What Does Exodus 13:5 Mean?

"And when the LORD brings you into the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, which he swore to your fathers to give you, a land flowing with milk and honey, you shall keep this service in this month." The Matzot observance is commanded not only for the desert period but specifically for when Israel enters the land.

The list of nations, Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Hivites, Jebusites, is the standard five-nation list of the promised land's current inhabitants, whose displacement will be required for Israel's settlement. The feast is being instituted before the land is entered, and it is commanded specifically for observance in the land as a perpetual beacon of how the land was made accessible.

The "land flowing with milk and honey" is the promised land's most characteristic description, first appearing in YHWH's burning-bush announcement (Exodus 3:8). The milk-and-honey description is an agricultural abundance image: milk from livestock herds in good pastures, honey from wild bees or dates in productive land. The promised land is abundant with the two sweet and nourishing products that represent pastoral and agricultural prosperity. Israel is going from the "house of slavery" (Egypt) to the "land flowing with milk and honey": the contrast is the narrative arc of liberation leading to inheritance.

"Which he swore to your fathers": the land promise is traced to the patriarchal oaths. The Exodus generation is receiving a land promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob by YHWH's own oath. The Matzot feast observed in the land will thus be a double memory: the liberation from Egypt (the immediate event) and the fulfillment of the Abrahamic land-promise (the longer arc). Every Passover observed in Canaan is both a slave-liberation memorial and an Abrahamic-promise-fulfillment celebration.