Keeping the paschal lamb: Exodus 12.6 and the question of sacrifice in the Passover-of-Egypt

Abstract

The paschal prescription in Exodus 12.3-6—attributed to the Priestly Source—that requires the Israelites to keep an animal four days prior to slaughtering it is an enigmatic episode unparalleled in other biblical accounts of Passover. Modern discussions often disregard the prescription as a faux rite created through textual harmonization of apparently disparate dating traditions for Passover. This discussion demonstrates that compositional approaches to explaining the rite are unsatisfactory and attempts rather to approach the rite phenomenologically—even if the phenomenon only existed in the imagination of the Priestly writer. With a nuanced understanding of the language used to describe the rite and the correspondence of the Passover-of-Egypt with the Priestly system of Tabernacle sacrifice, the study shows that the four-day detainment of the animal is an intentionally crafted device used to approximate in a pre-Tabernacle environment the mediation between sacred and profane that would later be guarded by priests.