11 seq. But in neither of its sources does the
Jehovistic tradition know anything of this. "Let my people go,
that they may keep a feast unto me in the wilderness with
sacrifices and cattle and sheep: "this from the first is the
demand made upon Pharaoh, and it is in order to be suitably
adorned for this purpose, contemplated by them from the first,
that the departing Israelites borrow festal robes and ornaments
from the Egyptians. Because Pharaoh refuses to allow the Hebrews
to offer to their God the firstlings of cattle that are His due,
Jebovah seizes from him the first-born of men. Thus the exodus is
not the occasion of the festival, but the festival the occasion, if
only a pretended one, of the exodus. If this relationship is
inverted in Exodus xiii, it is because that passage is not one of
the sources of the Jehovistic tradition, but is part of the
redaction, and in fact (as is plain from other reasons with regard
to the entire section xiii. 1-16) of a Deuteronomic redaction.
From this it follows that the elaboration of the historical motive
of the passover is not earlier than Deuteronomy, although perhaps a
certain inclination to that way of explaining it appears before
then, just as in the case of the _maccoth_ (Exodus xii.
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