1. Keep the month of Abib. As noted in the commentary on Exodus, Abib, the month that corresponds to March–April, means “new grain” (in modern Hebrew, it comes to mean “spring”). The rabbis took the name as a warrant for introducing leap months in order to keep the lunar calendar in phase with the solar calendar. One could infer that some rudimentary mechanism of calendric correction was in place even in the early biblical period, or else the month of new grain would have fallen sometimes in midwinter, sometimes in late summer or fall. Unlike other biblical texts on the festivals, the law here does not specify which day in Abib marks the beginning of the festival—unless one interprets “month” as “new moon,” a construction found among some ancient and modern commentators.

2. sheep and cattle. The option of cattle is new, perhaps reflecting a more sedentary form of animal husbandry than the earlier nomadic model.

3. poverty’s bread. The noun ʾoni has the basic meaning of a lowly condition, and so it could equally refer to poverty, affliction, or debasement.

5. You shall not be able to sacrifice . . . within one of your gates. This reiterated emphasis in connection with Passover is understandable. Passover, unlike the other festivals, was primarily a home ritual: each household sacrificed a paschal lamb, and, at least in the earliest period, apotropaic blood was probably smeared on the lintel. Deuteronomy thus must take pains to relocate even this domestic festival in the central sanctuary. The reiteration of the obligation to go “to the place that the LORD your God chooses” contributes to the lengthiness of the Passover section in comparison with the sections on the other two pilgrim festivals, although critical scholarship has also detected here a successive layering into a single law of injunctions regarding a passover (pesaḥ) and injunctions regarding a festival of flatbread (matsot), once separate observances.

6. the hour of your coming out of Egypt. Most traditional Hebrew commentators understand moʿed in its frequent sense of “fixed season,” i.e., the date in the month of Abib on which Israel left Egypt. The context, however, with the stress on the time of sunset suggests that here the term means hour of the day.

7. cook. In other contexts, bashel means “boil,” a mode of preparing the meat prohibited by the Passover laws in Exodus, which insists that the meat be fire-roasted. This may be another instance in which this legislation edges the observance away from its archaic origins, not enjoining the preparation of the meat in the old Bedouin fashion.

you shall turn in the morning and go to your tents. Although Deuteronomy must insist on the pilgrim obligation to celebrate at the central sanctuary, it also recognizes it could be a hardship for these agriculturalists to have to remain at the temple site a whole week, so the pilgrims are permitted (in contrast to later laws about travel on the festivals) to return home the morning after the sunset sacrifice. “Your tents” is a linguistic fossil; the actual fact of fixed settlement is reflected in the more prevalent idiom, “within your gates.”

8. Six days you shall eat flatbread. One would have expected “seven.” Either it is implied that the seventh day, the day of assembly, is included in the injunction, or the number six assumes a count that begins after the first day, on which the Passover sacrifice is offered.

9. from when the sickle begins in the standing grain. Although Passover is not mentioned, other biblical texts understand the counting to begin the day after the first day of Passover (interpreted by some Jewish sectarians to mean the first Sunday after the first day of Passover).

10. your hand’s freewill gift. The repeated emphasis here, addressing a population of farmers and animal husbanders that is expected to enjoy a degree of prosperity, is on voluntary gifts to the cult in proportion to the “blessing” that the donor has enjoyed. The Priestly predilection for lists of stipulated sacrifices is entirely absent.

13. A festival of huts. The holiday is called Succoth, “huts” (others, “booths,” “tabernacles”), because as a harvest festival, there was evidently a celebration at the site of huts in the field (feasting and perhaps in the earliest period some sort of sacrifice). The Deuteronomist preserves the popular name (in Exodus it is called the Festival of Ingathering) but makes no reference to any observance in huts, following his usual line on the obligation of pilgrimage to the central sanctuary, the sole legitimate place to celebrate the festival.

15. Seven days you shall celebrate . . . in the place that the LORD chooses. Unlike on Passover, the pilgrim is to remain at the temple site for the full seven days. Perhaps this is because after the completion of the autumn harvest, which this festival marks, the farmer has no urgent further work to do right away, as he would in the spring.

16. Three times in the year every one of your males shall appear. This and the next verse summarize the obligation of the three pilgrim festivals. As elsewhere, the phrase yeraʾeh ʾet pney-YHWH, “will appear [or be seen] in the presence of the LORD,” is a euphemistic revocalization of yirʾeh, “will see,” to avoid the anthropomorphism of the notion that the celebrant sees the presence, or face, of God. It should be noted that the pilgrim obligation, with the attendant hardships of travel, falls only on the male, but, in fact, the Israelite is encouraged to include his daughter and his slavegirl as well as male dependents (verses 11, 14) in the celebration.

18. overseers. The term shotrim is used in Exodus for the Hebrew overseers or foremen of the slave population. Since the word derives from a root meaning to “write down” or “record” (compare the Aramaic shtar, “document”), its meaning here might be an amanuensis, secretary, or administrator working alongside the judge.

19. You shall recognize no face. As in Deuteronomy 1:17, not recognizing someone you know, or about whose guilt or innocence you might have some presumption, means showing no partiality.

for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and perverts the words of the innocent. As Jeffrey H. Tigay justly observes, this declaration takes the form of a semantically balanced aphorism of the sort one finds in the Book of Proverbs. The parallel verse in Exodus 23:8 has “sighted” instead of “wise.” The change here might be a kind of explanatory gloss on the original formulation because “sighted” could refer merely to physical sight: Deuteronomy, with its intellectualist bent, wants to stress that even the wise lose the guidance of their wisdom if they succumb to bribery (whether shoḥad is construed as bribery proper or as a fee paid a judge for his services).

20. Justice, justice. Though much ingenuity has been exercised by exegetes to explain the repetition, its function as a verbal gesture of sheer emphasis is self-evident: justice, and justice alone, shall you pursue.

21. no cultic pole, no tree. The ʾasherah may have been a carved pole. Either “tree” could be in apposition to ʾasherah, an extended meaning of the word to include artifacts made from trees, or it could refer to the sacred trees actually planted at the sites of Canaanite worship and reflected in the Patriarchal stories in Genesis.

22. you shall set you up no pillar. The patriarchs and Moses did precisely that. One way of resolving the contradiction (e.g., Abraham ibn Ezra) is to understand “which the LORD your God hates” as a restrictive clause—it is specifically the pillars (matsevot) associated with the pagan cult that are prohibited. But Rashi’s notion of a historical development seems more likely: “For it was a practice of the Canaanites. And even though it was favored [by God] in the period of the Patriarchs, now He hated it because these people made it a practice of idolatry.”