Exodus 12:3-5

New English Translation

Footnotes

1. Exodus 12:3 tn Heb “and they will take for them a man a lamb.” This is clearly a distributive, or individualizing, use of “man.”
2. Exodus 12:3 tn The שֶּׂה (seh) is a single head from the flock, or smaller cattle, which would include both sheep and goats.
3. Exodus 12:3 tn Heb “according to the house of their fathers.” The expression “house of the father” is a common expression for a family. sn The Passover was to be a domestic institution. Each lamb was to be shared by family members.
4. Exodus 12:3 tn Heb “house” (also at the beginning of the following verse).
5. Exodus 12:4 sn Later Judaism ruled that “too small” meant fewer than ten (S. R. Driver, Exodus, 88).
6. Exodus 12:4 tn The clause uses the comparative min (מִן) construction: יִמְעַט הַבַּיִת מִהְיֹת מִשֶּׁה (yimʿat habbayit mih^eyot misseh, “the house is small from being from a lamb,” or “too small for a lamb”). It clearly means that if there were not enough people in the household to have a lamb by themselves, they should join with another family. For the use of the comparative, see GKC 430 §133.c.
7. Exodus 12:4 tn Heb “he and his neighbor”; the referent (the man) has been specified in the translation for clarity.
8. Exodus 12:4 tn Heb “who is near to his house.”
9. Exodus 12:4 tn The construction uses a perfect tense with a vav (ו) consecutive after a conditional clause: “if the household is too small…then he and his neighbor will take.”
10. Exodus 12:4 tn Heb “[every] man according to his eating.”sn The reference is normally taken to mean whatever each person could eat. B. Jacob (Exodus, 299) suggests, however, that the reference may not be to each individual person’s appetite, but to each family. Each man who is the head of a household was to determine how much his family could eat, and this in turn would determine how many families shared the lamb.
11. Exodus 12:5 tn The construction has: “[The] lamb…will be to you.” This may be interpreted as a possessive use of the ל (lamed), meaning, “[the] lamb…you have” (your lamb) for the Passover. In the context instructing the people to take an animal for this festival, the idea is that the one they select, their animal, must meet these qualifications.
12. Exodus 12:5 tn The Hebrew word תָּמִים (tamim) means “perfect” or “whole” or “complete” in the sense of not having blemishes and diseases—no physical defects. The rules for sacrificial animals applied here (see Lev 22:19-21; Deut 17:1).
13. Exodus 12:5 tn The idiom says “a son of a year” (בֶּן־שָׁנָה, ben shanah), meaning a “yearling” or “one year old” (see GKC 418 §128.v).
14. Exodus 12:5 tn Because a choice is being given in this last clause, the imperfect tense nuance of permission should be used. They must have a perfect animal, but it may be a sheep or a goat. The verb’s object “it” is supplied from the context.