Key Verses: Exodus 11-12

Key Questions


1. How does the Passover ritual help shape a collective identity for the Israelites? What role does the household play in Israel’s liberation? How does the command to share the lamb among neighbors reflect communal values, especially under threat? How does shared ritual function in your own community or faith tradition?
2. What does the use of blood on the doorposts signify? What does this action represent, and how is it developed in the Bible?
3. Why are the people told to eat with sandals on and staff in hand? What does this urgency say about faith in movement?
4. What does the inclusion of non-Israelites in the Exodus say about God’s vision of community? How might this challenge narrow views of who “belongs” in God’s liberating work? How different is this from the first chapter of the Exodus (when Pharaoh turns his people against the Israelites)?
5. In what ways does the institution of the Passover tie personal piety to communal faith, trust, and deliverance?

Theological Insights


“A newly liberated people will create practices and institutions that are in tune with their new status. In the case of passover, however, liturgy precedes the liberative event… the ritual is set before the event occurs… the event is liturgy.” Fretheim, Exodus (Interpretation), 137.

[on 12:11 – “and you shall eat it hurriedly”] “Hebrew hippazon expresses a sense of haste informed by anxiety. The noun is used only in connection with the Exodus. The prophet Isaiah (52:12) implicitly contrasts the future unhurried and unagitated redemption of Israel from exile with the circumstances of the Exodus: ‘For you will not depart in haste [hippazon].” Sarna, Exodus, 56.

“[U]ntil now the Israelite slaves have been almost entirely passive. They have cried out from their miseries. They have turned a deaf ear to Moses’s promise of divine redemption. They have watched from a distance the destructive effects of the plagues on their Egyptian masters. But they have done nothing to show that they deserve emancipation or even that they want to be redeemed. If they are to make the transition from slavery toward the possibility of self-rule, the people themselves must do something to earn their redemption. The tasks they are given, both before and after their deliverance, are intended in part to make them worthy of being liberated: they are to act, and they are to act in obedience to God’s instructions; they are to act trusting in God and in His servant Moses.” Kass, Founding God’s Nation, 162.

“The tragedy of Pharaoh was the failure to realize that the exodus from slavery could have spelled redemption for both Israel and Egypt. Would that Pharaoh and the Egyptians had joined the israelites in the desert and together stood at the foot of Sinai!” Abraham J. Heschel, “The White Man on Trial” in The Insecurity of Freedom, 103.