Exodus 12 — A Dated Deliverance
Exodus 12:1-14
The Passover instruction begins by resetting the calendar. The month of the Exodus is made the first month of the year, and the lamb is tied to specific days of that month.
The text
'This month shall be unto you the beginning of months: it shall be the first month of the year to you' (Exodus 12:2). The lamb is taken on the tenth day, kept until the fourteenth, and killed 'between the evenings' — with the feast of unleavened bread following for seven days.
A calendar as memory
'This day shall be unto you for a memorial' (12:14). The date is the mechanism by which a historical act of deliverance is carried forward through generations who did not witness it. Dating here is not bureaucracy; it is how a people remembers.
Observation, not arithmetic
Ancient Israelite reckoning was lunisolar and observational — new months declared by sighting the new moon, with an extra month added when the barley harvest required it. There was no printed table. That matters later: the biblical system was not a fixed algorithm of the kind 1582 was arguing about.