Exodus12chapter 12

Exodus 12:1-2

in the land of Egypt: The instruction for the passover is given while the people are still slaves and the last plague has not yet fallen. God resets the calendar before he changes their circumstances, so the year itself begins from a redemption rather than from a harvest or a king's reign. Israel's whole reckoning of time is moved to this month.

Exodus 12:3-5

The lamb is chosen four days before it is killed and it is reckoned by households rather than by heads, with a small household joining its neighbour so that nothing is wasted. It must be without blemish and a male of the first year, and it may come from the sheep or from the goats. The word congregation occurs here for the first time in Scripture, so Israel is named an assembly on the night it becomes a nation.

Exodus 12:6-7

The lamb lives with the family for four days before it dies, which makes the killing personal rather than procedural. The whole assembly of the congregation kills it, so the act belongs to the nation and not to a priesthood, and there is no priesthood yet. The blood goes on the two side posts and the upper door post, which puts it where the household passes in and out.

Exodus 12:8-10

Blood on the door saves the house and the flesh inside feeds the people, and the chapter requires both. Roasting with fire rather than boiling keeps the animal whole, and the bitter herbs put the taste of the bondage on the table on the night it ends. Nothing may be left until morning, so the meal cannot become a store of food and belongs to that night alone.

Exodus 12:11

They eat dressed to leave, with shoes on and staff in hand, which nobody does at a meal in his own house. The posture is itself the instruction, since the food is for a road they have not yet been told they are taking. The word passover occurs here for the first time in Scripture, at the close of the verse that describes how to eat in haste.

Exodus 12:12-13

God names two targets and the second is easy to read past, the firstborn of Egypt and the gods of Egypt. Numbers 33:4 looks back and says the same, that upon their gods the LORD executed judgments, so the plagues were a contest and not only a punishment. The sign is the blood and nothing else, since the promise reads when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and says nothing about who is inside.

Exodus 12:14

The night is turned into a permanent institution before it has happened. The word ordinance occurs here for the first time in Scripture, and the first thing Israel is ordered to keep for ever is a meal that explains itself to children. Memory is being built into the calendar rather than left to the people who were there.

Exodus 12:15-16

Leaven occurs here for the first time in Scripture and it arrives as something to be put out rather than something to be avoided. Seven days of unleavened bread follow one night of the lamb, so the deliverance is a night and the consequence is a week. Paul reads the two together at 1 Corinthians 5:7, telling a church to purge out the old leaven because Christ our passover is sacrificed for us.

Exodus 12:17-20

The feast is grounded on a date rather than on a season, since in this selfsame day have I brought your armies out of the land of Egypt. The word armies for a body of unarmed slaves is the text's own and it returns at verse 51. The rule already reaches the stranger as well as the man born in the land, which is the first sign of what verses 48 and 49 will say outright.

Exodus 12:21-22

Moses turns the instruction into an order and supplies a detail the reader has not been given before, that the blood is applied with a bunch of hyssop. Hyssop returns for the cleansing of the leper and the house in Leviticus 14, in David's prayer at Psalm 51:7, and at the cross in John 19:29. The families are also shut in until morning, so the night is spent inside a house marked with blood.

Exodus 12:23

The verse names two actors, the LORD who passes through and the destroyer who is not suffered to come in, and commentators have long divided over whether these are one or two. The text does not settle it. What it does settle is the mechanism, since the blood is seen from outside the house, so a family is kept safe by something none of them can see while they eat.

Exodus 12:24-25

The command reaches forward to a land they have not seen and to a generation not yet born. It is called a service, and the Hebrew root behind that word is the one Exodus 1:14 used five times over for the bondage they are leaving that night. Israel does not stop serving; the master changes.

Exodus 12:26-27

The rite is built to provoke a question from a child, and the answer given back is a piece of history rather than a doctrine. Israel's children are to learn who God is by being told what he did on one night to particular houses. The people bow and worship at the end of verse 27, before the plague has fallen and before anything has been delivered.

Exodus 12:28

One verse of obedience stands between the instruction and the midnight, and verse 50 repeats it after the event. The report that the people did as they were told is the shape Exodus uses at its close, where the phrase as the LORD commanded Moses falls thirteen times in chapters 39 and 40. Between those two ends stands chapter 32, where they do the opposite.

Exodus 12:29-30

The stroke reaches from the throne to the dungeon, so it falls on the household of the man who ordered Hebrew boys drowned and on the household of a prisoner who ordered nothing. It answers the words of Exodus 4:22 and 4:23, where God called Israel his firstborn son and told Pharaoh what refusal would cost. There was not a house where there was not one dead, and Israel's houses are the exception the blood made.

Exodus 12:31-32

Pharaoh finally uses the words Moses had been given at the start, go, serve the LORD, and drops every condition he had tried to attach in chapters 8 and 10. Then he asks for something for himself, bless me also, and the text records no answer. The man who said at 5:2 who is the LORD, that I should obey his voice ends the contest asking for a blessing.

Exodus 12:33-34

Egypt drives out the people it had refused to release, saying we be all dead men. The dough goes onto their shoulders unleavened because there is no time, which means the seven-day feast commanded at verse 15 rests on a practical fact of that same morning. The reason for the ordinance and the reason of the moment turn out to be one reason.

Exodus 12:35-36

This is the discharge of a promise made to Abram four hundred years earlier, that afterward shall they come out with great substance, at Genesis 15:14. The words borrowed and lent have troubled readers of the English, and the Hebrew verb is the ordinary word for asking, with the transfer described from Egypt's own side as a thing given. The gold carried out here will build the tabernacle in chapter 35 and the calf in chapter 32.

Exodus 12:37-38

from Rameses to Succoth: Six hundred thousand men on foot beside children is the figure the text gives, and the size of the total it implies has been argued over for centuries without agreement. A mixed multitude goes up with them, named here without comment, and Numbers 11:4 will say the trouble began among them. What leaves Egypt is larger and less uniform than the family that came down in Genesis 46.

Exodus 12:39

The bread of the feast is the bread of the hurry, baked from dough that had no time to rise. They were thrust out of Egypt and could not tarry, which is the narrator's own account of an ordinance he had already recorded God commanding. Both explanations stand in the same chapter and the text sets no tension between them.

Exodus 12:40-41

Four hundred and thirty years is stated twice and the going out is dated to the selfsame day. Genesis 15:13 had said four hundred years of affliction, which is a different quantity from a sojourning, and the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Septuagint read the four hundred and thirty as covering Canaan and Egypt together, which is the reading Paul appears to follow at Galatians 3:17. The Masoretic Hebrew reads it as Egypt alone, and both readings have long been held.

Exodus 12:42

The verse calls it a night of observance twice over, once unto the LORD and once to be observed of all the children of Israel in their generations. A date is being fixed in the memory of a people who have not yet walked out of the country. The observance has run from that generation to this one.

Exodus 12:43-45

The meal is closed to outsiders and the closure has one door in it, which is circumcision. A bought servant who is circumcised eats, a hired servant who is not does not, and money is not what decides it. The line runs between covenant and no covenant rather than between Israelite and foreigner, which verses 48 and 49 then say outright.

Exodus 12:46

The lamb is eaten in one house and no bone of it is broken. John 19:36 quotes this rule at the crucifixion and says the scripture was fulfilled when the soldiers found Jesus already dead and did not break his legs. This is one of the places where the New Testament makes the connection itself rather than leaving it to a reader.

Exodus 12:47-49

One law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you. On the night Israel becomes a nation it is given a rule that refuses to make its own birth a privilege. The stranger who joins the covenant is to be as one that is born in the land, which is the same phrase the chapter uses of the native.

Exodus 12:50-51

The chapter closes on obedience and on the date, the selfsame day. The word armies is used again of the people who left, as at verse 17, and it is a word for a body drawn up in order rather than a crowd running. Four hundred and thirty years of service to Egypt end in one line, and the rest of the book is about what they are now to serve.