Exodus 12:5
Your lamb must be an unblemished year-old male, and you may take it from the sheep or the goats.
BSB
Parallel translations (2) ▾
ASV
Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male a year old: ye shall take it from the sheep, or from the goats:
KJV
Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male of the first year: ye shall take it out from the sheep, or from the goats:
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Commentary
2 voicesVoices on this verse
loading…Hebraic traditional view
The night Israel still keeps
This chapter founds Passover, in Hebrew Pesach, the spring feast that remembers the night God struck Egypt's firstborn and passed over the blood-marked houses. Jewish families keep it to this day with a ceremonial meal called the seder (Hebrew for “order”): unleavened flatbread (matzah), bitter herbs, cups of wine, and the retelling of this chapter's story, with the children asking the questions.
Honesty about the timeline helps the reader: in the Bible's own period the center of the feast was the lamb, slain and eaten as this chapter commands. The seder as now practiced took its shape after the Temple fell in AD 70 and the lamb could no longer be offered; its oldest written outline is in the Mishnah, the first code of Jewish oral law (about AD 200), which already includes the four cups and the rule that “in every generation a person must see himself as if he personally came out of Egypt.”
Sources: Mishnah Pesachim 10 (the seder's oldest outline) · Mishnah Pesachim 10:5 (“in every generation”) · The Feasts of the LORD (this site's study)
Original language & word study
12 tagged words| Original | Transliteration | Meaning | Word study |
|---|---|---|---|
| שֶׂ֥ה | seh | a lamb | H7716 → |
| תָמִ֛ים | ta.Mim | unblemished | H8549 → |
| זָכָ֥ר | za.Khar | male | H2145 → |
| בֶּן־ | ben- | a son of | H1121 → |
| שָׁנָ֖ה | sha.Nah | a year | H8141 → |
| יִהְיֶ֣ה | yih.Yeh | it will be | H1961 → |
| לָכֶ֑ם | la.Khem | for <the> you | |
| מִן־ | min- | one of | H4480 → |
| הַכְּבָשִׂ֥ים | ha.ke.va.Sim | the lambs | H3532 → |
| וּמִן־ | u.min- | and one of | H4480 → |
| הָעִזִּ֖ים | ha.'i.Zim | the goats | H5795 → |
| תִּקָּֽחוּ׃ | ti.Ka.chu | you will take | H3947 → |
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