With the fourteenth day of the month, the day appointed by the Law of Moses for the killing of the Paschal lamb (Exodus 12:6), the Passover ( חַפָסַה with the article, the well-known festival of that name) should commence.
Though the selection of the lamb upon the tenth day of the first month is not specified, it may be assumed that this would be implied in the appointment of a Passover which should begin on the day already legalized by the Mosaic Torah.
According to Wellhausen and Smend, the first mention of the Passover occurs in Deuteronomy 16:2, Deuteronomy 16:5, Deuteronomy 16:6, and the next in 2 Kings 23:22; but this can only be maintained by declaring Exodus 34:25, which occurs in the so-called "Book of the Covenant"—a pre-Deuteronomic work—"a gloss," and by relegating Exodus 12:1-51.
to the "priest-code" for no other reason than that it alludes to the Passover (Exodus 12:11, Exodus 12:21, Exodus 12:27, Exodus 12:43)—a principle of easy application, and capable of being used to prove anything.
Smend likewise regards it as strange that the Passover should be made to commence on the fourteenth of the month, and not, as the autumn feast, on the fifteenth (Exodus 12:25); and suggests that the original reading, which he supposes was the fifteenth, may have been corrected subsequently in accordance with the priest, code.
But if the priest-cede was posterior to and modeled after Ezekiel. Why should it have ordained the fourteenth instead of that which its master recommended, viz. the fifteenth? A sufficient explanation of the differing dates in Ezekiel is supplied if Ezekiel, in fixing them, may be held to have followed the so-called priest-cede.
A feast of seven days; literally, a feast of hebdomad of days ( חַג שְׁבֻעוֹת יָמִים). By almost all interpreters this is understood to mean "a feast of a full week, the exact duration of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, which began with the eating of the Paschal lamb (Exodus 12:8, Exodus 12:15-20; Le Exodus 23:6; Numbers 9:11; Deuteronomy 16:3, Deuteronomy 16:4).
At the same time, it is frankly admitted that, to extract this sense from the words, שְׁבֻעוֹת must be changed into שְׁבְעַת. As the words stand, they can only signify a feast of weeks of days. חַג שְׁבֻעוֹת, in Exodus 34:22 and Deuteronomy 16:10, is applied to the Feast of Pentecost, which was called "a Feast of Hebdomads," from the seven weeks which intervened between the Passover and it.
Hence Kliefoth, adhering to the legitimate sense of the expression, understands the prophet to say that the whole period of seven weeks between the first Passover and Pentecost should be celebrated in the new dispensation as a Feast of Unleavened Bread.
In support of this Kliefoth cites a similar use of the word "days" in Genesis 29:14; Genesis 41:1; Deuteronomy 21:13; 2 Kings 15:13; Jeremiah 28:3, Jeremiah 28:11; Daniel 10:2, Daniel 10:3; and certainly no objection can be taken to a Passover of seven weeks, if Ezekiel may be supposed to have been merely expressing analogically spiritual conceptions, and not furnishing actual legislation to be afterwards put in operation.
Against this translation, however, Keil urges that the expression, "seven days of the feast" (verse 23), appears to mark the duration of the festival; but this is not so convincing as its author imagines, since the prophet may be held as describing, in verses 23, 24, the procedure of each seven days without intending to unsay what he had already stated, that the feast should continue seven weeks of days.
A second objection pressed by Keil, that יָמִים "is not usually connected with the preceding noun in the construct state, but is attached as an adverbial accusative," as in the above-cited passages, is sufficiently disposed of by Kliefoth's statement that the punctuation might easily be altered so as to read שָׁבֻעוֹת.
Upon the whole, while not free from difficulty, the view of Kliefoth seems best supported by argument.