The Lamb Kept from the Tenth

The last two chapters followed Yeshua from the table through the night and the morning of the thirteenth, as far as the road to Golgotha. Part Three had already shown the household’s last leavened meal eaten as the thirteenth began, the ordinary bread that Yeshua took into His hands, and John’s plain word that all of it happened “before the Feast of the Passover” (John 13:1). Now, before we stand at the cross, we turn from the hours to the lamb.

A question waits here, and many readers feel it at once. If the Messiah died in the daytime of the thirteenth, and the Passover belongs to the fourteenth, how can Paul write that “Messiah our Passover has been sacrificed for us” (1 Corinthians 5:7)? Would that not make His death a day too early?

The answer begins in a single verse of Exodus, and it turns on three Hebrew words. This chapter takes up the first of them, a small word of only two letters, and the next two chapters take up the others.

The Lamb Chosen on the Tenth

The instructions for the first Passover were given in Egypt, before the night Israel went out. They do not begin on the fourteenth. They begin four days earlier.

Exodus 12:3-6 Speak to all the congregation of Israel, saying: On the tenth of this month they shall take for themselves, each man (ish אִישׁ eesh) a lamb for a father's house, a lamb for the household. And if the household is too little for a lamb, then he and his neighbor who is near to his house shall take according to the number of souls (nephesh נֶפֶשׁ neh'-fesh); each man (ish) according to the mouth of his eating you shall make your count for the lamb. A lamb without blemish, a male, a son of a year, shall be for you; from the sheep or from the goats you shall take it. And he shall be for you for a charge (mishmeret מִשׁמֶרֶת mish-meh'-reth) before(ad עד) the fourteenth day of this month; and all the assembly of the congregation of Israel shall offer him (shachat שחט shaw-khat') between the evenings.

Read the steps in the order Moses gives them. On the tenth of the month each household takes a lamb, and if the household is too small, it joins with its neighbor. Of the lamb Moses says, “A lamb without blemish, a male, a son of a year, shall be for you.” Then comes a time of keeping, and after the keeping, the offering.

The keeping has a word of its own. “And he shall be for you for a charge (mishmeret).” Mishmeret means a charge, something given into a person’s keeping and watched over. The lamb was in the care of a household that knew it would be offered to the LORD, and that it had to be without blemish when that time came.

Up to the Fourteenth

Now comes the word on which this chapter turns. The lamb is a charge “before(ad עד) the fourteenth day of this month.” The Hebrew word is ad. It marks a limit, the point up to which something goes on and at which it comes to an end.

Many readers have taken the verse as though it said that the lamb is kept through the fourteenth and then killed as that day draws toward its close. On that reading the fourteenth is mostly another day of keeping, and the offering comes at its far end. The reading is sincere and very old, and it shapes how most people picture the Passover.

But the verse does not set the keeping inside the fourteenth. It sets the keeping before it. The YLV gives the word here as “before,” and the sense is plain: the charge runs up to the fourteenth day. When the fourteenth arrives, the time of keeping is over. What follows is the offering, and Moses names its time in the same breath: “all the assembly of the congregation of Israel shall offer him (shachat) between the evenings.”

The Same Word in Genesis

To see how the word ad works, it helps to hear it in another verse that is built the same way. After the fall, God told the man how he would live from then on.

Genesis 3:19 By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, until(ad עד) you return to the ground (adamah אֲדָמָה ad-aw-maw'); for out of it you were taken; for dust (aphar עָפָר aw-fawr') you are, and to dust (aphar) you shall return.

“By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, until(ad עד) you return to the ground.” Here the YLV renders the word “until,” and the meaning is easy to follow. A man eats bread all his days, up to the day he dies. On the far side of that line there is no more eating. The little word draws a line, and the eating stops at the line.

Exodus 12:6 has the same shape. Something goes on, the keeping of the lamb; then comes ad; then comes the boundary, the fourteenth day. The keeping stops at the boundary. In Genesis the YLV writes “until” and in Exodus it writes “before,” but the Hebrew word beneath both is the same, and in both places it marks where one thing ends.

Why a Small Word Matters

This may seem a great deal of attention to give a word of two letters. Yet the whole timetable of the cross leans on it.

If the lamb was kept through the fourteenth, the Passover sacrifice would fall late in the fourteenth, and a Messiah who died in the daytime of the thirteenth would have died before the Passover had any part in His death. But if the lamb was kept up to the fourteenth, then the offering belongs to the very beginning of the fourteenth. Everything that had to be done to make that offering ready would be done in the hours before the fourteenth arrived, and those hours are the daytime of the thirteenth.

As we saw in Part One, the biblical day begins with evening: “And there was evening and there was morning, day one” (Genesis 1:5). The fourteenth does not begin at sunrise, and it does not begin at an hour set by a clock. It begins the moment the thirteenth’s daytime ends and evening comes. So when Exodus says that the lamb is a charge “before(ad עד) the fourteenth day of this month,” it places the end of the keeping, and the time of the offering, at the turning of the thirteenth into the fourteenth.

Leviticus names the appointed time in the same way, and it puts the fourteenth and the evening together in one sentence, which we read in Chapter 18: “In the first month, on the fourteenth of the month, between the evenings, is a Passover to the LORD” (Leviticus 23:5). The Passover is the appointed time of the fourteenth, and it is kept between the evenings, in the evening with which that day begins. Exodus 12:18 says the same of the bread: “on the fourteenth day of the month, in the evening, you shall eat unleavened bread.” The offering and the unleavened bread arrive together, at the evening that opens the fourteenth.

The Order of the Days

Set down in order, the days of Exodus 12 look like this.

Each line is simply what the verses say. Read with the biblical day in view, the daytime of the thirteenth stands out as the last span of time before the offering. It is the day when all that the offering needs must be made ready. John has a name for that day, as we saw in Chapter 24: “the preparation day for the Passover” (John 19:14).

Kept for One Purpose

One more thing in Exodus 12:3-6 deserves notice. For the days between the tenth and the fourteenth, each household kept its lamb under watch, and the lamb had to be “without blemish.” The keeping had one end in view. It was the time between the choosing and the offering, and it came to its end exactly at the line Moses drew.

So the first of the three words is settled. The lamb was kept before the fourteenth, and the keeping ended where the fourteenth began. But Moses also said that the assembly would offer it “between the evenings.” What is that time, and how long does it last? That second word is the subject of the next chapter.