The First Passover

The event

The tenth and final plague was the most severe: the death of every firstborn male in Egypt, from Pharaoh's own household down to the livestock in the field. But before it fell, God gave Israel a way of escape. Each household was to select a lamb without blemish, slaughter it at twilight, and paint its blood on the doorframes of their homes. "When I see the blood," God told Moses, "I will pass over you" (Exodus 12:13) — and from that promise the festival takes its name.

The instructions were remarkably specific: the meat was to be roasted, not boiled, eaten with unleavened bread and bitter herbs, and consumed in traveling clothes, staff in hand, ready to leave at a moment's notice. Nothing was to be left until morning. God commanded that this night be commemorated by Israel as a perpetual ordinance, a home-based ritual repeated every generation so children would ask what it meant and be told the story of their deliverance (Exodus 12:26-27).

For Christian readers, the Passover carries forward into the New Testament in a direct and deliberate way. Paul writes plainly that "Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed" (1 Corinthians 5:7), and the Last Supper itself was a Passover meal, reinterpreted by Jesus around his own body and blood. The lamb whose blood spared Israel's firstborn in Egypt stands, in the logic of Scripture's own storyline, as a forward-pointing shadow of the greater deliverance accomplished at the cross.

Dating

The Passover date is fixed relative to the Exodus itself — the night of the tenth plague, immediately before Israel's departure — so it shares the same early-date/late-date uncertainty discussed under the Exodus entry. What is firm within Scripture's own record is the calendar position: the fourteenth day of the first month, later named Abib and then Nisan, a date so significant that God restructured Israel's entire calendar around it (Exodus 12:2).

Scripture references

• Exodus 12:1-30
• 1 Corinthians 5:7