2. Let the Israelites do the Passover offering. The reiteration here of the instructions for the Passover offering picks up the first injunction about the Passover offering on the eve of the departure from Egypt (Exodus 12:43–51). There is narrative symmetry in the reiteration: the first Passover was celebrated just before the Israelites set out on their journey from Egypt. Now they are about to move onward from the Sinai encampment in their Wilderness itinerary—a topic to which verses 15–23 alert us—and again the departure is marked by the Passover offering.

6. And it happened that there were men who were defiled by human corpse. The injunction to offer the Passover sacrifice at its fixed time is followed by a piece of case law. What is to be done for Israelites who find themselves in a state of ritual impurity and hence excluded from the sacrificial ceremony?

7. Why should we be withheld from offering the LORD’s sacrifice at its fixed time in the midst of the Israelites? The partaking in the Passover sacrifice is the primary act of affirming membership in the community of Israel, and so the people in question are distressed that a mere accident, contact with a corpse (or perhaps another source of ritual pollution), should exclude them from the community. Conversely, a person who deliberately neglects to perform the Passover offering is “cut off from his kin.”

10. or on a distant journey. This is another circumstance, not that of the men who come to petition Moses, that would prevent someone from participating in the Passover offering. Baruch Levine plausibly infers that the stipulation of a distant journey presupposes the Deuteronomic requirement of a centralized cult. (The initial Passover sacrifice was performed in each household, and a person on a journey could presumably have participated with a household where he was a guest.)

14. should a stranger sojourn with you. This provision for the resident alien (ger) reflects a prevalent ancient Near Eastern practice of allowing such residents to adopt the local cult. No formal ceremony of “conversion,” as in later times, was required, though the law in Exodus stipulates that the stranger must be circumcised before he can partake in the Passover offering. That requirement is presumably implied here in “according to the statute of the Passover offering and according to its law” but it is not expressly stated.

15–23. This literary unit nicely sets the stage for the peregrinations and perturbations that will make up much of the Book of Numbers from chapter 10 onward. Until this point, the forward drive of narrative has been abandoned for tabulation—census and military roster—and legislation in a long stasis in the Wilderness of Sinai. Now the Israelites prepare to move on, and their order of march, dictated by the descent upon the Tabernacle and the ascent from the Tabernacle of the divine cloud, is reported in a series of verbs in the iterative tense. The indication of the varying time periods during which the cloud “abides” (or “tents,” “dwells,” a verb cognate with the noun mishkan, “Tabernacle”) over the Tabernacle may seem repetitious but in fact constitutes a grand rhetorical flourish: all of Israel’s movements through the wilderness are prompted by the divine sign, with the duration of encampment varying from a night or two to a month to a year. Yitzhak Avishur neatly confirms the purposeful rhetorical organization of the passage by pointing to its studied use of numerically formulaic repetitions: the phrase “by the LORD’s word” (literally, “by the LORD’s mouth”) occurs seven times—three times in conjunction with “they would journey onward,” three times in conjunction with “they would camp,” and at the very end of the passage, in conjunction with neither. “Tabernacle” occurs seven times; the root sh-k-n from which it derives, ten times; and, if one follows the Septuagint rather than the Masoretic Text, “cloud” also appears ten times. The carefully measured repetitions thus yield a tight thematic interweave of cloud, Tabernacle, camping, journeying, and God’s word or direction.