Exodus 11-12 – the famous Passover text (including the exodus proper and the Feast of Unleavened Bread, or Matstsoth) – has some difficulties that have to do with chronology and timing. If you read through it, it is tough to get a firm chronology of when the things are instituted and when they are actually celebrated (see 12.28, 39, and 50 for example). I don’t have the time to sum up all the difficulties, but in short, the text is pretty tough. It’s so tough that Sarna writes, “Without doubt, the chapter is a composite of several strands of tradition” (Exodus, p. 53).
Childs is good here. After he discusses some of the difficulties, he writes this.
There are some broader implications for understanding the passover pericope which arise from our literary analysis of the final form of the present text. If an expositor takes seriously the final redaction, he can recognize an important biblical testimony to the relationship between word and event in the redactor’s manner of linking commands to narrative material. The Biblical writer brackets the exodus event with a preceding and succeeding interpretation. He does not see the exodus as an ‘act of God’ distinct from the ‘word of God’ which explains it. In theological terms, the relation between act and interpretation, or event and word, is one which cannot be separated. The biblical writer does not conceive of the event as primary or ‘objective’ from which an inferential, subjective deduction of its meaning is drawn. The event is never uninterpreted. Conversely, a theological interpretation which sees the subjective appropriation – whether described cultically or existentially – as the primary event from which an event may be reconstructed, is again introducing a theological scheme which has no warrant in the theology of the redactor.
Of course, this doesn’t wipe away all the difficulties, but it is a good reminder as we encounter this and other hard spots in the OT. We’re not usually going to have bare, objective, uninterpreted “brute facts” in texts; rather, they are acts which are interpreted in the text, or by the text. G. Vos said it this way: “Word and act always accompany each other…without God’s acts the words would be empty, without his words the acts would be blind” (“The Idea of Biblical Theology as a Science and as a Theological Discipline”).
The longer quote above was taken from page 204 of Brevard Childs, Exodus (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004).
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