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The passage in Numbers 9:1-14 presents new legislation on the Passover sacrifice. For one who contracted impurity immediately prior to the Passover or was too far away to participate in it, the amendment prescribes an alternate date, one month later:
When any of you or your posterity who are defiled by a corpse or are on a long journey would offer a passover sacrifice to the Lord, they shall offer it in the second month, on the fourteenth day of the month, at twilight (vv. 10-11).
In 1899, Arnold Ehrlich pinpointed this legal innovation as "a novella without parallel in the entire Pentateuch"--and justly so.1 The idea that for personal reasons an individual may defer a calendrically defined rite, miss a monumental date in the history of the nation and make it up some typological thirty days later, flies in the face of the significance of time to the potency of ritual. 2 Indeed, the law of the Second Passover stands alone, not only in the Hebrew Bible, but also, apparently, in the ancient Near East and beyond.3 Hittite law, for that matter, explicitly forbids just this scenario:
You who (are) the temple officials: If you do not perform the festivals at the time of the festivals; (if) you do the spring festival in fall, (or) the fall festival in spring, (or) if the right time for doing the festival (has) arrived, and he who is to do it comes to you ... and he seizes your knees, (saying) "The harvests (are) before me," or a marriage or a journey or some other matter. "Let me off. Let that matter finish for me, and when that matter is finished for me, I will do the festival thus": Do not do according to the wishes of (that) man. He must not persuade you. Do not conduct business concerning the will of the gods.4
The temple functionary who, baited by a bribe, succumbs to such a request will suffer the consequences:
(If) a man persuades you, and you take payment for yourselves, the gods will demand it of you at a later time. They will stand in evil against your spirit, wives, children, (and) servants.5
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