Rabbi Nathan takes on a question that had puzzled scholars of the Torah for generations: what does the Hebrew phrase ben ha'arbayim actually mean? The term appears in the Passover laws and is traditionally translated as "between the evenings" — but Rabbi Nathan argues it signifies something unexpected. It means midday.
His proof comes from the prophet Jeremiah, who describes a military siege with vivid urgency: "Prepare for battle against her. Arise and let us go up at noon. Woe unto us, for the day is declining, for the shadows of evening go forth!" (Jeremiah 6:4). The verse moves from noon to evening in a single breath, treating the afternoon — the period beginning at midday — as the start of the evening transition.
Rabbi Nathan is honest about the strength of his evidence. He admits openly: "Even though there is no proof for this, it is intimated." This is not a watertight legal argument. It is an intimation, a hint, a textual whisper. And the Mekhilta preserves it anyway, because in rabbinic thought, even an intimation from Scripture carries weight.
The implications for Passover law are significant. If ben ha'arbayim begins at midday rather than late afternoon, the window for slaughtering the Passover lamb opens much earlier than commonly assumed. The entire choreography of the fourteenth of Nissan shifts. But beyond the legal details, Rabbi Nathan's method reveals something about how the rabbis understood language itself: words in the Torah do not always mean what they seem to mean on the surface. Sometimes the real meaning hides in a prophetic verse written centuries later.