[Avodah] The not-Korban Pesach

[Akiva Miller]

.
It has come to me attention recently that the Torah never refers to
the Pesach as a Korban. (Disclosure: I have not yet sat down with my
concordance to verify every single occurrence, but it certainly fits
the excerpts that I peruse in Parshas Hachodesh and in Seder Korban
Pesach.) The Torah does occasionally call it a Zevach, but it seems
that the vast majority of the time, the Torah simply calls it
"haPesach" - "the Passover", with no other noun associated with it.
And the verb is never "makriv", but just a simple "yaaseh".

(Thus, in my opinion, the common translation of "the Passover
offering" is misleading, as it misleads the reader to imagine a
category of things called "offering", and that "Passover" is a type of
offering. But that's not accurate, nor is there any literary or
grammatical need for it. We can simply translate it as "the Passover",
the same way as we translate "mishkan" as "the tabernacle" without
expanding it to "tabernacle building". But I digress, and I
apologize.)

I'm sure that some of you will be able to offer very learned drashos
about *why* the Pesach is not a korban. I do realize that there are
MANY halachos where the Pesach follows different rules. If that's why
the Torah chooses to avoid using the words "korban" or "yakriv" in
this context, I'm okay with that. That's NOT what I want to ask in
this thread. (But I don't mind a spin-off thread on that topic.)

My question is this: Whatever reason it was, why the Torah avoided
using that word in this context ... why did Chazal feel differently?
It is difficult (impossible?) to find anyplace where Chazal refer to
it as simply "hapesach"; they seem to have no compunction about
calling it the "korban pesach". Why is that? I accept the idea that
language changes over time, but technical terms - like "melacha" and
"tumah" - tend to stay pretty much the same. Did the word "korban"
change so much that the Pesach was not a korban in Moshe Rabenu's day,
but it was indeed a korban as Chazal used the term?

For extra credit, can anyone identify the era in which we did begin
referring to the Pesach in this manner? The neviim? Tannaim? Amoraim?
Knowing the historical context of the WhoWhereWhen, might shed light
on the Why.

Thanks!
Akiva Miller