⚠ After nine plagues and ten chapters of argument, the answer is not another plague. It is a set of instructions, and the first of them resets TIME: “this month shall be for you the HEAD OF MONTHS.” Israel’s year is re-founded on the night it was rescued — the calendar itself becomes a witness. (The civil year continued to begin in the autumn, which is why Judaism keeps two new years to this day.) The month is the one 9:31 was quietly counting toward, Abib, the month of the ripening ear.

The lamb is chosen on the tenth and kept until the fourteenth — four days in the house before it is killed. It is a male without blemish, and it may be a sheep or a goat (the Hebrew seh covers both; “lamb” in English quietly narrows it). ⚠ And note verse 4, which is easy to read past: a household too small for a whole lamb shares with the nearest neighbor, counted “according to what each eats.” Nobody is left out for being too few, and nothing is wasted. The ordinance is built for poor and small families first.

“Between the two evenings” (v6) is an old ambiguity: between sunset and full dark, or from the sun’s decline to sunset (the later, mid-afternoon reckoning, which is how the temple came to do it). KJV keeps the Hebrew idiom, “in the evening” with a margin note; the ESV reads “at twilight”; the NWT “between the two evenings.” And it is slaughtered by “the whole congregation” — thousands of households acting at one hour, which is itself the making of a nation.

⚠ The blood goes on the OUTSIDE of the door — the two doorposts and the lintel — where the family eating inside cannot see it. Whatever else Passover is, it begins as a night of trusting a mark you are not looking at. The sign is not for them; verse 13 says so plainly: “when I SEE the blood.”

Eaten in haste, loins girded and sandals on and staff in hand — a meal eaten standing, dressed for the road, by people who are still slaves at the moment they eat it. Roasted, not boiled; nothing left till morning.

⚠ «It is a PASSOVER to Jehovah.» The word pesach is famously uncertain. Three readings, all old: (1) to PASS OVER, skip, spare — the traditional rendering, and the Greek Old Testament’s; (2) to PROTECT, hover over defensively — supported by Isaiah 31:5, where Jehovah “protects and delivers, PASSES OVER and rescues” Jerusalem like a bird over its nest; (3) to LIMP or leap, the verb’s ordinary sense elsewhere (1 Kings 18:21, 26). The difference matters: reading (1) has God stepping past a house; reading (2) has him standing over its door. This translation keeps the traditional “pass over” and flags the alternative rather than deciding it.

And verse 12 finally states outright what the plagues have been doing: “against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments.” The whole cycle has been a lawsuit against a pantheon, and the last defendant is the god-king’s own house.

The instructions jump forward before the night has even happened. Verses 14-20 legislate an annual festival — the Feast of Unleavened Bread — for a people who are not out of Egypt yet. The text is deliberately arranged this way: the rescue and the remembering of the rescue are given together, as one thing.

Why unleavened? Verse 39 gives the historical reason — there was no time to let dough rise. But the command here precedes the haste, and goes further than an absence: leaven must be actively REMOVED from the houses, and for seven days none may be found. ⚠ That is the origin of the household search still carried out before Passover, and of leaven’s standing New Testament use as an image of what spreads invisibly through a whole batch — “a little leaven leavens the whole lump” (1 Corinthians 5:6-8, where Paul goes straight on to call Christ “our Passover”).

«That soul shall be CUT OFF from Israel.» The penalty (karet) is severe and its exact force is debated in the tradition itself — expulsion from the community, childlessness, or a divine rather than judicial punishment. What is clear is the logic: a member of a redeemed people who will not keep the sign of the redemption removes himself from it. KJV “that soul shall be cut off from Israel”; the NIV “must be cut off from Israel.”

⚠ And already, in verse 19, the door is open: the rule binds “the SOJOURNER and the native of the land” alike. The founding festival of Israel is legislated from the first day with the resident foreigner inside its frame — a thread this chapter picks up again at its very end (vv48-49). KJV “whether he be a stranger, or born in the land”; the ESV “whether he is a sojourner or a native.”

Moses passes the instructions to the elders, and adds the practical detail the divine speech did not: a bunch of hyssop as the brush, the blood held in a basin — though the word saf can equally mean the THRESHOLD, so that some have read the blood as caught at the doorway itself rather than in a bowl (KJV “the bason”; the NWT the same, with the alternative noted) — and an order that sounds small and is not — nobody goes outside until morning. The households are shut in with the mark on the door and the night outside. Hyssop reappears wherever blood or water is applied for cleansing (Leviticus 14; Numbers 19; Psalm 51:7, “purge me with hyssop”), and at the cross a sponge is lifted on a hyssop stalk (John 19:29).

⚠ «He will not allow THE DESTROYER to come into your houses.» Verse 23 introduces a destroyer (ha-mashchit) — and the chapter does not harmonize this with verse 12, where Jehovah says “I will pass through… I will strike.” Both are left standing: God himself strikes, and a destroyer is restrained at the door. Ancient and modern readers have taken it as a distinct agent (compare the destroying angel of 2 Samuel 24:16), as a personification of the plague, or as a way of speaking about God’s own act at one remove. The library reports the double statement and does not resolve it. KJV and the ESV both read “the destroyer”; the NWT renders it “the ruination.”

⚠ «And when your sons say to you, what does this service mean to you?» There it is again — and this is the second time in three chapters. At 10:2 the plagues were said to exist so that a father could RECOUNT them to a son and a grandson; here the rite is built around the child’s question, with the answer scripted into the law itself. This verse is the direct ancestor of the Four Questions of the Passover seder, and the reason that meal is conducted as an interrogation rather than a lecture. The instruction to explain is older than the event being explained.

“And the people bowed low and prostrated themselves” — the first act of worship in the book by the whole people, and it comes before anything has been delivered. Then, quietly: “so they did.”

It happens exactly as announced, at the hour named in 11:4 — and the roll of the dead repeats the merism of 11:5 with one change: there the bottom of the range was the slave girl at the millstones, here it is “the firstborn of the CAPTIVE who was in the dungeon.” Even the prisoners of Egypt are counted as Egypt.

⚠ And there is a tomb. On the early-date chronology this translation follows, the pharaoh of the exodus is Amenhotep II — who, Scripture being careful that the ARMY drowned and not the king (14:28), was buried in the Valley of the Kings. Buried with him in KV35 is a son, WEBENSENU, whose organs were found in canopic jars inscribed with his name: a son who demonstrably died before his father did. It is suggestive rather than probative — nothing establishes that he was the crown prince or how he died — and Joel Kramer, who makes the case, is careful to say he does not want to make too much of it, “but I also don’t want to make too little of it either.” The encyclopedia entry carries his film on the tomb.

«There was no house where there was not someone dead.» The narration is flat and short; the book spends no words on the scene. And the sound that fills it is the great OUTCRY promised in 11:6 — the same word this book opened with when Israel cried out under the bondage (2:23).

⚠ Pharaoh’s surrender is total, and its last three words are the most surprising in the chapter. He summons them at night, concedes everything he has spent five chapters withholding — the people, the children, the flocks and the herds — and then says: “AND BLESS ME ALSO.” The man who opened this contest with “Who is Jehovah, that I should obey his voice? I do not know Jehovah” (5:2) ends it asking the God he did not know for a blessing.

“We are all dying!” The Egyptians press Israel out — the same verb-root that has described Pharaoh’s hardened HOLDING ON now describes Egypt pressing them to GO. The expulsion promised in 11:1 arrives.

⚠ And the asking is fulfilled (vv35-36): they ask, the Egyptians give, “and they STRIPPED Egypt.” The verb (natzal) is the plunder-word, and it is the same root used all through the book for God DELIVERING his people — the rescue and the spoil named by one verb. KJV “they spoiled the Egyptians”; the ESV and NIV “plundered.” What Abraham was promised in Genesis 15:14 is now in their hands, and what it will become is a golden calf and a tabernacle.

⚠ «About six hundred thousand on foot — the men — besides the little ones.» Read plainly this implies a nation of roughly two million people, and it is one of the most discussed figures in the Bible, because the logistics in the Sinai are formidable and the same books elsewhere describe Israel as small (Deuteronomy 7:7). The readings, each with a real pedigree: (1) the plain sense — the figure is what it says, and the wilderness provision is precisely the point the narrative keeps making; (2) the elef reading — the Hebrew word for “thousand” (elef) also means a CLAN or a military unit, so “600 elef” could be 600 fighting units of unstated size; the same ambiguity turns up in Judges and 1 Samuel; (3) a later census figure carried back into the exodus account. The library lays them out and takes no vote — but the elef reading is a real feature of the language, not a modern escape hatch.

⚠ «And a great MIXED MULTITUDE also went up with them.» This is one of the quietest and most important sentences in Exodus. Erev rav means a mingled crowd — non-Israelites who walked out of Egypt with Israel. Who were they? The book has already told us: at the hail, “the one who FEARED the word of Jehovah among the servants of Pharaoh” brought his household indoors (9:20). Egypt was never a solid block; some of it believed, and some of it left. KJV “a mixed multitude”; the ESV “a mixed multitude”; the NIV flattens it to “many other people,” losing the mingling the Hebrew names. Israel, from its first hour as a free people, is not ethnically pure — which is exactly why the chapter ends by legislating for the foreigner who wants in.

⚠ «Four hundred and thirty years.» Another old crux, because Genesis 15:13 told Abraham four hundred, and Paul, at Galatians 3:17, counts the 430 from the PROMISE to the law — which would place the patriarchs inside the span. The Greek Old Testament and the Samaritan Pentateuch resolve it in the text itself, reading “in Egypt AND IN CANAAN”; the Hebrew here says simply “in Egypt.” Both totals are standing witnesses and both are old; this translation follows the Hebrew and notes the variant rather than importing it. KJV “the sojourning of the children of Israel, who dwelt in Egypt, was four hundred and thirty years”; the NWT reads the same and footnotes the Greek and Samaritan expansion.

“On that very day” — twice (vv41, 51), and once more at v17. The exodus is dated as precisely as a legal instrument.

⚠ «A NIGHT OF WATCHING for Jehovah.» The Hebrew (leil shimmurim) works in both directions and the verse says both: it is a night Jehovah KEPT WATCH to bring them out, and a night to BE KEPT by all Israel through their generations. God’s vigil becomes the people’s vigil — and Jewish tradition has kept it as a night of staying up ever since. KJV “a night to be much observed”; the ESV “a night of watching.”

The chapter closes by drawing the boundary of the meal — and the surprise is where it falls. Not around a bloodline. The foreigner’s son may not eat; but a slave bought with money MAY, once circumcised, and so may any sojourner who takes the covenant sign on himself and his household. ⚠ The line is drawn around the COVENANT, not around ancestry — which is why the mixed multitude of verse 38 is not a problem the text has to explain away. It was legislated for on the same night.

«ONE LAW shall there be for the native and for the sojourner who sojourns among you.» This is stated at the founding moment of the nation, before Sinai, before any of the rest of the legislation — and it is repeated through the Torah (Leviticus 24:22; Numbers 15:15-16). Whatever else Israel is being made into, it is not being made into a closed people.

⚠ «You shall not break a bone of it.» A rule about butchering — the lamb is kept whole, eaten in one house, nothing carried out. It becomes one of the New Testament’s most exact citations: at the crucifixion the soldiers break the legs of the two men beside Jesus and find him already dead, and John writes, “these things happened so that the Scripture might be fulfilled: NOT A BONE OF HIM SHALL BE BROKEN” (19:33-36), quoting this verse (with Psalm 34:20 behind it). KJV “neither shall ye break a bone thereof”; the ESV “you shall not break any of its bones.” Paul makes the identification directly: “Christ our PASSOVER has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7).

And the book’s longest chapter ends with a sentence it has been trying to write since chapter 1: “on that very day Jehovah brought the sons of Israel out from the land of Egypt by their armies.” Not “he did not send them” — which is how every chapter since the fifth has ended — but OUT.