The Origins of the Biblical Pesach

Dr. Kristine Garroway

The Angel of Death and the First Passover (1897 by Charles Foster)

Introduction: Non-Jewish Influence on Chanukah

On Chanukah we bring out dreidels, sufganiot, latkas, and, of course, a menorah to light Chanukah candles, but only that last item comes from rabbinic halacha. The first three customs developed over time in Europe. For example, the dreidel originated as a German gambling game. Even the four Hebrew letters, נ, ג, ה, ש – which ostensibly stand for the Hebrew phrase, נס גדול היה שם (a great miracle happened there), are really just shorthand for the Yiddish instructions: nisht (nothing), halb (half), gants (all), and shtel ayn (put in).

That was Europe; in America, Chanukah falls smack in the middle of the Christmas season when corporate America heads back into the black on account of all the gifts, decorations, and trimmings purchased for “decking the halls.” Some Jews have felt the need to keep up with the Joneses, so they too purchase presents, decorate their houses with lights, and make jokes about Santa’s back-up: Hanukah Harry. All of these things have become, for many, part of the modern American Chanukah experience.

Perhaps the best example of the phenomenon is the Chanukah bush topped with a Jewish star, a clear and striking example of how some Jews incorporate their Christian neighbors’ religious practice into their own Jewish celebration.

Pesach’s Problematic Past
Chanukah is not the first Jewish festival to incorporate non-Jewish elements. The holiday of Pesach, the foundational holiday of the Jewish people, also incorporates non-Israelite rituals.

The Passover described in Parashat Bo does not reflect how we celebrate Passover today. This parashah describes two different holidays, the ritual of Pesach and the festival of Matzah, which were later combined.^[1] More significantly for this essay, if we look carefully at the description of Pesach within the parasha we find that the pesach ritual itself is derived from an original, probably pagan ritual. Although the biblical authors try to cloak this connection, scholars can still see the traces of the older ritual and its meaning.

The Early Stages of the Pesach Ritual

It is commonly held that the section in Exodus 12:21-23 describes the older pagan rite.^[2]  

The following schematic illustrates this ritual:

1. Select a sheep (צאן) for the family.
   
2. Slaughter the pesach (הפסח).
3. Take hyssop, dip it in the (animal) blood and smear it on the lintel and two doorposts.
4. Do NOT go out until dawn.
5. YHWH will pass through to smite the Egyptians and will see the blood on the doorposts.
6. YHWH will pesach (פסח) on the door.
7. YHWH will not give the משחית the ability to enter your house to smite (you?).

These verses do not connect these activities with the 10^th plague of the killing of the firstborn. It is only in a later reinterpretation of the core pagan ritual that the target audience is identified as firstborn.^[3] In fact, if one assumes, like a number of scholars do, that the first half of verse 23 is an addition, then this command/ritual may not have any intrinsic connection to the Egypt story at all.

An Apotropaic Ritual

From a cultural anthropological perspective many of the elements in the pesach ritual are associated with pagan rites. When brought together, as they are here, they form an apotropaic ritual, one meant to ward off evil.

Night
Exodus 12:22 implies that this is a nighttime ritual, something which later edits of the text pick up on and emphasize (Exod 6:-10). Night was not a time people wanted to be outside. Bad things happened at night. For example, the Sodomites come to Lot’s house for unsavory purposes under the cover of night (Gen 19: 4-10). Consider too the apprehension about traveling after nightfall in (Judg 19:9) and spending the night sleeping outside (Judg 19:20). Night was understood as the liminal period when curtain between the divine and human realms was drawn back. It was when men received dreams (Gen 15:12-16); interacted with divine beings (Gen 28:10-16); and talked to the dead (1 Sam 28:8; Isa 8:19-20).

Liminality and Blood
Before the meat is roasted and eaten, the blood of the sacrifice is collected and painted on the doors, this time reflecting liminality of place rather than of time, since doorways define where one sphere ends and another begins. Blocking off the doorway with blood blocks the movement of demons through the liminal threshold.  As the life-force, blood is dangerous and should be treated cautiously (Lev 12; 15:19-30, 17:6-11).

Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Parallels
The association of blood and sacrifice at nighttime with demons and rituals to get rid of them can also be found other places, like in the Mesopotamian ritual of maqlû, which reverses witchcraft. Within the Bible, a number of examples come to mind. The first is the “bridegroom of blood” episode in Exodus 4:24-26. The text is so obscure it is difficult to figure out who Zipporah circumcises, but the outcome is clear –the blood of the circumcision wards off YHWH (!) who was seeking to kill Moses. Another example occurs with the “witch of Endor” (1 Sam 28) as she is affectionately known, who also performs a bloody sacrifice in order to protect herself from what she perceives as evil.^[4]

The ritual of sending a goat out into the wilderness to Azazel (a demon?), carrying the sins of the Israelites on its back appears to function as a way of protecting the community (Lev 17). Similarly, when the elders of a town near which a person was murdered declare that their hands are clean of the victims blood and break the neck of a heifer on the spot, this also seem like a way of warding off any unsavory consequences for the spilled blood that occurred under their auspices (Deut 21). 

The Nature of the Ritual

Based on these observations, scholars have offered two suggestions concerning the origin of these rituals:

Protection from a Malevolent Deity (משחית)
The first understands the protection ritual as warding off evil from a malevolent deity, the maschit.  Scholars speculate that the ritual originated as a spring-time rite observed by a semi-nomadic shepherds when they prepared to move the flock to new grazing grounds.  Fearing demons would attack the flock, the shepherds warded them off with blood through a protection ritual known as pesach.^[5]  The term פסח thus carries the meaning “protection,” such as found in Isaiah 31:5. The more familiar meaning of “to pass over” came about when the ritual was historicized and entered the narrative talking about Egypt.^[6]

The Cult of Ancestors
A second approach associates the sacrifice with the cult of ancestors.^[7] While families lived together in nuclear family units, the cult was practiced by the family (משפחה), the larger kin network.^[8] Regular gathering to sacrifice and make offerings to mutual dead ancestors was an important part of organizing and maintaining living relationships within the broader clan.^[9] Ziony Zevit points out that sacrifices made on the ground [not on altars] are often associated with chthonic deities, ones that live in the ground or close to the ground.^[10] 

Examples of the ancestor cult are peppered through the Hebrew Bible with the clearest being from 1 Samuel 20 where David asks leave to go attend the yearly sacrificial meal for his entire family (משפחה) kinship group.^[11]. As a ritual within the ancestor cult, sacrifice by the living members bound the dead ancestors to the living and the unborn. The ancestors then protected the living and the unborn, and the unborn would in turn perpetuate the cult in their own time.

Both of these ideas explain the pagan parts of the sacrifice, but neither idea, in my opinion, sufficiently addresses the threat of the משחית and its smiting (Exod 12:23). To this end, I think that some Mesopotamian lullabies can offer new insight.

Protection Ritual for Babies

Protection plaque against Lamashtu, Louvre Museum. by Pazuzu

Mesopotamian Lullabies were sung in order to ward off the demoness Lamashtu who steals away babies and men’s semen in order to gain the children she never had.^[12] It is noteworthy that Jewish lore has its own Lamashtu: Lilith. In the post-biblical text The Alphabet of Ben Sira, Lilith states that she was created to harm infants!^[13] While the Mesopotamians may have been facing the realities of crib death, the lullabies all have a sense of urgency: the baby must stop crying now for the baby’s cries were thought to alert Lamashtu that an infant was nearby.

In one particular lullaby, Lamashtu sends out her helper demon, the evil eye who flies around into doorways seeking to do harm.^[14] The lullaby describes the children as ceasing to cry through suffocation when the evil eye comes upon them. This description calls to mind the movie depictions of the exodus where the משחית sneaks into the Egyptian houses and snuffs out the breath of the firstborn.

Finally, the lullabies state that when the baby cries it not only summons the demoness, but bothers ili bītum (אל הבית; god of the house.) The noise can become so disturbing that the ili bītum might actually leave the house. Karel van der Toorn points out that in various Mesopotamian contexts, including the lullabies, ilu (=ili) should be translated not as “god” but as “ancestor” and, thus, this phrase means “the ancestor of the house.” It was generally believed that the ancestor of the house offered protection for his or her descendants (like a mezuzah according to some traditions). Therefore, if the ancestor of the house leaves, true disaster can follow, since the house would now be open to demonic forces without any protection.

The Pesach Ritual as a Lullaby

The pagan aspects of the pesach ritual address the two concerns found in the Mesopotamian lullabies: keeping the infants safe and the ancestors appeased. With regard to the latter, the pesach sacrifice (Exod 12: 21) maintains the cult of the ancestors by binding them to the living and the unborn as suggested by the second theory above.  Reaffirming connections with the ancestors might also assuage any annoyance they experienced due to the cries of children in the house.

Exodus 12:22-23 ostensibly keeps the משחית from entering the house and smiting. The text is not clear on who will be smitten.  JPS translates the latter have of verse 23 ולא יתן המשחית לבא אל בתיכם לנגף as “He [YWHW] will not let the Destroyer enter and smite your home.” I suggest that the individuals needing protection in the pre-Israelite shepherd ritual were infants and children.

The ritual of painting the blood on the door then could be the (pre-)Israelite way to deal with the baby-snatching night demon Lamashtu [later identified as Lilith], just as the Mesopotamians ritually used lullabies to ward her off.

In this reconstruction, the Israelites inherited these pagan rites from their semi-nomadic ancestors and later historicized and reinterpreted them into the story we are familiar with—Pesach commemorates the flight from Egypt which happened on the heels of the 10^th plague, the killing of the firstborn children (Exod 12:25-32).

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Dr. Kristine Garroway was appointed Visiting Assistant Professor of Bible at the HUC-JIR Jack H. Skirball Campus in 2011.   Before coming to Los Angeles, Dr. Garroway received her doctorate in Hebrew Bible and Cognate Studies at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati in 2009. She enjoys spending time studying and researching in Israel and has participated in excavations at Ashkelon, Tel Dor, and Tel Dan.  Dr. Garroway’s scholarly interests include the status of children in the ancient Near East, Deuteronomistic Histories, Former Prophets, feminist and gender studies, and archaeology. Her book Children in the Ancient Near Eastern Household (Eisenbrauns Nov. 2014) combines texts and archaeological realia to explore what a child is and how a child’s gender and social status affect her membership in the household. 

[1] See Michael Satlow’s TABS essay, “Passover and the Festival of Matzot.”

[2] Scholars have long recognized the disjunctive nature of the text in Exodus 12, and have assigned it to different sources. See the discussion by Brevard Childs and Naomi Steinberg (Brevard Childs, Exodus [Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974], 184-195; and Naomi Steinberg, “Exodus 12 in Light of Ancestral Cult Practices” in The Family in Life and in Death [ed. Patricia Dutcher-Walls; New York: T & T Clark, 2009], 89-90).

[3] I follow Steinberg, Childs and Noth who see Exodus 12:21-23 as the original pagan rite that was later reinterpreted by P in Exodus 12:1-20.

[4] Pamela Tamarkin Reis, “Eating the Blood: Saul and the Witch of Endor.” JSOT 73 (1997): 3-23.

[5] Leonhard Rost, “Weidewechsel und altisraleischer Festkalender,” ZDPV 66 (1943): 205-15; Martin Noth, Exodus (Old Testament Library; Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1962); Childs, Exodus.

[6] Pesach can also mean “to be lame” (2 Sam 4:4), which leads David Silber (public lectures) to the interesting suggestion that the meaning of Pesach in the biblical story is “hover over”, i.e., stay in one place like a lame person. Support for this translation, he argues, comes from the famous statement of Elijah (1 Kings 18:21): “How long will you stand upon two boughs?!” Thus, in our story, YHWH will hover over the houses of the Israelites and keep the משחית out of it.

[7]  Dianne Bergant, “An Anthropological Approach to Biblical Interpretation; The Passover Supper In Exodus 12:1-20 as a case study.” Semeia 67(1994) 43-62; Steinberg, “Exodus 12.”

[8] Elizabeth Bloch Smith, Judahite burial practices and beliefs about the dead (JSOT Supp; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992);  Karel van der Toorn, Family religion in Babylonia, Syria, and Israel : continuity and changes in the forms of religious life (Leiden; New York: Brill, 1996), 225.

[9] Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice Religion and Paternity (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994), 46. “Thus, cross-culturally, ancestral worship is a term used to refer to the rituals and beliefs concerning the dead kinsmen. Since ancestor worship underscores notion of continuity and preservation of social order in society, sacrificial offerings should be understood not as gifts to the ancestors, but rather as the fulfillment of the obligations of the living to the dead” (Steinberg, “Exodus 12,” 92).

[10] Ziony Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel (London: Continuum, 2001), 280-81. This is in stark opposition to sacrifices made to YHWH, which are made on altars in order to go up to the heavens, where YHWH abides (Exod. 19; 20:22; Deut. 33:26, Pss. 115.  

[11] Karel van der Toorn, Family religion, 212-18; Steinberg, “Exodus 12,” 93; Brian B. Schmidt, Israel’s Beneficent Dead: Ancestor Cult and Necromancy in Ancient Israelite Religion and Tradition (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994).  

[12]  Walter Farber, “Magic at the Cradle: Babylonian and Assyrian Lullabies,” Anthropos 85 (1990): 139-148; Walter Farber, Schlaf, Kindchen, Schlaf! (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1989), 34-39.

[13] She appears in the The Alphabet of Ben Sira in the fifth conversation between Nebuchadnezzar and Ben Sira. Seee also http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/people-cultures-in-the-bible/people-in-the-bible/lilith/ accessed 1/15/15.

[14] Karel van der Toorn,  “Magic at the Cradle: A Reassessment,” in Mesopotamian Magic: Textual Historical and Interpretative Perspectives (ed. Tzvi Abusch and Karel van Der Toorn; Groningen: Styx, 1999), 139-141;