told Moses that Pharaoh would refuse, because God sought to inform humanity that when God withholds repentance from a sinner, the sinner will not be able to repent. Maimonides made clear that God did not decree that Pharaoh harm the Jewish people; rather, Pharaoh sinned willfully on his own, and he thus deserved to have the privilege of repentance withheld from him. According to Hezekiah ben Manoah (Hizkuni), Pharaoh's courtiers in "questioned Pharaoh's judgment by asking him if he wanted to wait until the whole of Egypt was ruined? They implied that if Egypt were to be ruined, in the end Pharaoh would have no option but to give in to the Israelites' demands. Why not give in while Egypt was still a functioning nation?" Reading , "Moses said: 'We will go with our young and with our old,'" the Lekach Tov taught that Moses told Pharaoh that just as all had been in Pharaoh's service, so would all be in God's service. Exodus chapter 12 Maimonides taught that the prerogative to sanctify the New Moon at its sighting and to set a leap year to reconcile the calendar applied to the Sanhedrin in the Land of Israel. Maimonides taught that this was derived from the command given Moses and Aaron in , "This month shall be for you the first of months," which Maimonides reported the Oral Tradition interpreted to mean that this testimony was entrusted to Moses and Aaron and those sages who arose after them who functioned in their position. When the Sanhedrin ended in the Land of Israel, Jews established the monthly calendar and instituted leap years solely according to the fixed calendar that is followed now. So the sighting of the moon is no longer of any consequence. According to Maimonides, Passover is kept seven days, because a week is the intermediate unit of time between a day and a month. Passover teaches people to remember the miracles that God performed in Egypt, encouraging people to thank God repeatedly and to lead a modest and humble life. Jews therefore eat unleavened bread and bitter herbs on Passover in memory of what happened to the Israelites. And they eat unleavened bread for a week because if the eating were only for one day, Jews might not notice it. The Zohar taught that on the night of the Exodus, there were three slayings in Egypt. First, the