Exodus 12:4-6

"And if the household be too little for a lamb, then shall he and his neighbor next to his house take one according to the number of the souls; according to every man's eating ye shall make your count for the lamb. Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male a year old: ye shall take it from the sheep, or from the goats; and ye shall keep it until the fourteenth day of the same month; and the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it at even."

"According to every man's eating, ye shall make your count ..." This means merely that each householder was to take into account the amount given members of his household would eat. The very young, the aged, or other conditions were to be considered.

"Your lamb shall be without blemish ..." This, in addition to being a proper qualification for any sacred use, was also typical of the perfection and sinlessness of the Son of God, the Christ.

"A male a year old ..." Here too the Christ is typified. It was specifically foretold that the Seed of Woman should crush the serpent's head, but it was equally true that the Messiah would be a man, "a He-Man," (Revelation 12:13), his masculinity being specifically stressed by the sacred writers. A male (lamb) a year old would be in the prime of life, at the zenith of its strength, just as Christ was crucified at about age 33, the very pinnacle of earthly strength and maturity. There were also other qualities of a lamb which provided a suitable prefiguration of Christ. One, revealed later in Isaiah 53:7 (See Acts 8:32f), was the wonder of a lamb's patient and noiseless submission to death. It appears to have been the genius of the Jewish nation that instinctively preferred the lamb to the kid goat for these sacrifices, despite the acceptability of either.

"The whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it ..." Only the heads of households actually did the killing, but, in the aggregate, they represented all Israel. In this too, one sees the responsibility of all Israel, indeed of all people, in the crucifixion of Christ. It was the sins of ALL OF US which crucified him. As the song says, "Were you there when they crucified my Lord?"

"Congregation ..." Here and in Exodus 12:3, a moment earlier, one finds the very first use of the term "congregation" for the chosen people, a term later used for the New Israel of God's church.

One may only be astonished at the assertion that, "The post-exilic celebration of the Passover is again in the writer's mind, as he pictures the heads of households all gathered in a single place for the slaying."[10] There are two impossibilities in such a comment.

1. There's not a word in the Bible about all those heads of households coming together at any one place, an event not even hinted at in this place, and withal impossible anyway.
   
2. Furthermore, there is nothing at all post-exilic about such a dreamed up "picture." Priests were absolutely in charge in post-exilic times and long prior to those times. This is only one sample of the worthless and illogical "arguments" employed by critical enemies of the Bible.
   

"Kill it at even ..." "Literally, `between the two evenings.'"[11] There are two interpretations of this: (1) between 3:00 p.m. and sundown, and (2) between sundown and dark. We believe that the correct interpretation is (1), basing it upon the fact that Christ suffered death at the ninth hour (3:00 p.m.), as noted in Matthew 27:46. That every householder, and not the priests, would be the ones killing the lamb was God's original intention, and thus the whole business of a priesthood adopted later was not fully in keeping with the plan of God - these facts are fully set forth in Exodus. And, when the people insisted that "someone else" do the priestly service that had been originally designed for all Israel, God accommodated to it as he later did in the cases of both the monarchy and the building of the temple. It was that change in God's plan, due to human failure, that resulted in the acceptance of the second interpretation.

When the lambs were sacrificed in the temple, by a continual succession of offerers, it became impossible to complete the sacrifices in the short time originally allowed. Of necessity the work of killing the victims was commenced pretty early in the afternoon, and continued until after sunset. The interpretation was then altered to bring it in line with the altered practice.[12]