Exodus 5:1-3
New American Bible (Revised Edition)
Chapter 5
Pharaoh’s Hardness of Heart. 1 Afterwards, Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Let my people go, that they may hold a feast[a] for me in the wilderness.” 2 Pharaoh answered, “Who is the Lord, that I should obey him and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord,[b] and I will not let Israel go.” 3 They replied, “The God of the Hebrews has come to meet us. Let us go a three days’ journey in the wilderness, that we may offer sacrifice to the Lord, our God,(A) so that he does not strike us with the plague or the sword.”
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- 5:1 Hold a feast: the Hebrew verb used here, hagag (“to celebrate a feast or a festival”; see 12:14; 23:14), refers to a community celebration marked above all by a procession to the sanctuary. It is used especially of three major feasts: Unleavened Bread, Pentecost (in 23:16, “the Feast of Harvest,” but customarily “the Feast of Weeks” [Shavuot]), and Succoth/Sukkoth (in 34:16, “the Feast of Ingathering,” but more frequently “of Booths, or Tabernacles,” as in Dt 16:13, 16; 31:10; Lv 23:34; Zec 14:16; passim) and—along with the related noun hag—the Passover in 12:14. See 23:14–18; 34:18–25.
- 5:2 I do not know the Lord: whether or not he had heard of the Lord, the God of Israel, Pharaoh here refuses to acknowledge the Lord’s authority. See note on 1:8.
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