The passage in Numbers 9:1-14 presents new legislation on the Passover sacrifice. For one who contracted impurity immediately prior to the Passover or was too far away to participate in it, the amendment prescribes an alternate date, one month later:
When any of you or your posterity who are defiled by a corpse or are on a long journey would offer a passover sacrifice to the Lord, they shall offer it in the second month, on the fourteenth day of the month, at twilight (vv. 10-11).
In 1899, Arnold Ehrlich pinpointed this legal innovation as “a novella without parallel in the entire Pentateuch”—and justly so.Footnote 1 The idea that for personal reasons an individual may defer a calendrically defined rite, miss a monumental date in the history of the nation and make it up some typological thirty days later, flies in the face of the significance of time to the potency of ritual.Footnote 2 Indeed, the law of the Second Passover stands alone, not only in the Hebrew Bible, but also, apparently, in the ancient Near East and beyond.Footnote 3 Hittite law, for that matter, explicitly forbids just this scenario:
You who (are) the temple officials: If you do not perform the festivals at the time of the festivals; (if) you do the spring festival in fall, (or) the fall festival in spring, (or) if the right time for doing the festival (has) arrived, and he who is to do it comes to you … and he seizes your knees, (saying) “The harvests (are) before me,” or a marriage or a journey or some other matter. “Let me off. Let that matter finish for me, and when that matter is finished for me, I will do the festival thus”: Do not do according to the wishes of (that) man. He must not persuade you. Do not conduct business concerning the will of the gods.Footnote 4
The temple functionary who, baited by a bribe, succumbs to such a request will suffer the consequences:
(If) a man persuades you, and you take payment for yourselves, the gods will demand it of you at a later time. They will stand in evil against your spirit, wives, children, (and) servants.Footnote 5
With regard to the Second Passover, an added level of complexity or even irony comes from the fact that the primary text instituting the Passover, Exod 12:1-24, forges an organic link between the Passover and the new calendar that will constitute the nation of Israel ever after: “This month is hereby for you the first of the months; it is the first, for you, of all the months of the year … on the tenth of this month, they should take each one a lamb.” The irony would appear to thicken in light of the framing narrative, which dates the law of the Second Passover to the very first turn of the new national calendar, one year after the exodus from Egypt (Num 9:1).Footnote 6
According to the larger narrative that provides the setting for the law, when the time came to begin preparing for the first Passover since the exodus, several people stepped forward with the problem that they had contracted impurity, which would exclude them from the proceedings (Num 9:1-8). God responded with the new law. Tight parallels with Lev 24:10-23; Num 15:32-36; 27:1-11 (also 36:1-12)—in terms of structure, terminology, plot, characterization, and conception of jurisgenesis—illuminate the passage as cast in a highly stylized mold.Footnote 7 Scholars have unanimously identified the passage in its entirety, along with its parallels, as part of the Priestly literature.Footnote 8
Taken together, the mythic setting in the wilderness, the stylized, abstract character of the novella, and the Priestly source of the Second Passover pericope all indicate its fundamentally unhistorical nature. Setting aside, then, the current narrative frame, what were the historical circumstances that led to the development of this rare law of an untimely, deferred Passover, and what was its purpose?Footnote 9 Over the years, scholarship has put forward only a few theories. The first two sections of this paper will offer a critical review of the two most influential theories, and the final three sections will suggest an alternative.
Hezekiah's Delayed Passover in 2 Chronicles 30
Building on the fact that, according to 2 Chronicles 30, King Hezekiah must consult with the city elite to hold a belated Passover rather than draw on Mosaic authority, Ehrlich inferred that the law of the Second Passover in Num 9:1-14 originated in the wake of Hezekiah's deferred Passover.Footnote 10 Chronicles, by implication, preserves an ancient historical memory. Nearly sixty years later (without referring to Ehrlich), Shemaryahu Talmon proposed a more ambitious version of this suggestion. To his mind, Jeroboam I's festival in the eighth month, related in 1 Kgs 12:32-33, together with Hezekiah's Passover in the second month, reflect a northern, IsraelianFootnote 11 agricultural cycle and corresponding calendar that differ from those in Judah in the south, lagging behind them by a month. The Second Passover instituted in Num 9:1-14 represents Hezekiah's politically motivated attempt at incorporating the northern Israelian calendar into that of the Judahite south.Footnote 12
The Hebrew Bible does attest to original laws earning Mosaic authority only secondarily.Footnote 13 Calendars, for that matter, are indeed notorious for their political significance—as the story of Jeroboam I's change in 1 Kgs 12:26-33 makes deliberately unmistakable. However, even granting the dubious assumption by Ehrlich and Talmon alike that Chronicles can hold so much reconstructive value for an entire historical chapter in the First Temple period, the approach with respect to this particular event has several serious flaws that thoroughly undermine its viability.
1) The assertion of a neat dichotomy between the agricultural cycles in the north and the south directly contradicts the vast agricultural data compiled anthropologically by Gustaf Dalman and mined from rabbinic literature by the botanist Yehuda Feliks; it confuses geography with topography, kingdoms with highlands and lowlands, atlas with almanac. Rather than distinguishing north from south, agricultural seasons in the land of Israel tend to differentiate the Jordan valley from the hills and the coastal plains.Footnote 14 Accordingly, the supposition of two competing fixed calendars emerges as overly speculative and essentially unusable.Footnote 15
2) In addition to the problems with the above synthesis, building it upon the text of 2 Chronicles 30 as if it represents a reliable historical source encounters several significant obstacles.Footnote 16 First of all, one can discern no base-text with which to bridge the roughly four centuries between the composition of Chronicles and the events it describes. Hezekiah's Passover has no parallel material anywhere.Footnote 17 Likewise, from the very first phrases of the chapter,
(“sent to”) and (“wrote letters to”), to the episode's finale in an inconsistent concatenation of clauses culminating in the distinctive syntax of Hezekiah's prayer, the language represents not a classical biblical Hebrew base overlaid by the Late Biblical Hebrew of Chronicles, but rather a stratum fundamentally and consistently late in character, which makes the idea of any pre-existing base-text or orally transmitted memories tendentious in the extreme.Footnote 18Secondly, the backbone of the plot of Hezekiah's Passover, namely, the relationship he forges with the northern populace, appears highly suspect against the archaeological and epigraphical data. Finds indicate that as part of the expulsion of the Israelian populace, Sargon II repopulated the north with foreign elements in successive waves and maintained it actively and intensively.Footnote 19 Hezekiah's calling upon the northern populace, even only those Israelians that remained, to celebrate a national festival in the competing capital of Jerusalem would mount a direct, open challenge to Assyrian hegemony. In light of the repeated Assyrian incursions and major successes in the region, the image of Hezekiah, at an early stage of his reign, reaching out to poke a Judean thumb in the Assyrian eye seems difficult to envision.Footnote 20
Indeed, one can fully account for the existence of the story of Hezekiah's Passover on hermeneutical grounds alone.Footnote 21
3) Moving from the historical unreliability of the account in 2 Chronicles 30 to underlying phenomenological suppositions, the view of Ehrlich and Talmon that the supplementary Second Passover in Numbers 9 reflects Hezekiah's delayed Passover in 2 Chronicles 30 assumes that the two texts refer to one and the same phenomenon. However, a careful comparison of Numbers 9 and 2 Chronicles 30 shows that this view involves misleading abstractions that overlook defining details. The analysis below will demonstrate that the two texts describe two completely different and unrelated phenomena; that, accordingly, the texts employ alternate sets of terms; and that, undergirding the distinction, the texts are in total accord with their respective textual environments—namely, the Priestly literature and Chronicles—and never so much as refer to one another. Any apparent points of contact claimed to exist between the two texts evaporate as illusory.Footnote 22
(“sent to”) and 
(“wrote letters to”), to the episode's finale in an inconsistent concatenation of 
clauses culminating in the distinctive syntax of Hezekiah's prayer, the language represents not a classical biblical Hebrew base overlaid by the Late Biblical Hebrew of Chronicles, but rather a stratum fundamentally and consistently late in character, which makes the idea of any pre-existing base-text or orally transmitted memories tendentious in the extreme. The passage about the Second Passover in Numbers 9 establishes a precedent and enacts a permanent law. This new law targets only the individual. Taken at face value, the law implies that because missing the Passover leads to the severe result of 
(being “cut off”), it provides for those unable to attend because circumstances beyond their reasonable control had them impure or too far away during the Passover's primary date.Footnote 23 The dispensation covers only the Passover sacrifice itself; the Festival of Unleavened Bread remains firmly anchored to the first month. As a result, the celebrant comes with, at the most, just his own immediate family. These facts are so clear as to have generated a midrashic-style digression within the text itself on the practical implications a Passover held a month late would have on the Passover laws (vv. 11b-12):Footnote 24 Disconnected from the Festival of Unleavened Bread, shall the pilgrim eat the Passover without unleavened bread (and bitter herbs)? In the absence of enough people to consume all the meat, can the leftovers be eaten the next day? Perhaps only some of the animal need be prepared, not all of it? The passage answers: all laws remain in force regardless of the artificial circumstances.Footnote 25
The circumstances of Hezekiah's Passover in 2 Chronicles 30 could not differ more. Hezekiah defers the Passover not on the basis of any law or tradition, but solely and explicitly through human deliberation and consultation capped by his own royal decree. He does so as a limited, one-time decision in response to very specific circumstances (note the palpable relief with which the author stresses that the circumstances did not recur in the Passover of the returnees, in Ezra 6:19-20). These circumstances, moreover, have nothing to do with the ritual or physical ability of any individual to attend the Passover, but rather reflect the larger socio-political interests of the king, the lethargy of the priests and the apathy of the people. Hezekiah pushes off the Passover in its entirety, together with the Festival of Unleavened Bread, even for those who did come to Jerusalem to celebrate the first time around (2 Chr 30:21-22). The priests were not prevented by “impurity” but rather unmotivated to “sanctify themselves” (v. 3); Footnote 26 indeed, subsequently in the story, impurity prevents no one from participating in the Passover: Hezekiah's prayer suffices to cover them (vv. 17-20).Footnote 27 Likewise, the people who did not come to Jerusalem for Hezekiah's original Passover were not unable to do so but simply uninterested in doing so (vv. 3-12). The threat of 
never even enters the debate.Footnote 28
The one apparent link, the close linguistic similarity between the phrase “because they could not perform it at that time” in 2 Chr 30:3 and that in the narrative passage Num 9:6, “and they could not perform the Passover on that day,” in fact offers a parade example of an exception that proves the rule.Footnote 29 In Numbers 9, the clause refers to those who were prevented from coming to perform the Passover altogether, whereas in 2 Chronicles 30 it describes that minority that did arrive for the Passover, but was prevented from observing it because of the majority that did not show up or sanctify themselves. As said above, in Numbers 9, only those prevented from participating perform the Passover subsequently; in 2 Chronicles 30, Hezekiah defers the Passover equally for everyone, as the text declares explicitly: “The king and his officers and the congregation in Jerusalem had to keep the Passover in the second month, for at that time they were unable to keep it.”Footnote 30
Seen in this light, the phenomenon described in 2 Chronicles 30 recalls the well-known one-time manipulations in the Greek calendar similarly effected for various political, military and social reasons. In these cases, a month is called by the name of the previous month, or specific dates are moved backwards or frozen to repeat themselves for extended numbers of days.Footnote 31 For instance, in order to placate his soldiers and sidestep a tradition against fighting in a particular month, Alexander the Great changed the name of the month to that of the previous one. In the campaign against Tyre he changed the date within the month from the 30th to the 28th to make a prophecy of victory that month more credible—and inspiring—to his soldiers.Footnote 32 Thucydides recounts that in order to avoid a ban on fighting in a sacred month, the Argives counted the 27th of the preceding month for the duration of their campaign.Footnote 33 Similarly, when the Athenians needed to delay the festival of Dionysos, they did so by repeating the date prior to that of the festival for four days in a row.Footnote 34 In an extreme instance, Demetrius wrought havoc on the months in the Athenian calendar in order to have himself initiated into all the mysteries at once, rather than over a period of more than a year and a half.Footnote 35 These examples culled from the fifth, fourth, and third centuries b.c.e. match the period of the composition of Chronicles.Footnote 36 The rabbis referred precisely to this practice when they censured Hezekiah for intercalating the month of Nissan within Nissan itself, turning Nissan into a repeated Adar, in order to defer the Passover.Footnote 37
To put it more succinctly, the law of the Second Passover in Num 9:1-14 has no impact on the calendar itself and describes rather a personal “make-up” date for the individual pilgrim. In stark contrast, the story of Hezekiah's Passover in 2 Chronicles 30 tells of an intervention in the calendar that affects everyone equally and from the very outset was intended to do so. The Passover, together with the Festival of Unleavened Bread, takes place on its correct, original date, on the fourteenth of the first month, but that date has been deferred for nearly thirty days by the addition of a month. From this point of view, one should not be misled by the use of the term 
that modifies the “month” in which they perform the Passover (vv. 2, 13, 15). In Numbers 9, the term means “second,” as it does everywhere else in calendar references within the Priestly literature. In light of the above, though, in 2 Chronicles 30, it must mean “other, next.”Footnote 38 The two texts, then, describe two fundamentally different phenomena unlinked by any relationship, historical, analogical or other.Footnote 39
One final point remains to be made. Ehrlich and Talmon do not take into account the two provisions explicitly established by the law, namely, that one may miss or defer the Passover if he contracted impurity beforehand or found himself too far away. Methodologically speaking, any theory about the Second Passover should first attempt to anchor itself in at least one of these two provisions.
Yehud, the Merchant Community
In 1903, Heinrich Holzinger articulated what has remained the most widely held opinion on the matter today:
The law very obviously presumes the circumstances of the post-exilic period, when the Jews became a merchant community, who frequently found themselves on business trips.Footnote 40
This explanation clearly puts decisive emphasis on the provision of distance. Moreover, it is critical to appreciate that Holzinger does not infer a relative rise in the number of people traveling within the local markets of Yehud to supplement their resources by bartering or otherwise exchanging their excess produce for other necessities. Rather, he posits a fundamental change in the very nature of the society in Yehud, from that of subsistence farmers into a community of longdistance traders.Footnote 41
Such a radical transformation in the basic structure of a society should leave its imprint on the literature or archaeological record of its time. Yet the scholars espousing the theory of just such a transformation have yet to cite any evidence to support it, biblical or archaeological. To the contrary, the Priestly literature to which the passage of the Second Passover in Num 9:1-14 belongs consistently depicts a provincial, patriarchal, agrarian Israel—in the history it writes for retelling, in the laws it legislates for practice, as well as in its underlying theology and ideology.Footnote 42 Indeed, David Margoliouth's comprehensive and nuanced survey in 1939 reveals that the Hebrew Bible as a whole, a large portion of which comes from the period of the return in the sixth and fifth centuries b.c.e., rarely refers to trade, and when it does, it directs itself to the uppermost crust of society, either explicitly or by referring to high-end luxury goods—hardly the reflection of a society broadly and fundamentally engaged in long-range, large-scale trade.Footnote 43 Margoliouth's findings lead him to conclude further, “it would appear that till the taking of Jerusalem by Titus, and perhaps even later, agriculture remained the normal occupation of the Israelites.”Footnote 44
From the standpoint of archaeology, material finds from the period of the return do not indicate the sharp increase in the kinds, amounts, and origins of goods befitting a community gone suddenly from farmer to merchant. Rather, initially, they continue First Temple patterns; subsequent growth and change remain moderate and gradual. Surveys, for that matter, have yet to turn up the sizable warehousing depots, distribution centers, and markets appropriate to large-scale, long-distance trade.Footnote 45 To the contrary, settlement patterns reflect decentralized, rural farming communities.Footnote 46 Moreover, Yehud itself may have been too small and too poor to produce enough to survive, let alone thrive, as a merchant community.Footnote 47
Historically speaking, the constant external pressure seemingly exerted by other local groups and the concomitant power vacuum that characterized the period at least until the latter part of the fifth century b.c.e. (see Nehemiah 1-4, 6) make it hard to imagine the Jewish community successfully establishing and maintaining the infrastructure necessary for constant large-scale travel, shipping, and distribution. The beleaguered returnees struggled even to rebuild the one temple in Jerusalem. Again, the archaeological record strongly suggests that Yehud did not even begin to recover from the wholesale destruction caused by the Babylonians and emerge recognizably as a state until the latter part of the Persian period, in the late fifth and fourth centuries b.c.e.;Footnote 48 Jerusalem itself remained extremely small, its population never expanding beyond the spur known as the city of David until the Hellenistic period.Footnote 49
A spate of studies from the 1990s strongly discounts the viability of the merchant-community model for Yehud. Jack Pastor's socio-economic study of the Second Temple period highlights subsistence farming as the backbone of the economy.Footnote 50 The various data brought by Yaron Dan for the period turn the tables on the merchant community conception to depict Yehud more as a hub or way-station for foreign merchant communities, particularly Phoenician merchants promoted by Persian interests and backing.Footnote 51 Ze'ev Safrai's study of Roman Palestine, reaching back to the Persian period, meets the theory head on and rejects it outright as entirely unfounded and contradicted by the literary evidence not only in the Talmud, but in non-Jewish sources as well.Footnote 52
Finally, the foregoing concrete considerations benefit from the strength of theoretical support. The very idea of a pre-industrial merchant society, in which large numbers of members regularly travel abroad to distant lands and live primarily by trade, simply does not fit with current models in sociological research. Large-scale, long-distance trade remains in the hands of the wealthiest few, while the average citizen struggles to eke out a subsistence living through agriculture, whether as owner or otherwise.Footnote 53 With regard to ancient Israel in particular, Magen Broshi made several important methodological remarks, pointing out that the incredibly high costs of long-distance transportation and distribution, coupled with the fact that the majority of goods transported and distributed throughout the ancient world comprised non-produce, luxury items, deny the likelihood of a Jewish merchant community engaged in large-scale commerce.Footnote 54 Likewise, Richard Horsley reveals such models as anachronistic, having more to do with Western socio-economic history than ancient Near Eastern.Footnote 55
Taken together, all these literary, archaeological, historical, and sociological analyses uniformly paint in bold strokes a completely different picture of the returnees than that posited by Holzinger and others. The economic structure of life for Israelians and Judahites in the Iron Age did not undergo fundamental change for Jews in the Persian period (and beyond): as a community, the majority of Jews lived first and foremost not by long-distance, large-scale trade, but rather by subsistence agriculture, supplementing their material needs through local markets.Footnote 56
The conception here bankrupted does have one very significant merit, the recognition that one should look only to the terms of the law itself in order to reconstruct its origins and not rely on the narrative currently attending it. The law of the Second Passover delineates only two scenarios as warranting a make-up sacrifice—impurity and distance. The story of the legislation of the Second Passover, though, tells only of a case of impurity. As noted at the outset, scholarship has not taken the story prima facie as historical, but the story, by its very presence, can create the impression that it has value for the historical reconstruction of the law. Specifically, it can suggest that at the heart of the law lies impurity, whereas distance constitutes a second-order clause, or even, some scholars go so far as to infer, a secondary one.Footnote 57
However, it is the larger narrative context of the wilderness that has determined the case related in the story. For the law to emerge from a case of distance simply would not suit the wilderness context, when according to the presuppositions of the larger narrative history, the Israelites are always within walking range of the tabernacle. Impurity, by contrast, can occur in any place at any time as the byproduct of any normal death and render someone unfit to approach the tabernacle. In response to precisely this incongruity between the law's provision of distance and the larger wilderness context, Ibn Ezra parsed the unusual phrase in v. 10 “of you or of your posterity” (
) as follows (ad loc.):
“of you”—with reference to the impure person; “or of your posterity”—with reference to either the impure person or the person too far away.
To take his insight one critical step further, this uncharacteristic qualifier itself appears to represent an interpolation designed specifically to bridge this very gap between the law's provision for distance and its complete irrelevance to the narrative context.Footnote 58 In order to set the origins of the Second Passover law within the wilderness context, the story had to describe a case of impurity. This means that to reconstruct the origins of the law of the Second Passover, one should resist the misimpression created by the story that the weight of the law falls on impurity and consider the provision of distance as of at least equal significance.Footnote 59
Centralization and Distance
What circumstances, then, might lie behind the concept of “distance”? In what historical context would a problem of proximity have led to the legislation of the Second Passover? The answer hinges on the meaning of “distance.” For those who would have the law referring to an Israelite away on a journey, “distance” refers to those temporarily far away from home or homeland. However, at the literary level, the text does not necessarily warrant this interpretation, which emerges exclusively by hermeneutical analogy with the impurity clause that precedes the distance clause. The concept of “distance” may in fact have its sights set on those whose home is permanently out of reasonable range of the temple.
As amply demonstrated in the literature of the Hebrew Bible as well as in the material culture recovered by archaeology, ancient Israel of the Iron Age was a clan- and land-based agricultural society whose various structures presupposed and depended upon access to local sacred sites. The move to a single temple could wreak havoc on such structures. The Deuteronomic Code, representing the Hebrew Bible's most uncompromising call for cultic centralization, attempts to manage just such a radical transformation by anticipating (rhetorically, at the very least, if not historically) the manifold shock-waves throughout society this could cause and providing a bulwark against them through legislation.Footnote 60 Palpably, the single most prevalent problem the code struggles to overcome consists of the new geographical distance opened up between individual Israelites and the single sacrificial site, namely, the inaccessibility of the temple. One can gauge the significance of distance to the program of centralization in the mind of the Deuteronomic legislators by the fact that ultimately they themselves come to employ distance as a literary trope for legal innovation.Footnote 61
Explicitly, one's distance from the single legitimate sanctuary justifies local, secular slaughter (Deut 12:20-28; compare Exod 20:22-26 and Lev 17:1—7);Footnote 62 exchanging tithe produce and firstborn animals for money in order then to buy fresh goods in the temple city (Deut 14:22-26); Footnote 63 and the establishment of cities of asylum (Deut 19:1-10; compare Exod 21:12-14).Footnote 64 Implicitly, it provides the rationale behind a host of changes in many different laws. The Hebrew slave no longer has his ear pierced in a local temple, as in Exod 21:6, but rather at the doorpost of his master's home (Deut 15:17).Footnote 65 Whereas Exod 22:28—29 required the farmer to offer every firstborn animal eight days after its birth, now the farmer may keep them all for a single annual visit to the temple; as a result, the law must stress 1) that in the costly interim, one may not give in to temptation and work them or shear them; and 2) that in light of the greater likelihood of a blemish developing, one may not bring a blemished animal, which one may as well eat at home like game (Deut 15:19-23).Footnote 66 Distance from the temple also gives the law apt reason to incorporate the wisdom warning against vows, the fulfillment of which is now ever more likely to be pushed off and eventually forgotten (Deut 23:22-24; Qoh 5:3—4). With the sequestering of priestly mantic and oracular means for administering justice in the one faraway temple, the Deuteronomic law must insist upon the establishment of a local secular judiciary, determine its relationship to the centralized court, and, at the same time, thrusting in the opposite direction, assiduously assert the authority of the temple court (Deut 16:18-20 and 17:8-13; compare Exod 22:6-8).Footnote 67 Likewise, in the absence of local shrines to support levitical priests and other landless or otherwise vulnerable people, the Deuteronomic law transfers that responsibility to the laity, demanding repeatedly of them that they remember these unfortunates and provide for them (Deut 12:11-12, 17-19; 14:26-29; 16:11, 14; 24:19-21; 26:12-15).Footnote 68
In the specific context of the festivals, H. L. Ginsberg argued that the farmer's distance from the single temple made it imperative in D that the Harvest Festival close the harvest season (16:9-12) rather than inaugurate it, as in Exod 23:16a. By the same reasoning the Ingathering Festival must take place not after the gathering in of the harvested crops, as in Exod 22:16b, but only after their having been processed for the coming winter (Deut 16:13-15). This distance-driven adaptation had the added result of disconnecting the firstfruits from any specific date altogether; the farmer, by implication, should bring them whenever he happens to have the opportunity, recite the prayer appropriate to the occasion, and return home (Deut 26:1-11).Footnote 69 Within the Priestly literature as well, Lev 23:9-22 appears to evince a change both in the omer and in the firstfruits from citizen gifts to priestly offerings, which effectively erases altogether the popular Pentecost, and it does this precisely for the reason that the average farmer cannot leave his fields in this critical agricultural period.Footnote 70
By contrast with this list of far-reaching enactments meant to ameliorate the (envisioned) new circumstance of a distant temple, the Deuteronomic treatment of the Passover (Deut 16:1-7) achieves almost nothing. Indeed, when seen against the broad variety of adjustments made elsewhere for the sake of centralization, this text stands out for failing, or refusing, to make almost any meaningful provision at all. Rather, it remains focused almost exclusively on the demand that one perform the Passover at the one chosen sanctuary (see vv. 2, 5, 6, 7). The way the text demarcates the conclusion of the Passover as the time when one returns home resounds with the new substantial character of the journeyFootnote 71—and makes the total absence of any provisions for it all the more significant: no accommodations here.Footnote 72
One can recover intellectual ruminations on and responses to the impact of cultic centralization upon society not only from the Deuteronomic laws, but from rabbinic lore as well. Through a confluence of forces, the Deuteronomic idea came to define Yehud of the Second Temple period, but rabbinic materials reflecting Second Temple reality indicate that the idea of a single temple did not materialize quite the way the Deuteronomic legislators had envisioned and attempted to ensure. Shmuel Safrai's comprehensive study of rabbinic sayings, stories and legal comments about the three major pilgrimage festivals reveals that, for most of the Second Temple period, masses of people simply did not visit the place of God's choosing three times a year. Indeed, so out of step was Second Temple pilgrimage practice with the Pentateuchal pilgrimage laws that the rabbis gave those laws an otherwise bewildering reinterpretation, according to which one never need appear at the temple—except in the event that he is already in Jerusalem at the time that a festival occurs.Footnote 73 The main debate as to what, geographically defined, constitutes being “in Jerusalem” at the time of the Passover comprises two opinions: either “Jerusalem” encompasses whatever sits within a twenty-eight kilometer radius, or “Jerusalem” is none other than the temple itself, and one must already be on the other, holier side of the threshold of the temple precincts to activate the requirement.Footnote 74 Safrai concludes:
Tannaitic law, according to most Tannaim, interprets the concept of being too far away in symbolic terms and in practice transforms the Passover into a voluntary matter.Footnote 75
As a matter of fact, 2 Chronicles 30, a Second Temple composition that reflects the ritual conceptions and practices of its time, depicts just this mentality as characteristic of Second Temple Yehud. As stressed above, the people at first did not attend Hezekiah's Passover in Jerusalem because they recognized no obligation to do so; in the words of the narrator at the end of v. 5 (and not as part of the preceding proclamation): “not often did they act in accord with what was written,” namely, to congregate in Jerusalem for the Passover as enjoined by Deut 16:1-8 (and illustrated by 2 Kgs 23:21-23).Footnote 76
In this context one may also understand the series of variants in the textual tradition (granting the otherwise standard assumption that later manuscripts preserve Second Temple scribal activity, which in this case actually makes more sense).Footnote 77 At Num 9:10, MT and the Samaritan Pentateuch (SP) read 
, according to which the adjective “distant” (
) modifies the immediately preceding noun “road” (
): “anyone who is … on a distant road.” lxx ms B renders the passage: ἄνθρωπ○ζ ἄνθρωπ○ζ ὃζ ἐἄν γἐνηται… ἐν ὁὃω μακρἄν, in which case the adverb “distant” (μακρἄν) modifies the verb is (ἐἄν γἐνηται), and, now in apposition to the prepositional phrase “on a road” (ἐν ὁὃῷ), serves in an explanatory capacity: “anyone who is … on a road, i.e., far away.” Nowhere does this change indicate that the person is only temporarily “on the road.” In line with the mentality charted by Safrai and seen in Chronicles, the new text could refer to—indeed serve—those living far away on a permanent basis .Footnote 78 The complete erasure of the adjective “distant” in mt and sp at v. 13 (contrast tellingly lxx) would further expand the bounds of those who can perform the Passover on the secondary date to include anyone living “on a road,” namely, not in the vicinity of the temple or the temple city. The dot over the letter 
in mt at v. 10 (
) could have meant to signal either possibility—erasure of the 
alone as in lxxFootnote 79 or of the entire word as in mt and sp at Num 9:13.Footnote 80
Safrai never actually ventures an explanation of how this state of affairs—both on the ground and in textual hermeneutics—ever came about. But the very terms of his discourse, together with the text-critical data, could not indicate more clearly that behind it all stands the reality of a single solitary temple physically far from most of the people—to wit, a reality created by cultic centralization.
When taken together—the Deuteronomic code's resistance to altering the Passover to make it easier for the farmer; the fact that in the Second Temple period, Jews rarely went on pilgrimage to celebrate the Passover at the temple; and the rabbinic reinterpretation of pilgrimage as a voluntary matter—all these converge to point towards an explanation for the rise of the law of the Second Passover. The centralized cult in Jerusalem made the distance to the single temple too far for many farmers to trek there with their families for Passover, especially in the difficult period towards the unpredictable end of the rainy season on one hand and the delicate beginning of the grain harvest on the other.Footnote 81 Sources attest that during these times, in order to bolster popular participation in the temple Passover, Judean authorities—not entirely unlike Chronicles' Hezekiah—would intercalate a month depending on precisely these same two factors: if the barley ripened late or the rains made the roads impassable.Footnote 82 The law of the Second Passover attempted to achieve the same result through a different means—by providing individuals with an alternate, secondary date, one month later.Footnote 83
In this case, then, the pivotal phrase 
in mt Num 9:10 did not originally mean “on (i.e., in the midst of) a distant journey.”Footnote 84 Rather, the phrase originally meant “on (i.e., along) a distant road” or perhaps “on a difficult road,”Footnote 85 in line with the rabbinic lore cited above about how imfrom the temple constitutes “too far” for one to be required to bring the Passover.Footnote 86 And the shifting textual traditions surveyed above represent not changes in the phrase's meaning, but rather a series of attempts to remove its ambiguity and refine its sense with greater specificity.
What comes to the fore so strikingly in this analysis is the realization that the emphasis in the law of the Second Passover falls not on sympathetically freeing the Israelite from bringing the Passover on time, but rather on insisting that he bring it sometime. Like the Passover law in Deut 16:1-8, the Second Passover law insists on the obligation to celebrate the Passover at the temple every year. It denies one's right to view the sacrifice as a voluntary matter, rejects the standing waiver the people applied to themselves, and refuses to compromise on the Passover's annual character. It does not represent the leniency projected by the narrative currently framing it (Num 9:6-8), but rather a stringency. Indeed, the Second Passover law is the only biblical text anywhere to state that one who fails to come perform the Passover will suffer 
.Footnote 87
At first glance, the strict approach in this Priestly law appears to diverge widely from that taken with regard to the Pentecost, when Priestly legislators waived the popular requirement altogether by transferring it to the temple priests. In fact, the two solutions represent alternate directions in the application of a single shared notion, one that characterizes the Priestly literature—the essential, concrete nature of the dates anchoring the festivals, with which one may not tamper. By contrast, the Deuteronomic code willingly and deliberately delayed and reconfigured two agricultural festivals. Notably, the D source also immovably fixed the date for Passover observance, having defined it historically rather than agriculturally.Footnote 88
Centralization and Purity
What, then, about the law's provision for the impure person? How does it fit into the historical reconstruction laid out above? Several possibilities recommend themselves, each of increasing integrality to the specific issue at hand. From the strictly literary point of view, one may take it, at the very least, as a predictable, unremarkable reflex of the law's Priestly provenance and marshall in support of this view the absence of the factor of impurity from the comparable Hittite law. From the point of view of legal logic, one could argue that the provision of impurity serves as the natural, perhaps even necessary, complement to the provision of distance, for together, the two provisions represent and encompass the two categories of obstacles that may prevent any person from participating in the Passover: the physical and the ritual. More forcefully, one can make a historical argument, parallel to that for the provision of distance. In the same context of a reality defined by cultic centralization, sanctity would have played no less a role than proximity in alienating the people from the temple cult. In the absence of a local temple and easily accessible means for purification, the need and concern for purity would plummet severely in terms of daily significance and the people's vigilance would wane.
Again, the Deuteronomic laws, written to take into account a centralized cult, provide telling examples. Though it does not appear to have been interpreted so by scholars, Exod 22:30 forbids (or recommends against) touching the impure carcass of a non-ritually slaughtered animal;Footnote 89 by contrast, the Deuteronomic law forbids consumption alone and explicitly allows one to handle the carcass and sell it to the non-Israelite (Deut 14:21).Footnote 90 What the law had first treated comprehensively on the grounds of sanctity, it subsequently broke down as a matter of mere taboo.Footnote 91 By the same token, whereas previously all slaughter of domesticated animals had a sacred aspect to it (as illustrated by 1 Sam 14:32-35) that required one to eat meat in purity (as articulated in 1 Sam 20:24-26), the Deuteronomic abolition of local sacred slaughter (Deut 11:31—12:28)Footnote 92 allowed one to eat domesticated animals in impurity, no different from game (12:15, 22).Footnote 93
In this desacralized atmosphere, the people could easily slip and arrive at the temple in a state of impurity. Indeed, in Chronicles—which tells of a recentralized cult and was composed during a period of centralized cult—the northern masses, displaying just this secularized state of mind, fall into the trap and eat the Passover in a state of impurity. With no technical, ritual recourse, Hezekiah can only pray to God and beseech him to accept the people's good intentions, which God in fact does, rather than stipulate a procedural remedy (2 Chr 30:18-20). Just as the rabbis' reinterpretation of the pilgrimage laws reflected de facto popular practice, in this instance too the rabbis formalized in principle the forbearance featured in Chronicles; and they did so specifically with regard to the Passover, though by extension to other public offerings as well: “impurity is waived in a public setting.”Footnote 94 However, average Judeans or Jews, who, with the pilgrimage season upon them, suddenly recall the untended impurities that have accumulated, may not have known or anticipated such leniency, expecting rather priestly rigor in the maintenance of temple strictures and so just as easily have forgone the journey to stay at home. The particular exchange in Hag 2:11-13 suggests that priests may very well have questioned pilgrims.Footnote 95 In such circumstances, the law of the Second Passover would insist that, like the distant farmer, the impure may not take impurity as a waiver and settle in his mind on coming only the following year; he must fulfill his Passover obligation one month after the original Passover date.
Conclusion
In sum, the law of the Second Passover represents a Jerusalem priesthood living in the unintended fallout from the centralization of the cult, unwilling to give up on the Passover as an annual temple rite.Footnote 96 Narrowing down the period in which the priests may have legislated this law poses a sticky problem that depends on one's view of several overlapping issues, each of which in its own right represents a series of complex historical and literary cruxes: the historical reliability or probability of the centralization reports in 2 Kings 18 and 21-23, the provenance of the Priestly literature, and the character of the Passover sacrifice and its historical development.Footnote 97 Without going into the various problems and theories, suffice it to point out one piece of data, that the language of the original Second Passover law arguably recoverable through literary criticism contains no signs of Late Biblical Hebrew.Footnote 98 In any case, it seems appropriate to close by highlighting the innovations introduced by the law of the Second Passover. The very idea of a make-up date for a festival and, on the flip-side of that coin, punishing one who unjustifiably misses the Passover with 
, together help set the Passover apart as sui generis.
), note its absence in the similar casuistic laws in the parallel pericopes in Lev 24:10-23, Num 27:1-11, and 36:8-9. The fact that, as opposed to Lev 24:10-23, Num 27:1-11, and 36:1-13 (also Num 15:32-36), the passage in Num 9:1-14 does not have a mediating section in which God responds first to the actual case, then reformulates and elaborates for posterity, may exacerbate the way the legal section jars with the narrative. On the history of the term, see Avi Hurvitz, A Linguistic Survey of the Relationship between the Priestly Source and the Book of Ezekiel: A New Approach to an Old Problem (Paris: J. Gabalda, 1982) 98-101.
) in 18:6, Menahem Haran hears the Deuteronomic law's recognition of the difficult disconnection suffered by a Levite who leaves hearth and home to join the temple priests (Temples and Temple-Service in Ancient Israel: An Inquiry into Biblical Cult Phenomena and the Historical Setting of the Priestly School [2d ed.; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1985; repr., 1995] 61-62, esp. 62 n. 6).
, and Prov 7:19, 
, or even the expression 
in Deut 29:21; Josh 9:6, 9; 1 Kgs 8:41; 2 Kgs 20:14; 2 Chr 6:36. For a briefer semantic study of 
, but without specific reference to Numbers 9, see Semantics of Ancient Hebrew (ed. T. Muraoka, ed.; Abr-Nahrain Supp. 6; Peeters: Louvain, 1998) 11-37.
(“Why should we be cut off from among the Israelites?”). So already Abraham Kahana, The Book of Numbers (1914; repr., Jerusalem: Makor, 1969) 28 [Hebrew]. Original 
becomes current 
in one of three possible scenarios: a) text-critical error due to graphical similarity (on 
interchanges, see Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992] 247—48); b) a copyist's stylistic change due to the interpolation of 
, making the verse's final clause qualify not the now distant verb 
but rather the closer verb 
; c) an editor's attempt to highlight the significance of all Israel performing the Passover together. In the first two scenarios, the interpolated clause, 
, could have entered the text at the wrong place, in the middle of the sentence rather than at its end as originally imagined. In the third scenario, it reflects the original intention of the interpolator. Relatedly, on the basis of several considerations, it appears that v. 13 originally concluded with 
.
means “you shall abandon it to the dogs” or “you shall leave it for the dogs.” For other instances where 
means “expose, abandon, leave untouched,” see Gen 21:15; 37:20 (as opposed to vv. 22, 24 there); Isa 2:20-21; 34:3; also 1 Kgs 13:24, 25, 28; Jer 14:16; 36:30; Dan 8:11, several of which were already discussed in Morton Cogan, “A Technical Term for Exposure,” JNES 27 (1968) 133-35. On the phenomenon of the semantic extension of verbs from the action itself to the result of that action, see Edward L. Greenstein, “Trans-Semitic Idiomatic Equivalency and the Derivation of Hebrew ml'kh,” UF 11 (1979) 329-36, esp. 335. Incidentally, according to Koehler and Baumgartner, Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon, 2:1527, the identification of the root 
as the Š pattern of 
goes back to C. J. Labuschagne in 1971. In fact, Naftali Tur-Sinai had already made the suggestion twenty years earlier, in 1952; see Eliezer Ben Yehuda, A Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew (ed. H. Ben Yehuda, M. Z. Segal and N. H. Tur-Sinai; 17 vols.; Tel Aviv: La'am Publishing House, 1948-1959) 14:7167 n. 2 [Hebrew].
, which recalls typical sacrificial terminology; 2) the domestic form detailed in Exod 12:1-11, 22 said in vv. 24—25 to endure for generations but destined in vv. 14—20 to transform into a seven-day “festival” connoting a temple pilgrimage; 3) and the seemingly domestic setting envisioned in the land in Exod 12:46—sets the Passover apart as outside whatever framework the Priestly texts have otherwise established for the sacrificial cult, if these texts do not themselves actually debate precisely this point. Secondly, scholars have routinely identified the passage in Num 9:1-14 itself as secondary within the Priestly text (for instance, Carl Steuernagel, Lehrbuch des Einleitung in das Alte Testament [Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1912] 161 §40, 5d), which allows it its own independent set of presupposed circumstances, as reconstructed here.
“in the open” (Lev 17:5).
