★★ Exodus 12 says the Passover animal is a lamb. This verse says tso’n u-vaqar, flock AND herd — and baqar is cattle. Exodus 12:5 (already on these pages) is specific to the point of fussiness: a male, a year old, without blemish, from the sheep or from the goats. Here the same rite may be taken from the herd. The two texts are not reconciled anywhere in the Torah, and the shelf's response is worth watching. Eleven of the thirteen versions keep the conjunction and leave the difficulty standing — ASV ‘of the flock and the herd’, KJV ‘of the flock and the herd’, Geneva ‘of sheep and bullocks’, Douay ‘of sheep, and of oxen’, NWT 1984 ‘of the flock and of the herd’, RV60 «de las ovejas y de las vacas», NVI «de tus vacas y ovejas» (which reverses the order but keeps the ‘y’). Exactly two turn the AND into an OR, and both are the modern paraphrasing end of the shelf: the NIV supplies a singular and a disjunction at once, ‘an animal from your flock or herd’, and the TLB spells the options out as a choice, ‘either a lamb or an ox’. This translation keeps the conjunction too, and drops even the ‘of’, because the Hebrew has no preposition there at all.

★ ‘The bread of poverty’ is the point where this chapter reaches back and picks up the last one. Lechem oni stands in one verse of the Hebrew Bible — this one. Oni is the abstract noun of the root behind ani, the poor man, and 15:11 had just used that word: open your hand to your brother, to your poor and to your needy. It is also the noun in what God says at the bush — I have surely seen the oni of my people (Exodus 3:7). Of the thirteen witnesses, ten read it as affliction — KJV ‘the bread of affliction’, ASV ‘even the bread of affliction’, NWT 1984 ‘the bread of affliction’, RV60 «pan de aflicción», and six more with them; one raises it to tribulation, Geneva ‘even the bread of tribulation’; one lowers it to suffering, TNM 2019 «el pan del sufrimiento»; and one does not render the phrase at all, the TLB replacing it with an explanation, ‘as a reminder of the bread you ate as you escaped from Egypt’. Ten, one, one, one — thirteen, and not one of them reaches for poverty. That reading is defensible, since the root carries both senses. It is rendered poverty here because the poor man of the previous chapter is the reason the word is in the vocabulary at all, and because a reader who has just read chapter 15 should be able to see the connection without being told.

‘In haste’ is a word with three homes, and the third one cancels it. Chippazon is not a common noun; read out of the archive, it stands in three verses and all three are about leaving Egypt. Exodus 12:11 commands the haste — loins girded, sandals on, staff in hand, and you shall eat it in haste. This verse remembers it. And Isaiah 52:12, promising a second exodus, takes it away: for you shall not go out in haste, and you shall not go in flight. (A fourth hit in the archive is the verb, not the noun — Psalm 104:7, where the waters flee.) So the one word that describes the first departure is the one word the prophet uses to say the next one will be different.

Abib, and the shelf's four ways of not saying it. The phrase chodesh ha-aviv, the month of the ripening ear, stands in four verses — Exodus 13:4, 23:15, 34:18 and this one — and with this chapter all four are on these pages. The Douay translates the word instead of keeping it, ‘the month of new corn, which is the first of the spring’, which is what aviv means but is no longer a name. The TLB converts it, ‘during the month of April’ — helpful, and an anachronism twice over, since the Hebrew month is lunar and April is not. The NIV respells it ‘Aviv’. The ASV simply keeps ‘Abib’, and so does this translation.

★★ Exodus 12:9 forbids boiling the Passover in the strongest grammar Hebrew has. Deuteronomy 16:7 commands it, using that verb. Exodus 12:9 (already on these pages) reads al tokhlu mimmennu na, u-vashel mevushal ba-mayim — ki im tsli esh: do not eat it raw, nor boiled, boiled in water — the verb doubled on itself, which is how Hebrew shouts — but roast with fire. The verb there is bashal. The verb here, at v7, is u-vishalta: the same verb, in the same book of law, telling you to do the thing the other passage bans. Nothing in the Torah harmonises them.

⚠ Twelve of the thirteen versions this project tracks decline to print the word. Seven simply write the Exodus rule into Deuteronomy's sentence: KJV ‘thou shalt roast and eat it’, ASV ‘And thou shalt roast and eat it’, Geneva ‘And thou shalt roast and eat it’, NIV ‘Roast it and eat it’, TLB ‘Roast the lamb and eat it’, RV 1909 «Y la asarás y comerás», RV60 «Y la asarás y comerás». Four soften it to a neutral verb: NVI «Cocerás y comerás», TNM 1987 «tienes que cocerla y comerla», TNM 2019 «Cocina y come la ofrenda», NWT 2013 ‘You must cook it and eat it’. The Douay retreats into vagueness, ‘And thou shalt dress, and eat it’. Exactly one witness prints the boiling: the NWT 1984, ‘And you must do the boiling and the eating’ — and its own later revision, quoted just above, is one of the four that steps away from it. This is the pattern this project keeps finding and the reason the shelf is fixed rather than chosen: on a verse where the literal reading is theologically awkward, the 1984 edition is the one that prints it.

★ The Bible itself solves the problem, once, and the solution is a welded joint you can see. Describing Josiah’s Passover — the one the Chronicler says no king of Israel had matched since the days of Samuel — he writes: va-yevashlu ha-pesach ba-esh ka-mishpat — ‘and they boiled the Passover with fire, according to the ordinance’ (2 Chronicles 35:13, not yet on these pages). He uses Deuteronomy's verb and Exodus's fire in one clause, and calls the result ‘according to the ordinance’ — and then, in the second half of the same verse, uses the same verb again in its ordinary sense for the other offerings, which were boiled ‘in pots and cauldrons and pans’. The Chronicler is not confused about what bashal means. He is holding two laws together and letting the seam show.

The assembly on the wrong day. Atseret, a solemn assembly, is a festival's closing day, and it dates itself elsewhere with striking regularity: the EIGHTH day at Leviticus 23:36, the EIGHTH at Numbers 29:35, the eighth again in Solomon's dedication and in Nehemiah's reading of the law. Here alone it falls on the seventh — because Unleavened Bread runs seven days and has no eighth to add one to. The word is the noun of atsar, to restrain or hold back, so what it names is the stopping, not the gathering; a reader who takes ‘assembly’ as the whole meaning has the crowd but not the brake.

⚠ Seven days at v3, six days at v8, five verses apart. Both sentences are about eating unleavened bread and they do not give the same number. Twelve of the thirteen simply print both numbers and leave them: KJV ‘Six days thou shalt eat unleavened bread’ against its own ‘seven days shalt thou eat unleavened bread therewith’ five verses earlier, and so on down the shelf. Exactly one harmonises, and it does it with a single added word: the TLB writes ‘For the following six days you shall eat no bread made with yeast’ — following, which makes the six run after the first day and quietly restores the seven. The usual reading is that the seventh day is covered by v8's own clause — on that day there is an assembly and no work, so it is counted differently rather than dropped — which is plausible and is not what the text says. It is left standing here, as the Hebrew leaves it.

⚠ And this is the paragraph that makes the household Passover of Exodus 12 illegal. Verse 5 forbids the sacrifice within any one of your gates — the phrase this book uses for your own town — and v6 requires the one chosen place. Exodus 12 has it eaten at home, by households, with blood on the doorframes. Numbers 28 assumes the same. The centralising programme of chapter 12 has now reached the oldest domestic rite in the book and moved it out of the house.

★★ Weeks is the one pilgrim feast with no calendar date. You start counting when you start cutting. Leviticus 23 fixes Passover to the fourteenth day of the first month and Booths to the fifteenth of the seventh; this feast begins from when the sickle is first put to the standing grain, which is a farmer's judgement about a field, not a date on a tablet. The chermesh, sickle, stands in exactly two verses of the Hebrew Bible — this one and Deuteronomy 23:26 (now on these pages), where you may pluck ears from a neighbour's standing grain by hand but may not swing a sickle at it. Both are in this book, both are about the same crop at the same stage, and the second is the one that limits what the first sets loose.

The amount is set by a word that occurs nowhere else. Missat, in v10, has no second occurrence in the Hebrew Bible in this sense, and the honest measure of that is the shelf: the thirteen versions produce six different things for one word — a tribute, a proportion, a free gift, an oblation, a voluntary offering, and a sufficiency. The KJV makes it a levy, ‘with a tribute of a freewill offering of thine hand’, and the ASV keeps the levy but hyphenates and re-spells around it, ‘with a tribute of a freewill-offering of thy hand’. The NIV drops the noun and keeps only the proportion, ‘in proportion to the blessings the Lord your God has given you’. The Geneva reduces it to generosity, ‘even a free gift of thine hand’, and the Douay to liturgy, ‘a voluntary oblation of thy hand’. The NWT 1984 reads only the willingness, ‘according to the voluntary offering of your hand’. ★ The reading closest to the word's likely sense is on the Spanish shelf: the RV 1909 has «de la suficiencia voluntaria de tu mano», sufficiency — as much as you can manage — and the RV60 revises it to «de la abundancia voluntaria de tu mano», abundance, which is a different claim about the same unknown word. This translation keeps it as a measure and leaves the vagueness where the Hebrew put it, because the sentence's real point is that the sum is set by the giver.

★ The guest list is the argument. Eight named dependants are commanded into the rejoicing — son, daughter, slave, slave-woman, Levite, and then the triad this book keeps together, the stranger, the orphan and the widow. That quartet of Levite, stranger, orphan and widow is 14:29's tithe list, arriving here as a party. ⚠ And the list is worth reading for what is not in it: it names your slave and your slave-woman and your daughter, and it does not name your wife. The Hebrew addresses one man throughout the chapter, so she is presumably inside the ‘you’ rather than excluded from the feast; but the sentence enumerates eight other people and stops.

And the reason clause is the previous chapter's, verbatim. And you shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt (v12) is the same sentence, in the same words, that 15:15 used to explain why a freed slave must not be sent away empty. There it grounded a payment; here it grounds a party. This book argues from that memory more than from anything else it has.

★ In Exodus this feast is agricultural; by Deuteronomy it has a historical name. Exodus 23:16 calls the autumn festival chag ha-asif, the Feast of Ingathering, ‘at the end of the year, when you gather in your labours out of the field’; 34:22 keeps asif. Here it is chag ha-sukkot, the Feast of Booths — and the ingathering, which used to be the name, has become the subordinate clause: when you gather in from your threshing floor and from your winepress. Leviticus 23:34 (already on these pages) already carries the new name, and eight verses later, at 23:42–43, supplies the reason Deuteronomy never gives: that Israel is to live in booths for seven days so that its generations will know God made them dwell in booths when he brought them out of Egypt.

⚠ Two spellings of the name inside three verses. Verse 13 writes it defectively, ha-sukkot without the vav; v16 writes it full. Nothing turns on it — but it is the kind of detail a search misses: a word written two ways is two searches.

The threshing floor and the winepress are carried straight over from the slave law. Mi-gornekha u-mi-yiqvekha here is the pair from 15:14, where you load up the freed slave ‘out of your flock and out of your threshing floor and out of your winepress’. The two nouns do the same work in both places: they are what a household actually has after harvest, and in both chapters they are what has to be shared before it is enjoyed.

‘Nothing but joyful’. Ve-hayita akh sameach ends v15 with the restrictive particle akh, only, which normally narrows a statement and here has nothing to narrow but the mood. The ASV reads it as an intensifier, ‘and thou shalt be altogether joyful’; the KJV makes it a consequence, ‘therefore thou shalt surely rejoice’; the NWT 1984 takes it literally and keeps the oddity, ‘and you must become nothing but joyful’, which is what is done here. Read strictly it is a command about a feeling, which is unusual in a law code — and it is the third time in this chapter that somebody is ordered to be glad (v11, v14, v15), all three of them inside the two harvest feasts and none of them at Passover.

★★ The Hebrew of this verse does something no version on either shelf shows: it puts the object marker in front of God's face. Read as it is pointed, yera’eh is passive — shall be seen, hence ‘shall appear’ — and every one of the thirteen versions reads it that way. But a passive verb does not take a direct object, and this verse has one: et-penei YHVH, with et, the accusative particle. Set the three verses of this commandment side by side out of our own archive and the difference is a single letter. Exodus 23:17 writes yera’eh kol zekhurkha el penei ha-adon — el, to, toward, which fits ‘appear before’ exactly. Exodus 34:23 and this verse both write et penei. With el the man is seen; with et the sentence reads, on its face, all your males shall SEE the face of Jehovah — which is the reading the pointing steps around, and Exodus 33:20 is the reason anyone would want to. This translation prints ‘appear before the face of’, keeping the face the Hebrew keeps and following the pointing on the verb; the alternative is not adopted, only shown.

The phrase belongs to this one commandment and nowhere else. Zekhurkha, ‘your males’, stands in three verses of the Hebrew Bible — Exodus 23:17, Exodus 34:23 and this one — and all three are the same law about going up three times a year. All three are now on these pages.

★ ‘Three times’ used to be ‘three footings’. Exodus 23:14 says shalosh regalim — three regel, feet, the noun that gives the Jewish festivals their standing name, the shalosh regalim. Exodus 34 and Deuteronomy both replace it with pe’amim, times, which is what the shelf translates. The pilgrimage is still in the law; it has walked out of the vocabulary.

⚠ ‘Empty’ is the word the last chapter spent, turned round on the man who spent it. 15:13 forbade you to send a freed slave away reqam, empty; here the same word comes back and the obligation has changed hands — you shall not appear before Jehovah reqam. It is the same word, and the reversal is deliberate enough that the older law it is quoting already had it: Exodus 23:15 and 34:20 both end ‘and none shall appear before me empty’. Read out of the archive the word stands in sixteen verses — the raw consonants return twenty-three, but six of those are the name Azrikam and one is a different verb — and its best-known appearance is Naomi's: I went out full, and Jehovah has brought me back empty (Ruth 1:21, already on these pages).

★★ Tsedeq tsedeq tirdof. The doubled noun stands in one verse of the Hebrew Bible — this one — and the thirteen witnesses divide into six constructions of two words. Two dissolve the repetition into an intensifying adjective, and do it in the same words: KJV ‘That which is altogether just shalt thou follow’, ASV ‘That which is altogether just shalt thou follow’ — in both, the doubling is simply gone. One splits it into two different words: Geneva ‘That which is just and right shalt thou follow’. One turns the first into an adverb: Douay ‘Thou shalt follow justly after that which is just’. Three read it as exclusivity: NIV ‘Follow justice and justice alone’, NVI «la justicia y solamente la justicia», TNM 2019 «La justicia, y solo la justicia». One abandons the syntax and keeps the force: TLB ‘Justice must prevail’. And five print the repetition and let the reader hear it: NWT 1984 ‘Justice—justice you should pursue’, NWT 2013 ‘Justice—justice you should pursue’, TNM 1987 «La justicia», RV 1909 «La justicia, la justicia seguirás», RV60 «La justicia, la justicia seguirás». Two, one, one, three, one, five — thirteen. This translation is with the last five.

★ The bribe clause is 10:17 handed down from God to the judge. Chapter 10 described Jehovah as the one who does not lift the face and does not take a bribe. Here the human court is given the same two prohibitions in the same order — do not regard a face, do not take a bribe — so that the bench is not merely told to be fair but told which two specific things God does not do. The verbs for the face differ (nasa panim there, hikkir panim here); the bribe clause is the same words.

⚠ And the reason for the ban is Exodus 23:8 rewritten, with one noun changed. Exodus: a bribe blinds the piqchim — the clear-sighted, from a verb used of opening eyes. Deuteronomy: the bribe blinds the eyes of the wise. Exodus's word is about sight, and calling a bribe a blinding of the sighted is already a pun; Deuteronomy trades the pun for a category, and the victim becomes not the sharp-eyed but the chakham, the wise man — which quietly widens the claim, since wisdom is what a judge is supposed to have. The second half of the clause, and twists the words of the righteous, is carried over unchanged. ⚠ The NIV renders that second noun ‘twists the words of the innocent’, moving it from character into the courtroom; every other version that renders the clause keeps the righteous or the just — ASV ‘pervert the words of the righteous’, Geneva ‘perverteth the words of the just’, NVI «tuerce las palabras del justo». The TLB is the one that does not render it at all: ‘For bribes blind the eyes of the wisest and corrupt their decisions’ keeps the blinding and replaces the victims with their verdicts.

⚠ Three of the older versions decline to call it a bribe. The KJV has ‘neither take a gift: for a gift doth blind the eyes of the wise’, the Geneva before it ‘neither take reward: for the reward blindeth the eyes of the wise’, and the Douay ‘Thou shalt not accept person nor gifts: for gifts blind the eyes of the wise’. The Hebrew shochad is not a gift or a fee; it is specifically the payment that buys a verdict, and ten of the thirteen say so plainly — the ASV of 1901 is the first on this shelf to print ‘neither shalt thou take a bribe’, and every version after it, in both languages, follows. The three that do not are the three oldest.

‘You shall not regard a face’ is an idiom, and the shelf agrees on the meaning while disagreeing on how much of the face to keep. KJV ‘thou shalt not respect persons’ keeps the old English legal phrase; the NIV reads it out entirely as ‘show partiality’. The face is kept here because chapter 10 kept it, and because the two verses are meant to be read against each other.

Judges and officers. Shoterim are not police in the modern sense; the word is used of the Israelite foremen under Egyptian taskmasters (Exodus 5:14) and of officials who address the army before a battle. ‘Officers’ is the majority word on the English shelf — KJV ‘Judges and officers shalt thou make thee’, ASV ‘Judges and officers shalt thou make thee’, NWT 1984 ‘You should set judges and officers for yourself’ — and is kept here; the Douay reaches for a civic term, ‘judges and magistrates’, and the RV 1909 for a startling one, «Jueces y alcaldes», mayors. ⚠ The same verse is also where the shelf quietly loses this book's favourite noun: the Hebrew says in all your gates, which is the phrase v5 has just used to say where you may NOT sacrifice, and the NIV ‘in every town’, Geneva ‘in all thy cities’ and RV60 «en todas tus ciudades» all replace it with a settlement. The gate is where a court actually sat. In the Hebrew scroll v18 also opens a new weekly reading, Shoftim, named from its first word — so a synagogue hears the festival calendar end and the courts begin at exactly this line.

★★ The object this verse says Jehovah hates is the object Jacob set up at Bethel and poured oil on. Read out of the archive, matsevah in the singular stands in thirteen verses (the raw consonants return sixteen; three are a garrison, a place-name and a guard). Eight of the thirteen are in the Jacob story — the stone he slept on, stood up and anointed (Genesis 28:18, 28:22), the pillar of the treaty with Laban (31:45, 31:51, 31:52), Bethel again (35:14) and Rachel's grave (35:20) — and at 31:13 it is God himself who says I am the God of Bethel, where you anointed a pillar. ⚠ Moses set up twelve of them at the foot of Sinai, one for each tribe, on the morning he wrote the covenant down (Exodus 24:4, already on these pages). Leviticus 26:1 bans it; this verse bans it and adds the verb sane, hate. Hosea 3:4 then names its absence as part of Israel's desolation, and Isaiah 19:19 promises one to Jehovah in the middle of Egypt. The word is not the problem; the practice was absorbed and then forbidden, and this verse is where the forbidding gets a feeling attached to it.

⚠ A disclosure about this translation's own English. One Hebrew word stands behind all of that, and this project has rendered it two ways: ‘pillar’ in the Genesis chapters, translated years earlier, and ‘standing stone’ from Deuteronomy 12:3 onward, which is what is used here. A reader comparing Genesis 28 with this verse should know they are looking at the same noun.

★ The Asherah, and the grove that never existed. The KJV reads ‘Thou shalt not plant thee a grove of any trees’, and the Geneva before it ‘Thou shalt plant thee no grove of any trees’; the Douay has ‘Thou shalt plant no grove’. All three are downstream of the Greek and Latin, which rendered the goddess's name as a wood, and the result is a well-known ghost in English Bibles: readers of 1611 met sacred groves throughout Kings and Chronicles where the Hebrew names a cult object connected with a named deity. The ASV of 1901 is the version that stops translating and transliterates, ‘Thou shalt not plant thee an Asherah’; the NIV makes it explicit with ‘any wooden Asherah pole’, and the NVI names her outright, «la diosa Aserá».

And the phrase is stranger than the versions make it. The Hebrew is lo titta lekha asherah kol ets — literally ‘you shall not plant for yourself an Asherah, any tree’, with the two nouns simply set side by side. Not one of the thirteen prints the two nouns flat side by side: most insert a preposition and make the tree a material (ASV ‘an Asherah of any kind of tree’), some reverse them and make the tree the object (NWT 1984 ‘any sort of tree as a sacred pole’), and the Douay separates them into two things, ‘Thou shalt plant no grove, nor any tree near the altar’. It is kept flat here, because the apposition is what tells you the object is wooden without telling you what shape it was, which is as much as the verse actually knows.