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Numbers 9 · a question people ask

Could anyone just keep the Passover in the second month instead?

In the text

No. The second date is for two kinds of people: whoever "is unclean by reason of a dead body, or is on a journey far away" (9:10). For everyone else the chapter is plain: "the man who is clean, and is not on a journey, and fails to keep the Passover, that soul shall be cut off from his people. Because he didn’t offer the offering of the LORD in its appointed season, that man shall bear his sin" (9:13). The men in 9:7 had asked why they could not "offer the offering of the LORD in its appointed season"; 9:13 uses the same words for the man who could and didn't.

The verses

“Those men said to him, “We are unclean because of the dead body of a man. Why are we kept back, that we may not offer the offering of the LORD in its appointed season among the children of Israel?””
Numbers 9:7 · World English Bible

From Favor's study of Numbers 9

Numbers 9: At the commandment of the LORD

When unclean men asked, "Why are we kept back?", Moses waited to hear from the LORD, and the answer was a second Passover a month later, for them and for anyone far away on a journey (9:7-11). And "the commandment of the LORD" that moved and stopped the camp, seven times over, is in Hebrew the mouth of the LORD (9:18-23).

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Scripture quotations are from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain. Every answer cites the verses it rests on. What we believe · All Bible questions