Exodus 13:5

Moses speaks to the people on the day itself, with Egypt just behind them, and his first word is “Remember.” The verb zâkar means to remember, and in some of its forms to mention or to bring to remembrance. The rest of the passage shows what this remembering looks like: a week of unleavened bread, a house cleared of leaven, a father telling his son, and the whole feast kept again every year. God knows how quickly his people forget his works, so he gives them a memory they can eat, see and say aloud. Deuteronomy sounds the same call, “thou shalt remember the LORD thy God” (Deuteronomy 8:18), and a psalmist makes it his resolve: “I will remember the works of the LORD: surely I will remember thy wonders of old” (Psalm 77:11). God himself remembers his covenant, as he said of the rainbow (Genesis 9:16), and he calls his people to remember what he has done.

What they remember is a day, “this day, in which ye came out from Egypt.” The Hebrew hayyôm hazzeh, “this day”, uses the ordinary word for day, yôwm, and points to one known day in their history. Egypt is called “the house of bondage.” The word for house, bayith, is used very widely, of a building, a household or a family, and here it is joined to ‘ebed, a servant or bondman, so the phrase is literally “house of slaves.” Egypt was the place where Israel had lived as Pharaoh’s slaves, under forced labour, and where their baby boys had been ordered put to death.

Then comes the reason for the whole command: “for by strength of hand the LORD brought you out from this place.” The phrase b’chozeq yad describes force that nothing can resist, and it gives all the credit to the LORD, Yᵉhôvâh, God’s covenant name, which the KJV prints as “the LORD.” Israel came out because he brought them out. The verb for their coming out in verses 4 and 8, yâtsâʼ, means to go or come out, and in its causative form to bring out, which is what the LORD has done.

The first practical command of the passage is short: “there shall no leavened bread be eaten.” The reason lies in the night they left. The Israelites went out of Egypt so quickly that their dough had no time to rise, and they carried it out unleavened (Exodus 12:34, 12:39). Deuteronomy calls the flat bread “the bread of affliction; for thou camest forth out of the land of Egypt in haste” (Deuteronomy 16:3). What they did in a hurry once became a feast for every generation, and each one would taste the haste of that night.

Three Hebrew words carry the command. Châmêts is leavened bread, anything made with fermented dough, from a root that has to do with sourness. Matstsâh is the unleavened bread itself, thin bread made without yeast, which Jews still call matzah. Sᵉʼôr, the “leaven” of verse 7, is the yeast-cake or barm, which Strong’s explains by its swelling in fermentation. In an Israelite house it was usually a piece of old fermented dough kept back to raise the next batch, so it was always at hand.

Verse 7 forbids both. Israel was to eat unleavened bread for seven days, and neither leavened bread nor the leaven that makes it was to be “seen with thee in all thy quarters.” “Quarters” translates a phrase meaning “in all thy borders”, the whole of Israel’s territory, so the command reaches past the table to every house and every holding in the land. In Egypt the LORD had already said, “even the first day ye shall put away leaven out of your houses” (Exodus 12:15), and verse 7 carries that across the whole land. Since leaven was part of every day’s baking, clearing it out was a real upheaval, a yearly break with ordinary life that marked the week as the LORD’s. Jews came to search their homes for every crumb before Passover, often by candlelight.

Verse 4 sets the day in the calendar: “This day came ye out in the month Abib.” The word ʼâbîyb means green or tender, a young ear of grain, and it names the month when the barley stands in fresh young ears, early in spring. Before they left, the LORD had told Israel, “This month shall be unto you the beginning of months” (Exodus 12:2), so their deliverance became the start of their year. Moses gives the date again when he repeats the law: “Observe the month of Abib, and keep the passover unto the LORD thy God: for in the month of Abib the LORD thy God brought thee forth out of Egypt by night” (Deuteronomy 16:1). A newly born nation began its life in the season of new growth, and every spring the young barley would bring the exodus back to mind.

“This day” is the day they set out, after the last plague and the Passover. The journey that followed, with the crossing of the sea, took longer, and this was the day the coming out began.

Verse 5 looks ahead. “When the LORD shall bring thee into the land”, Israel is to “keep this service in this month.” The feast is meant for life in the land as well as for the road out of Egypt. The land is named by its peoples, the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Hivites and Jebusites. Israel was going into a country already held by established nations, and the list makes plain that the LORD himself would bring them in and give them its territory.

The land is one “which he sware unto thy fathers to give thee.” The verb shâbaʻ means to swear a solemn oath, and Strong’s links it with the word for seven, as if a declaration were made seven times over. Israel’s claim to the land rests on that oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, beginning with “Unto thy seed will I give this land” (Genesis 12:7) and sealed in the covenant of Genesis 15. Joshua later records that the LORD kept every word of it (Joshua 21:43–45).

“A land flowing with milk and honey” is a well-known Hebrew way of describing great fruitfulness. Châlâb is milk, the richness of cattle, and speaks of good pasture. Dᵉbash is honey, named for its stickiness, and it can also mean syrup, such as date syrup or wild honey. Together they picture plenty and sweetness, a land unlike the slavery behind them and the dry wilderness ahead.

“Keep this service” uses the verb ʻâbad, to work, labour, serve, till or worship, with the noun ʻăbôdâh, work, labour or service. The feast is the service Israel offers to the LORD. Moses warns that plenty brings its own danger: when the LORD gives them houses and vineyards they did not build or plant, “Then beware lest thou forget the LORD, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage” (Deuteronomy 6:10–12). The yearly feast kept the good gifts of the land tied to the God who gave them.

Verse 6 sets the length: “Seven days thou shalt eat unleavened bread, and in the seventh day shall be a feast to the LORD.” Seven in Scripture often stands for completeness, and a full week gave the memory of the exodus time to settle into every part of daily life. The seventh day is a chag, a festival or pilgrimage feast, a joyful gathering with worship and sacrifices. Exodus 12 had already made both the first and the seventh days holy convocations, when the people gathered and set ordinary work aside (Exodus 12:16), so the week opens and closes before the LORD. It is a feast “to the LORD”, to Yᵉhôvâh, the God who delivered them, and its name in later Jewish speech is Chag HaMatzot, the feast of unleavened bread. The law of the feasts gives it again: “on the fifteenth day of the same month is the feast of unleavened bread unto the LORD” (Leviticus 23:6).

Worship here answers God’s saving act, the same pattern as the covenant soon made at Sinai (Exodus 19–24). God saves first, and his people respond with thanks, celebration and obedience. A psalm sums up the spirit of the week: “Remember his marvellous works that he hath done” (Psalm 105:5).

Verse 8 turns the feast into a lesson: “And thou shalt shew thy son in that day.” The verb nâgad means to tell, declare or make known, and bên is a son. “That day” is the feast itself, when the unleavened bread and the emptied house would make a child ask what it all meant. Exodus expects that question: “when your children shall say unto you, What mean ye by this service?” (Exodus 12:26), and the same chapter as our passage has a son asking again about the firstborn (Exodus 13:14). Deuteronomy gives the father his answer in words close to these: “We were Pharaoh’s bondmen in Egypt; and the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand” (Deuteronomy 6:20–23).

The rest of Scripture keeps up this charge. Parents are to teach God’s words diligently to their children at home and on the road (Deuteronomy 6:6–8), to “teach them thy sons, and thy sons’ sons” (Deuteronomy 4:9), and a psalmist promises, “We will not hide them from their children, shewing to the generation to come the praises of the LORD” (Psalm 78:4). The stones Joshua set up at the Jordan were for the same purpose, so that children would ask and hear what the LORD had done (Joshua 4:6–7). The verse speaks to the father as head of the house, and mothers share the charge: “My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother” (Proverbs 1:8).

Verse 9 says that the feast “shall be for a sign unto thee upon thine hand, and for a memorial between thine eyes.” A sign, ʼôwth, is a mark or token that points to something. A memorial, zikrôwn, comes from the same root as zâkar and means something that brings a thing to mind. The hand stands for what we do, and the place between the eyes, the forehead, for what we think and how we see the world. The feast was to stay as close to Israel as a mark on the hand or the brow, shaping both deeds and thoughts.

Its purpose follows: “that the LORD’S law may be in thy mouth.” Remembering leads to speaking, teaching and living God’s law, and to passing it on. The image comes back at the end of the chapter for the firstborn (Exodus 13:16), and Deuteronomy uses it for God’s words, to be bound as a sign on the hand and as frontlets between the eyes (Deuteronomy 11:18). Here the words describe how near the memory is meant to be, and later Jewish practice took this verse together with those in Deuteronomy as the basis for wearing tefillin, small boxes holding Scripture bound on the arm and forehead at prayer. The prophets look to the day when God would write his law on his people’s hearts (Jeremiah 31:33).

Verse 10 closes the section: “Thou shalt therefore keep this ordinance in his season from year to year.” To keep, shâmar, is properly to hedge about, to guard, and so to observe with care. An ordinance, chuqqâh, is something prescribed, a statute. Its season, môwʻêd, is an appointment, a fixed time, and the same word can mean an appointed feast, a meeting or the Tent of Meeting. The Hebrew for “from year to year”, mi-yāmîm yāmîmâ, is literally “from days to days”, and it means every year without end.

The Hebrew “therefore” is simply “and thou shalt keep”, joining this command to all that comes before it. Israel’s feasts came round with the year, and this one was tied to the year’s first month and its barley, yet what it celebrated was something God had done in history. By keeping it every spring, generations who never saw Egypt learned that the LORD had saved their people and that they belonged to him.

The New Testament gives this feast its fullest meaning in Jesus. Paul writes: “Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us: therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Corinthians 5:6–8). The lamb whose blood began the exodus pointed to Christ, who died at Passover, and the week of unleavened bread that followed pictures the life of those he has set free. He knew no sin (2 Corinthians 5:21), and he is the bread of life (John 6:35).

Israel’s coming out of Egypt is a picture of a greater deliverance. Luke calls the death Jesus would accomplish at Jerusalem his “decease”, and the Greek word is exodos (Luke 9:31). By it God has “delivered us from the power of darkness” (Colossians 1:13), made us free from sin (Romans 6:18) and raised us to walk in newness of life (Romans 6:4). The strong hand that broke Pharaoh’s grip is the power that triumphed over sin and death at the cross and in the resurrection (Colossians 2:13–15). Christ entered the holy place by his own blood and obtained eternal redemption (Hebrews 9:11–14), and he is the mediator of a better covenant (Hebrews 8:6).

Each part of the passage finds its answer in him. The new beginning of Abib becomes the new creation of all who are in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17), who have put on Christ (Galatians 3:27). The land of milk and honey points to every spiritual blessing God gives us in him (Ephesians 1:3) and to the rest that remains for the people of God (Hebrews 4:9–10). The feast to the LORD looks ahead to the marriage supper of the Lamb (Revelation 19:9). The father’s duty to tell his son grows into the charge to teach all nations (Matthew 28:19–20).

The memorial meal has its fulfilment too. On the night he was betrayed, Jesus took bread and said, “this do in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19), and Paul hands the same words on to the church with the promise that as often as we eat the bread and drink the cup, “ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come” (1 Corinthians 11:23–26). As Israel looked back to Egypt at every feast, we look back to the cross and forward to his return.

This passage shows a God who acts first and then gives his people ways to hold on to what he has done. Before there is any ordinance, there is his strong hand. He knew that a freed people would forget, so he gave them bread to eat, a house to clear, a story to tell and a season that came round every year. Every Israelite could say “the LORD did unto me”, and the feast made that true for children born long after.

He has done the same for us in Christ. The bread and cup of the Lord’s table tell the story of a greater exodus, and every believer can say of the cross what the Israelite father said of Egypt. The God who kept his oath to Abraham and brought Israel out of the house of bondage is the God who has brought us out of sin, and he gives us his own words to remember it by.