A Calendar of Remembrance, a Community of Justice

Abib means fresh ears of grain; Exodus 9:31 notes the barley was “in the ear” when hail struck Egypt. After the exile the month is called Nisan (Nehemiah 2:1), and Tel Aviv takes its name from the same word. “By night” is when Pharaoh summoned Moses (Exodus 12:31); Numbers 33:3 has Israel marching out the next morning.

Exodus 12:5 limited the Passover animal to a lamb or kid of the flock. Deuteronomy adds the herd. Josiah’s great Passover included thousands of cattle alongside the lambs (2 Chronicles 35:7-9).

“The bread of affliction” is lechem oni. The Passover Haggadah opens its telling with the Aramaic form of the phrase, “This is the bread of affliction which our fathers ate in the land of Egypt.” Isaiah 52:12 promises a later departure that will not be made in haste.

“Coast” in 1611 meant a border region or territory, not a seashore. No leaven “seen” anywhere in the land underlies the Jewish search of the house for leaven the night before Passover. Exodus 12:10 ordered any meat left until morning to be burned.

In Exodus 12 the Passover is a household rite, with blood on each house’s doorposts. Deuteronomy moves the sacrifice to the chosen place. 2 Kings 23:21-23 describes Josiah keeping it that way: “Surely there was not holden such a passover from the days of the judges.”

Exodus 12:6 set the slaughter “between the two evenings”, a phrase later debated. Deuteronomy gives a plain hour, sunset. “At the season” is mo’ed, the appointed time: the offering is timed to the hour of the departure it recalls.

“Roast” translates bishal, which usually means to boil, while Exodus 12:9 forbids eating it “sodden at all with water”. 2 Chronicles 35:13 blends the two: they “roasted the passover with fire”, using bishal with fire. “Tents” is the old word kept for lodgings, as in “to your tents, O Israel”.

The seventh day is an atseret, a closing assembly, from a verb meaning to hold back. The same word names the day after Tabernacles (Leviticus 23:36), and the rabbis used Atseret as a name for the feast of weeks. “Six days” counts the days before it, within the seven of 16:3.

Leviticus 23:15-16 counts fifty days from the first sheaf, which gave the Greek name Pentecost, the fiftieth (Acts 2:1). Jewish practice counts each day aloud. The sickle first goes into the barley, the earliest grain, and Weeks falls at the wheat harvest.

“Tribute” renders missat, a word found nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, most likely meaning a measure or sufficiency. Its sense is given by the next clause: according as the LORD has blessed. The festival is Shavuot, Hebrew for weeks.

The list pairs four of the household with four from the town: son, daughter, manservant, maidservant, and then Levite, stranger, fatherless, widow. Rashi quotes a midrash giving God the words: “your four against my four; if you make mine glad, I will make yours glad.”

Deuteronomy ties the feast of weeks only to harvest and to the memory of Egypt. Later Jewish reckoning, counting from Exodus 19:1 where Israel reached Sinai in the third month, made it the anniversary of the giving of the law.

Leviticus 23:42-43 commands dwelling in booths to recall the journey from Egypt; Deuteronomy gives the name, sukkot, booths, but not the rule. “Gathered in thy corn and thy wine” is literally from thy threshing floor and from thy winepress: after the last of the year’s produce is in.

The Talmud (Pesachim 109a) draws a positive duty to rejoice at the festivals from this verse, and Jewish liturgy calls Sukkot “the season of our rejoicing”. When the returned exiles kept the feast in booths, “there was very great gladness” (Nehemiah 8:17).

“Thou shalt surely rejoice” is literally thou shalt be only joyful, using akh, a restrictive word; the rabbis took it to extend the joy to the feast’s final night (Sukkah 48a). John 7:37 sets a saying of Jesus on “the last day, that great day of the feast”.

The three pilgrim feasts come from Exodus 23:17 and 34:23. The consonants of “appear before the LORD” can also be read “see the face of the LORD”, and scholars suggest the vowels were pointed to avoid that. Women went too: Hannah went up to Shiloh (1 Samuel 1:7), and Mary to the Passover (Luke 2:41).

“As he is able” is literally according to the gift of his hand. Paul applies the principle to the collection for Jerusalem: “it is accepted according to that a man hath, and not according to that he hath not” (2 Corinthians 8:12).

Officers are shoterim, the word used of the Hebrew foremen beaten in Egypt when the brick quota fell short (Exodus 5:14). In Deuteronomy they are clerks and marshals serving the courts and the army (20:5). The synagogue reading named Shofetim, judges, begins here.

The King James has “the wise” here and in Exodus 23:8, but Exodus’ Hebrew says pikchim, the clear-sighted: a bribe blinds people who can see. Samuel’s sons “took bribes, and perverted judgment” (1 Samuel 8:3), and that failure is what prompted the elders to ask for a king.

The Hebrew doubles the noun: justice, justice shalt thou pursue. “Follow” is radaf, to pursue or chase, the verb used of armies running down an enemy. The rabbis took the doubling to cover both a just verdict and a just process.

“A grove of any trees” is an Asherah of any wood. Manasseh set an image of Asherah in the temple itself (2 Kings 21:7), and Josiah burned it (23:6). Inscriptions from Kuntillet Ajrud in Sinai bless by “the LORD and his Asherah”, showing how near the altar such poles once stood.

“Image” is matsevah, a standing stone. Jacob set one up at Bethel (Genesis 28:18), and Moses raised twelve pillars at Sinai (Exodus 24:4). What the patriarchs used freely has become, in settled Israel, a thing the LORD hates, because of what the pillars had come to mean.