time of Israel's servitude would be 400 years to conflict with the report of that the descent into Egypt would last 430 years, the two accounts were left standing side by side, because ancient readers might have considered both traditions to have come down to them and therefore requiring treatment with reverence. Plaut identified two addenda to the Passover story—one dealing with the eating of the paschal sacrifice in and a second relating the Exodus to the first-born in . Plaut observed that both addenda speak from a context of settled conditions, rather than wilderness wandering. Plaut concluded that the two sections read like postscripts or summations appended to the main story at a later time. Exodus chapter 13 Reading the consecration of the firstborn in , Umberto Cassuto suggested that the obligation to transfer to God all that first opened the womb meant originally, in the tradition of the ancient East, to offer as a sacrifice, but the Torah when it accepted the custom of the neighboring peoples, introduced innovations and imbued the obligation with new significance. Thus the Torah continued the custom of offering firstborn on the altar only for clean domestic animals; for unclean animals, the Torah substituted redemption by a clean animal or the breaking of its neck; and for human firstborn, the Torah substituted only redemption. And the Torah substituted the new reason of the deliverance from Egyptian bondage. Sarna wrote that in many ancient cultures, the miracle of new life was considered a divine gift and nature endowed the first fruits of the soil and animal and human fertility with intrinsic holiness. Sarna argued that the instruction to Moses in to consecrate the firstborn may have been a polemic against such pagan notions. The Torah dissociated the firstborns' status from the ancient ideas, teaching that firstborns belonged to God solely because of Divine decree at the time of the Exodus. Noting that and report that the Levites supplanted the firstborn in priestly functions, Sarna inferred that in , God instructed Moses to install the firstborn to fulfill priestly duties. Nathan MacDonald reported some dispute over the exact meaning of the description of the Land of Israel as a "land flowing with milk and honey," as in and 17, 13:5, and 33:3, , and 14:8, and , 11:9, 26:9 and 15, 27:3, and 31:20. MacDonald wrote that the term for milk (, chalav) could easily