Ezekiel 45:21 → Exodus 23:15

Ezekiel 45:21 legislates the observance Exodus 23:15 commands, in the same terms: a חַג (chag, "feast") of seven days during which מַצּוֹת (matstsot, "unleavened bread") is eaten (אָכַל, akal). Ezekiel then does two things the Covenant Code does not. First, he fuses the week with the פֶּסַח (pesach, "Passover") itself, dating the whole feast from the fourteenth rather than treating the Passover sacrifice and the unleavened week as adjacent observances. Second, and more striking, he gives no reason for it. Exodus 23:15 grounds the command in history: "because that was the month you came out (יָצָא, yatsa') of Egypt (מִצְרַיִם, Mitsrayim)." Ezekiel 45:18-25 never mentions Egypt, never uses יָצָא of the exodus, and never says why the feast is kept. In its place stands atonement. The sanctuary is purified on the first and the seventh of that same month (45:18-20), the priest putting sin-offering blood on the temple's doorposts (מְזוּזָה, mezuzah) with the very verbs Exodus 12:7 used at Israel's own doors — לָקַח (laqach, "take"), דָּם (dam, "blood"), נָתַן (nathan, "put"). Ezekiel has moved the Passover blood from the house to the house of God. For readers in exile that was the necessary shift. A feast resting only on a past deliverance is cold comfort to people whose deliverance had visibly failed; Ezekiel refounds it on a cleansing applied now. And note who pays. Exodus 23:15 ends, "No one may appear before Me empty-handed" (רֵיקָם, reqam), while in Ezekiel the prince supplies the offerings for everyone (45:17, 22). The worshiper still comes — but comes to a feast already funded. That is the shape of the gospel before the gospel arrives: "Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed" (1 Corinthians 5:7), and the invitation reads, "Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost" (Isaiah 55:1). Empty hands stop being a problem to solve and become the only way in.