1. in the land of Egypt. This phrase is usually explained (by Nahmanides and others) as an indication of the unusual setting for the annunciation of this set of legal regulations in contradistinction to the body of Hebrew law that is given in the wilderness. But the phrase also serves to position this passage in the narrative sequence: as the Israelites are poised for the great escape, in the penultimate moment of their 430-year sojourn in Egypt (verse 40), God directs Moses and Aaron to deliver to them, while they are still on Egyptian soil, this law that will be binding on all their descendants.

2. This month is for you head of months. The reasonable inference of many scholars is that this calendric announcement reflects a moment in early Israelite history when there was at least one other competing system that designated a different month as the beginning of the year. (The Talmud later would speak of four different new years, and subsequent Jewish practice sets the beginning of the year in the early fall month of Tishrei, evidently making the calendar correspond to the agricultural cycle rather than to a historical event.) The point of beginning the annual sequence of months with the one in which the Exodus occurred is to coordinate the annual cycle with the event of liberation that is construed as the foundational act for the nation.

3. a lamb. Though the Hebrew seh can refer to both lamb and mature sheep, the indication that the animal should be in its first year—this is Rashi’s plausible construction of the term ben shanah—makes “lamb” the appropriate translation. It is a slightly peculiar lamb, however, because in verse 5 we learn that it also includes “kid.”

6. a thing to be kept. The Hebrew mishmeret is an abstract noun derived from the verbal stem sh-m-r, which has meanings that range from “keep” to “watch” to “observe” (in the ritual sense); all these meanings come into play as the root is repeated through the passage.

8. flatbread. The etymology of the Hebrew matsot remains uncertain. The conventional translation of “unleavened bread” is less than felicitous not only because of its excess of syllables but because it explicitly defines the bread by negation, the lack of leavening, whereas the Hebrew is a positive term. In Genesis 19 Lot serves matsot to the two anonymous guests who were to his house at nightfall, and the implication is that this is a kind of bread that can be baked hastily, with no need to wait for the dough to rise before putting it in the oven.

9. Do not eat from it raw, nor in any way cooked in water, but fire-roasted. Eating raw meat, still suffused with blood, would in any case have been prohibited, but elsewhere there is no restriction on boiled meat (here that would be lamb stew), whether for sacrificial or profane purposes. William H. C. Propp offers what may be the best explanation for this insistence on fire-roasting by observing that it is a more archaic method of cooking meat, without the use of a pot, cooking utensils being the instruments of a more complex culinary technology. In this fashion, he goes on to suggest, fire-roasting would be associated with a kind of purity in the preparation of the meal, just as flatbread (probably baked over an open fire, nomad-style) without any admixture of leaven, might be associated with purity. One could add that these archaically prepared foods enhance the sense of ritual reenactment of what amounts to an archaic moment of national history, when the nation itself was awaiting its foundational liberation as a destroying angel stalked through the Egyptian night and passed over the houses of the Israelites.

10. in fire you shall burn. This seemingly redundant idiom has the force of “burn till utterly consumed” and so when applied to buildings means something like “burned to the ground.”

12. I will cross through the land. The Hebrew verb ʿavarti means to “pass” (over, through, or by) or to “cross.” The usual translation of “pass through” or “pass over” has been avoided in order to obviate the misleading impression that it is the same word as “Passover,” which in the Hebrew reflects an entirely unrelated root, p-s-ḥ.

from all the gods of Egypt I will exact retributions. The least strained construction of this clause is that the absolute impotence of the supposed, or perhaps merely petty, gods of Egypt to protect their adherents will expose their nullity as gods. The idea of some commentators, that the Egyptian idols were smashed in the course of this fateful night, seems fanciful: and the exposure of the inefficacy of the Egyptian gods is in keeping with the preceding plagues.

13. And the blood will be a sign. Much anthropologically informed commentary has been made on the smearing of blood at the entrance of the house to ward off evil spirits, the “Destroyer” (mashḥit) of our narrative being a particularly scary instance of such a spirit. It is equally important, however, to keep in mind the deployment of blood as a recurrent motif in the literary structure of the larger narrative. Moses is thrust from Egypt, and set on the road toward his vocation as prophet, after he sheds the blood of the Egyptian taskmaster. On the way back to Egypt, it is the blood of circumcision that saves his life—a strong foreshadowing of the tenth plague that evidently interprets circumcision as a kind of substitute for the sacrifice of the firstborn. Then the plagues begin with the turning of the water of the Nile into blood.

I will pass over you. The primary meaning of the Hebrew verb pasaḥ is to “skip,” “hop,” “step over.” (There is one occurrence in the biblical corpus where it might mean “defend,” which is scant basis for the claim of some scholars that this is what it means here.) “Pass over” is used in this translation to preserve the pun on the time-honored English name for the festival. It is quite possible that the Hebrew pesaḥ was the independent name for this particular lamb sacrifice and for a spring festival, and that the narrative links that name with the Exodus story through folk etymology.

15. that person shall be cut off from Israel. This punishment (the Hebrew term is karet) will be invoked for a whole series of infractions as the Mosaic law is promulgated. Perhaps the most likely reference is to some form of ostracism, though both medieval and modern commentators have speculated about whether premature death or childlessness might be suggested by the phrase.

17. the Flatbread. Here the term matsot is the name of the festival, which is also called pesaḥ. Some have plausibly conjectured that these were originally two different holidays—matsot agricultural and pesaḥ pastoral—that were drawn together in the literary formulation of this text and hence in Israelite practice.

19. sojourner. As elsewhere, the Hebrew ger refers to a resident alien.

native of the land. The Hebrew reflected in “native,” ʾezraḥ, probably refers to a plant (many think, a grapevine), and so would be a metaphor for the autochthonous character of the native, springing from the soil in purity.

21. Draw out and take. The precise nuance of the first of these two verbs is elusive. It has been proposed that “draw” (mashakh) preceding another verb may have the idiomatic force of “hasten,” “perform urgently.”

22. touch the blood . . . to the lintel. This is precisely the same verb that is used in 4:25 for Zipporah’s placing or smearing the blood of circumcision at someone’s feet. The usage is unusual enough to suggest the possibility of an explicit allusion here to the earlier episode.

25. And so when you come to the land. This is a pointed rupture of the time frame of the story. In the midst of the breathless moment that is the last evening of the Israelites in Egypt, as Moses enjoins them to smear their entranceways with protective blood, the narrative briefly leaps forward to a time when the Israelites, long ago liberated from Egyptian servitude, dwell in their land, and when a generation arises that scarcely knows the meaning of the commemorative Passover ritual, so that telling has to supplement the ritualistic showing.

29. dungeon. The literal meaning of the Hebrew is “house of the pit.”

32. and you shall bless me as well. As both Rashi and Abraham ibn Ezra note, the desperate Pharaoh appears to feel in need of intercession: when you propitiate your god in the wilderness, he is saying, remember to put in a good word for me.

33. Egypt bore down on the people. The literal meaning of the verb is “was strong.” This same verb, ḥazaq, was repeatedly used for the “toughening” of Pharaoh’s heart, and the redeployment here in a different context, with a different grammatical object, is a virtually ironic echo.

We are all dead men. Coupled with the wrenching grief over the death of the firstborn is a note of panic: “the disasters are becoming more and more intolerable, and after the loss of our sons, the next thing that will happen is that we shall all be killed.”

35. and cloaks. The cloaks were not included in the preceding instructions about this event. The mention here is evidently triggered by the report of the cloaks in which the kneading pans were wrapped, as an explanation of where the Hebrews got them. Perhaps it is assumed that as a matter of course abject slaves would possess no more than simple work-tunics, and not the cloaks they would need for a journey. (In Egyptian paintings slaves are often depicted wearing only a short skirt and naked from the waist up.)

37. six hundred thousand men on foot, besides the little ones. “On foot” (ragli), which functions adverbially here, is a military term with the usual meaning as a noun of foot soldier and thus reinforces the idea that the fleeing Hebrews are “the LORD’s battalions.” “The little ones” in this instance would logically have to imply or include the women who nurtured them. The total figure of Israelites thus would be considerably more than two million. This is scarcely credible as a historical datum, but ancient literature (Greek as well as Hebrew) has little notion of numerical accuracy in the way it conjures with numbers.

38. motley throng. Umberto Cassuto plausibly suggests that the Hebrew ʿerev rav has no component that means “multitude” (King James Version, “mixed multitude”) but rather that the last syllable is not an independent word but a duplication of the ultimate syllable of the main word—thus, ʿerevrav—which is a Hebrew formation for pejoratives. (The English “riffraff” comes close.)

very heavy livestock. “Heavy” is a word that shuttles back and forth through the themes of the story, from Pharaoh’s heavy/hard heart to the sundry heavy plagues to the heaviness of the Israelite possessions.

42. a night of watch. The Hebrew leyl shimurim may suggest a vigil or simply a night on which this complex of commemorative rituals is scrupulously kept or observed. In any case, the last phrase of the verse, “through their generations” (or “through their eras”) serves as a transition from the preceding narration of the event of Exodus to the passage of legislation that frames it (verses 43–51), which will be followed by a second unit of legislative material (13:1–16).

43. no foreigner shall eat of it. The Exodus story defines the nation. The Passover ritual, which commemorates that story, is the cultic enactment of membership in the nation.

44. purchased with silver. Literally, the Hebrew is “purchase of silver.”

45. A settler. The Hebrew toshav appears to mean the same thing as ger, that is, “resident alien.” The two words are often coupled in a hendiadys, ger wetoshav, which plainly means resident alien.

hired worker. The obvious implication is a non-Israelite hired worker.

46. no bone shall you break in it. This is often linked to the haste of the eating: there is no time to break bones and suck out the marrow. It may be more likely, however, that the prohibition is meant to preserve the idea of the wholeness of the sacrificial meal. The lamb is fire-roasted whole, after which only the meat that can be cut away is consumed.

48. he must circumcise every male. Circumcision is the mark of belonging to the covenantal community, as God announced to Abraham when He enjoined the practice (Genesis 17); and so circumcision is a prerequisite to participation in the community-defining Passover ritual. But the mention of circumcision also ties in this law with the Bridegroom of Blood episode that was the prelude to Moses’s mission in Egypt: there is a symbolic overlap between the apotropaic blood of circumcision, the apotropaic blood of the lamb on the doorposts, and God’s saving Israel from the bloodbath of Egypt to make them His people.

then may he draw near. In ritual contexts, this verb is often an ellipsis for “draw near to the altar” (to offer sacrifice). The Hebrew for “sacrifice,” qorban, is cognate with the verb “draw near,” qarav.

49. One law. The Hebrew term here is torah, which has the primary meaning of “teaching” or “instruction.”