Exodus 12:4

12:4 If any household is too small ¹  for a lamb, ²  the man ³  and his next-door neighbor ⁴  are to take ⁵  a lamb according to the number of people – you will make your count for the lamb according to how much each one can eat. ⁶ 

Exodus 22:1

Laws about Property

22:1 ⁷ (21:37) ⁸  “If a man steals an ox or a sheep and kills it or sells it, he must pay back ⁹  five head of cattle for the ox, and four sheep for the one sheep. ¹⁰ 

[12:4]  ¹ sn Later Judaism ruled that “too small” meant fewer than ten (S. R. Driver, Exodus, 88).

[12:4]  ² 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]  ³ tn Heb “he and his neighbor”; the referent (the man) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

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

[12:4]  ⁵ 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]  ⁶ tn Heb “[every] man according to his eating.”

[22:1]  ⁷ sn The next section of laws concerns property rights. These laws protected property from thieves and oppressors, but also set limits to retribution. The message could be: God’s laws demand that the guilty make restitution for their crimes against property and that the innocent be exonerated.

[22:1]  ⁸ sn Beginning with 22:1, the verse numbers through 22:31 in the English Bible differ from the verse numbers in the Hebrew text (BHS), with 22:1 ET = 21:37 HT, 22:2 ET = 22:1 HT, etc., through 22:31 ET = 22:30 HT. Thus in the English Bible ch. 22 has 31 verses, while in the Hebrew Bible it has 30 verses, with the one extra verse attached to ch. 21 in the Hebrew Bible.

[22:1]  ⁹ tn The imperfect tense here has the nuance of obligatory imperfect – he must pay back.

[22:1]  ¹⁰ tn בָּקַר (baqar) and צֹאן (tso’n) are the categories to which the ox and the sheep belonged, so that the criminal had some latitude in paying back animals.