Leviticus 23:5-6 draws a line Ezekiel erases. Leviticus dates the פֶּסַח (pesach, "Passover") to twilight on the fourteenth of the first month and then begins the חַג הַמַּצּוֹת (chag hammatstsot, "Feast of Unleavened Bread") on the fifteenth, running שִׁבְעַת יָמִים (shiv'at yamim, "seven days") of eating (אָכַל, akal) unleavened bread. Ezekiel 45:21 puts the whole seven-day feast on the fourteenth and calls the entire thing the Passover. The vocabulary is Leviticus's — חַג, מַצּוֹת, אָכַל, the seven days — but the architecture is simplified into one observance. Ezekiel then supplies what Leviticus 23:4-8 conspicuously lacks. Leviticus's Passover week has "an offering made by fire" and two sacred assemblies (מִקְרָא־קֹדֶשׁ, miqra-qodesh, vv. 7-8), and prescribes no חַטָּאת (chatta't, "sin offering") whatever. Ezekiel prescribes one on the first day for the prince and all the people (45:22) and another every day of the week (45:23). Conversely, Ezekiel drops Leviticus's assemblies entirely — his calendar names no gathering, only offerings. The restored temple's Passover is thus less a convocation than a purgation: what Leviticus arranged around the people coming together, Ezekiel arranges around blood being applied. Read from the exile this is not a diminishment but a diagnosis. The people who had kept Leviticus's feast were the people who had defiled the sanctuary, and a feast that does not deal with that is theatre. Ezekiel's answer is to attach a sin offering to the memorial of redemption itself. The New Testament's answer is that the two were never really separable, and that they meet in one person on one night — the Lamb slain and the sin borne, at a Passover table (Luke 22:19). What Ezekiel had to add, Christ simply is.
