Exodus23chapter 23

Exodus 23:1-3

The chapter opens inside a courtroom, and the first three rules guard one thing, which is truthful testimony under pressure. Verse 2 forbids following a multitude to do evil, so the pressure named is the weight of numbers rather than the persuasion of a wicked man. Verse 3 refuses partiality toward a poor man and verse 6 refuses it against him, which closes the door from both sides. The Babylonian Talmud takes the clause after many from verse 2 as the ground for a court following its own majority, at tractate Bava Metzia 59b.

Exodus 23:4-5

The cases are a straying ox and an ass collapsed under its load, and the owner is named as thine enemy and as him that hateth thee. Deuteronomy 22:1 and 22:4 give the same two cases with thy brother standing where the enemy stands here, so this is the harder version of a law Israel already had. What is required is labour, since the man has to lift the burden alongside someone who hates him. Jesus works the same ground at Matthew 5:44, and Paul at Romans 12:20 quotes Proverbs 25:21.

Exodus 23:6-8

These three verses govern the men who sit in judgment, forbidding them to bend a poor man's case, to take any part in a false matter, and to receive a gift. The reason given for the last is that the gift blindeth the wise and perverteth the words of the righteous, so the warning is aimed at the honest judge as much as at the corrupt one. Deuteronomy 16:19 repeats the sentence almost word for word, and 1 Samuel 8:3 records Samuel's own sons taking bribes and perverting judgment.

Exodus 23:9

The law against oppressing a stranger stands twice in this Book of the Covenant, at 22:21 and here, and both times the reason is memory. Ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt puts the motive in something the hearers had felt rather than in a principle they had been taught. The same reasoning stands behind the one law for the homeborn and the stranger at 12:48 and 12:49, and Leviticus 19:34 will tell Israel to love him as itself.

Exodus 23:10-11

The seventh year belongs to the land, and the beneficiaries named are the poor of thy people first and then the beasts of the field. This is the arrival of the sabbatical year, which Leviticus 25:1 to 25:7 sets out at length and calls a sabbath of rest unto the land. 2 Chronicles 36:21 looks back on the exile and says the land enjoyed her sabbaths for seventy years, counting up the rests that were never kept.

Exodus 23:12

The sabbath command is given a third ground here. Exodus 20:11 rests it on the six days of creation and Deuteronomy 5:15 rests it on the bondage in Egypt, while this verse rests it on the rest of the ox, the ass, the son of the handmaid and the stranger. The people listed are the ones who could never have claimed a day for themselves, and the word used of them is refreshed.

Exodus 23:13

This line closes the civil laws and turns the chapter toward the danger the rest of it is about. Making no mention of the name of other gods reaches past worship into ordinary speech, since a name kept on the tongue keeps the god in the conversation. Joshua 23:7 gives the same order to the generation that entered the land, and verses 24, 32 and 33 here name the same danger three more times before the chapter ends.

Exodus 23:14-15

Three annual feasts are commanded to a people who own no land to keep them in. The first is unleavened bread in the month Abib, dated by the going out of Egypt in chapter 12, so the year is anchored on the deliverance and the other two are hung on the harvests that follow it. None shall appear before me empty attaches a cost to attendance, and Deuteronomy 16:17 later sets that cost by what a man is able to give.

Exodus 23:16

The second and third feasts are named here by their farming names, harvest and ingathering. Exodus 34:22 calls the second the feast of weeks and Leviticus 23:34 calls the third the feast of tabernacles, while the Greek name Pentecost at Acts 2:1 counts the fifty days that Leviticus 23:15 and 23:16 command. Reading the set as a prophetic calendar is a tradition taught by Chuck Missler and Jonathan Cahn, and it rests mainly on Leviticus 23 rather than on this verse.

Exodus 23:17

The duty falls on the males and it fixes three pilgrimages a year for as long as Israel has a central place of worship. Luke 2:41 shows Joseph and Mary keeping it every year at the passover, and John 7:2 and 7:10 put Jesus at the feast of tabernacles under the same law. Acts 2:5 explains the crowd in Jerusalem at Pentecost, since devout men out of every nation were in the city because of this command.

Exodus 23:18

Two rules guard the offering itself. Leaven is kept away from the blood and the fat is not left overnight, and both are about decay reaching what has been given to God. Exodus 34:25 repeats the pair almost exactly, and the same care about what remains until the morning governs the passover at 12:10.

Exodus 23:19

The firstfruits go to the house of the LORD, which names a house that does not yet stand anywhere. The second half of the verse forbids seething a kid in his mother's milk, and it is repeated at 34:26 and at Deuteronomy 14:21 with no reason ever given for it. Jewish law builds the separation of meat and milk on that threefold repetition, in the Mishnah tractate Chullin and the Talmud that follows it, from roughly the second to the sixth century. Readers have also proposed a Canaanite rite behind the ban, and the Ugaritic text offered as evidence for it is disputed.

Exodus 23:20-21

God announces an Angel to go before them, and two things said of him are unusual, that he will not pardon your transgressions and that my name is in him. The word provoke occurs here for the first time in Scripture. Matthew Henry, John Gill and John Calvin all read this Angel as the Son, on the ground that pardon and the name belong to God alone; other readers take him as a created messenger and point to 33:2 and 33:3, where God offers to send an angel and withhold his own presence, and to Moses refusing that at 33:15. Isaiah 63:9 and Acts 7:38 are the texts most often brought into the question.

Exodus 23:22-23

The promise attached to obeying that voice is stated as war, an enemy unto thine enemies and an adversary unto thine adversaries. Six nations are named for the Angel to bring Israel in against, where Genesis 15:19 to 15:21 had listed ten to Abram and Genesis 15:16 had said the iniquity of the Amorites was not yet full. The chapter treats the taking of the land as a judgment that has come due.

Exodus 23:24

Bowing to the gods of the land, serving them and copying their works are forbidden together, and the order goes past refusal to demolition. The Hebrew root behind serve here is the one Exodus 1:13 and 1:14 used five times over for the bondage in Egypt, and verse 25 uses it again of serving the LORD. Israel is never offered the option of serving nothing.

Exodus 23:25-26

The blessing promised for that service is ordinary, bread and water, health, children and a full count of days. I will take sickness away from the midst of thee stands with 15:26, where the name given at the bitter water was I am the LORD that healeth thee, the first occurrence of healeth in Scripture. Nothing casting their young and none barren answers a trouble that ran the length of Genesis, where Sarah, Rebekah and Rachel were each barren in turn.

Exodus 23:27-28

The fear arrives ahead of the army. Exodus 15:14 to 15:16 had already sung that the peoples would hear and be afraid, and Joshua 2:9 to 2:11 records Rahab saying it happened, that the terror was fallen upon them and their hearts had melted. The hornets of verse 28 return at Deuteronomy 7:20 and Joshua 24:12, which with this verse are the only three places the Hebrew word occurs; some readers take them as insects and others as a figure for the panic just described.

Exodus 23:29-30

The conquest is to be slow, and the reason given is practical, that an emptied land goes wild and the beasts of the field multiply against a small people. Little by little sets the pace of the giving against the increase of Israel itself, so the land comes at the speed the nation can hold it. Judges 3:1 to 3:4 gives a second reason for the nations left in the land, to prove Israel and to teach war to a generation that had known none.

Exodus 23:31

The borders run from the Red sea to the sea of the Philistines and from the desert to the river, which matches the grant made to Abram at Genesis 15:18, from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates. 1 Kings 4:21 reports Solomon reigning over all the kingdoms from the river to the land of the Philistines, which is the nearest those bounds ever came to being held. The verse puts the delivering on God and the driving out on the people, in that order.

Exodus 23:32-33

The Book of the Covenant ends with a ban on treaties and a reason for it, that the gods of the land become a snare. Judges 2:1 to 2:3 has the angel of the LORD at Bochim quoting this instruction back to Israel, saying they had not obeyed his voice and that the gods of the land would be a snare, which lands on both verse 21 and verse 33. Moses writes all these words down at 24:4 and reads them to the people at 24:7, and they answer that all the LORD has said they will do.