Keluaran 12:3-4

12:3 Tell the whole community of Israel, ‘In the tenth day of this month they each ¹  must take a lamb ²  for themselves according to their families ³  – a lamb for each household. ⁴  12:4 If any household is too small ⁵  for a lamb, ⁶  the man ⁷  and his next-door neighbor ⁸  are to take ⁹  a lamb according to the number of people – you will make your count for the lamb according to how much each one can eat. ¹⁰ 

[12:3]  ¹ tn Heb “and they will take for them a man a lamb.” This is clearly a distributive, or individualizing, use of “man.”

[12:3]  ² tn The שֶּׂה (seh) is a single head from the flock, or smaller cattle, which would include both sheep and goats.

[12:3]  ³ tn Heb “according to the house of their fathers.” The expression “house of the father” is a common expression for a family.

[12:3]  sn The Passover was to be a domestic institution. Each lamb was to be shared by family members.

[12:3]  ⁴ tn Heb “house” (also at the beginning of the following verse).

[12:4]  ⁵ sn Later Judaism ruled that “too small” meant fewer than ten (S. R. Driver, Exodus, 88).

[12:4]  ⁶ tn The clause uses the comparative min (מִן) construction: יִמְעַט הַבַּיִת מִהְיֹת מִשֶּׂה (yim’at habbayit mihyot miseh, “the house is small from being from a lamb,” or “too small for a lamb”). It clearly means that if there were not enough people in the household to have a lamb by themselves, they should join with another family. For the use of the comparative, see GKC 430 §133.c.

[12:4]  ⁷ tn Heb “he and his neighbor”; the referent (the man) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

[12:4]  ⁸ tn Heb “who is near to his house.”

[12:4]  ⁹ tn The construction uses a perfect tense with a vav (ו) consecutive after a conditional clause: “if the household is too small…then he and his neighbor will take.”

[12:4]  ¹⁰ tn Heb “[every] man according to his eating.”

[12:4]  sn The reference is normally taken to mean whatever each person could eat. B. Jacob (Exodus, 299) suggests, however, that the reference may not be to each individual person’s appetite, but to each family. Each man who is the head of a household was to determine how much his family could eat, and this in turn would determine how many families shared the lamb.