Exodus 12:1-28 – The passage starts as an
instructional on how the event shall be celebrated throughout Jewish history.
The actual event begins around verse 21.
Here is the instructional: The month of Passover shall be
reckoned the first month of the year for Jews.
On the tenth day of this month, every family must get a lamb (or join
with a neighbor and get one)—sheep or goat—keep it till the fourteenth and then
slaughter it in the evening. Some of its
blood shall be applied to the doorposts and lintel of every house partaking of
that lamb, and that night they shall roast it whole and eat it with unleavened
bread and bitter herbs (12:6-8).
They must eat
it dressed to escape. This Passover
shall be celebrated “with pilgrimage” as a perpetual institution. A period of
seven days is added (from fourteenth day to twenty-first) on which no
unleavened bread shall be eaten and with sacred assemblies on the first and
seventh days of the observance (12:15-16). They must observe this rite forever.
The rite is an occasion for children to be instructed in the history of their
people.
And then the author returns to the
actual event: The
people do as Moses instructs. They pick out the lambs or young goats and
slaughter them; they drain the blood into a basin and dip hyssop branches into
the blood to brush onto the doorframes of their houses. They stay in their
homes all night and when the Lord comes to “strike down the Egyptians,” He will
see the blood and “pass over” their homes.
The Epistle of Barnabas
10 – On Dietary Laws: On Moses’ dietary laws, presented in
Leviticus and Deuteronomy, he believes Moses was speaking “spiritually” not
literally. “The meaning of his allusion to swine is this: what he is really
saying is, ‘you are not to consort with the class of people who are like swine,
inasmuch as they forget all about the Lord while they are living in affluence,
but remember Him when they are in want—just as swine, so long as it is eating,
ignores its master, but starts to squeal the moment it feels hungry, and then
falls silent again when it is given good.’” (170)
References to
eagles and hawks as forbidden foods pertains to their habit of living off the
foods killed by others, not by their own “toil and sweat” (170).
All the other
“unclean” animals are similarly allegorized as representations of bad human
practices. “In these dietary laws, them, Moses was taking three moral maxims
and expounding them spiritually; though the Jews, with their carnal instincts,
took him to be referring literally to foodstuffs . . . SO now you have the
whole truth about these alimentary precepts (171). This
is a form of biblical literalism that even modern literalists do not subscribe
to. Allegorical Absolutist!! And the
pride in his writing I find hard to take. Here is the end of this chapter:
“So you see
what a master of lawgiving Moses was. His own people did not see or understand
these things – how could they? – but we
understand his directions rightly and interpret them as the Lord intended.
Indeed, it was to aid our comprehension of them that He ‘circumcised’ our ears
and our hearts” (172).
11 – On Baptism and the Cross: Did the Lord “give a foreshadowing of
the waters of baptism and of the Cross”? (172)
Barnabas
points to words in Isaiah and Jeremiah that reference water or wood: God as the
“fountain of life,” “spring of never-failing water,” “a tree planted where the
streams divide” as all prefiguring baptism.
Ezekiel’s
words - “a river issuing from the right
hand, with fair young trees rising out of it; and whoever eats of them shall
have life for evermore. Here He is saying that after we have stepped down
into the water burdened with sin and defilement, we come up out of it in full
fruitage, with reverence in our hearts and the hope of Jesus in our souls; and whoever eats of them shall have life for
evermore means that he who hears these sayings, and believes, will live for
ever” (173).
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