Exodus 34:22-26
Context34:22 “You must observe 1 the Feast of Weeks – the firstfruits of the harvest of wheat – and the Feast of Ingathering at the end 2 of the year. 34:23 At three times 3 in the year all your men 4 must appear before the Lord God, 5 the God of Israel. 34:24 For I will drive out 6 the nations before you and enlarge your borders; no one will covet 7 your land when you go up 8 to appear before the Lord your God three times 9 in the year.
34:25 “You must not offer the blood of my sacrifice with yeast; the sacrifice from the feast of Passover must not remain until the following morning. 10
34:26 “The first of the firstfruits of your soil you must bring to the house of the Lord your God.
You must not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk.” 11
1 tn The imperfect tense means “you will do”; it is followed by the preposition with a suffix to express the ethical dative to stress the subject.
2 tn The expression is “the turn of the year,” which is parallel to “the going out of the year,” and means the end of the agricultural season.
3 tn “Three times” is an adverbial accusative.
4 tn Heb “all your males.”
5 tn Here the divine name reads in Hebrew הָאָדֹן יְהוָה (ha’adon yÿhvah), which if rendered according to the traditional scheme of “
sn The title “Lord” is included here before the divine name (translated “
6 tn The verb is a Hiphil imperfect of יָרַשׁ (yarash), which means “to possess.” In the causative stem it can mean “dispossess” or “drive out.”
7 sn The verb “covet” means more than desire; it means that some action will be taken to try to acquire the land that is being coveted. It is one thing to envy someone for their land; it is another to be consumed by the desire that stops at nothing to get it (it, not something like it).
8 tn The construction uses the infinitive construct with a preposition and a suffixed subject to form the temporal clause.
9 tn The expression “three times” is an adverbial accusative of time.
10 sn See M. Haran, “The Passover Sacrifice,” Studies in the Religion of Ancient Israel (VTSup), 86-116.