These two passages give us the first narrative account of the Passover, the moment when God calls upon Israel to remember, and to ritualize the remembrance of, the central event in Israel’s corporate story with God: God’s deliverance of Israel from bondage in Egypt.

The episode is, of course, that which is recalled every year in the celebration of the Jewish Passover. And the story has profound meaning for Christians both because it reveals that delivering people from oppression is a core feature of God’s character (though, to be sure, God is already a saving God in Genesis), and because of its connections to understandings of the death of Jesus in the New Testament (namely Jesus as the Passover lamb).

Many volumes have been written on the Passover account in Exodus, so only a few observations can be made here. It is noteworthy how the ethics widely pervasive in the rest of the Old Testament are also found here: if a family cannot afford to provide a lamb for the Passover, it is the responsibility of a better-off neighboring family to share what they have. The idea that “households join together” and that the lamb shall be divided proportionally to the number of persons present (Exodus 12:4) reflects the deep biblical conviction that ...