Exodus 34:22-26

34:22 “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 

[34:22]  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.

[34:22]  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.

[34:23]  ³ tn “Three times” is an adverbial accusative.

[34:23]  ⁴ tn Heb “all your males.”

[34:23]  ⁵ tn Here the divine name reads in Hebrew הָאָדֹן יְהוָה (ha’adon yÿhvah), which if rendered according to the traditional scheme of “Lord” for “Yahweh” would result in “Lord Lord.” A number of English versions therefore render this phrase “Lord God,” and that convention has been followed here.

[34:24]  ⁵ 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.”

[34:24]  ⁶ 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).

[34:24]  ⁷ tn The construction uses the infinitive construct with a preposition and a suffixed subject to form the temporal clause.

[34:24]  ⁸ tn The expression “three times” is an adverbial accusative of time.

[34:25]  ⁷ sn See M. Haran, “The Passover Sacrifice,” Studies in the Religion of Ancient Israel (VTSup), 86-116.

[34:26]  ⁹ sn See the note on this same command in 23:19.