Searching for the Meaning of the Passover Sacrifice

The need for medieval exegetes to suggest a plausible alternative to the Christian exegesis of this ritual.

Prof. Rabbi Martin Lockshin

Agnus Dei. Francisco de Zurbarán (1598–1664)

Taamei Ha-Mitzvot

Over the years, Jewish Bible commentators and thinkers have been ambivalent about taamei ha-mitzvot, literally “the reasons for the commandments,” namely attempting to find rationales behind commandments in the Torah.  Many argued that since God’s wisdom transcends ours, the attempt to identify with certainty the reasons for a mitzvah (commandment) is doomed to failure.^[1] 

In fact, some considered this attempt potentially dangerous, since people could try to outsmart the legislator by being loyal to the idea behind the law but relaxing their observance of the law itself.^[2] Even Moses Maimonides, who does explain the reasons behind many mitzvot, specifically says that looking for the reasons behind the small details, and especially laws about sacrifices, is wasted effort and unproductive.^[3]

Passover Sacrifice
When it came to the Passover sacrifice in Parashat Bo (Exodus 12), however, many traditional commentators and thinkers did not hold back.  They actively speculated about the reasons for individual details of the law, many of which seemed obscure:

• The animal must be a male yearling,^[4] either a sheep or goat (12:5).
• The animal should be purchased four days in advance. (12:3 and 12:6)
• None of it is actually “sacrificed,” or burnt for God. In a sense, the “sacrifice” in Exodus 12 is a family feast, but with strict rules. 
• The assembled must roast it ראשו על כרעיו ועל קרבו “head, legs and entrails” (12:9).
• The meat should be eaten together with matzah and merorim, the latter generally rendered “bitter herbs” (12:8).
• The flesh cannot be boiled (Exod 12:9).^[5]
• The flesh must be consumed that night (12:10).
• It must be eaten in one house and no one is allowed to break a bone when eating it (12:46).

Modern Attempts to Understand the Ritual

Modern biblical scholars also struggle with the meaning of the ritual and the significance of these details, typically using anthropological tools to understand it, and suggesting that most of these rituals did not originate with a historical first Passover.^[6] 

Pesach and Matzot: Flock and Agricultural Celebrations
John Durham writes that just as Passover “has connections with a flock-animal sacrifice predating it, so also eating of unleavened bread cakes was first practiced in a setting having nothing to do with the exodus . . . [and] is rooted, in all likelihood, in an agricultural celebration connected with grain harvesting.”^[7] 

Nahum Sarna also believes that the slaughter of the lamb was originally a nomadic rite, repurposed by the Israelites:  “The pagan shepherds offered the animal in order to ensure the fecundity of the flocks, just as the rites of the spring harvest festival were intended to secure the fertility of the soil.  In Israel, each rite was severed from its magical and mythical roots.”^[8]

Pesach as an Apotropaic Ritual
Kristine Garroway, in her TABS essay “Origins of the Biblical Pesach,” suggests that Pesach began as an apotropaic ritual to protect babies by offering a sacrifice in their place. Along similar lines, William Propp offers an unusual explanation for the commandment to roast the animal whole: “If the paschal sacrifice was originally vicarious, perhaps it was roasted whole in order to resemble a human being as closely as possible.”^[9]

Eating Bitter Herbs as Magic or Penance
Rather than seeing the bitter herbs as an allusion to the bitter lives of the slaves described in Exodus (both words use the same root), or as an appropriate condiment for the roasted meat,^[10] the American scholar William Propp, who wrote the Anchor Bible commentary on Exodus, gathers a number of modern explanations of the merorim:  it was a plant that grew in the spring; it had “a magical function” of an apotropaic nature; or it was “a primitive ascetic repast, consumed in mortification and penance.”^[11]

Roasting as Traditional Method
Arnold Ehrlich theorizes that roasting was the standard way of cooking meat in ancient times since people in the ancient world had not yet mastered the skills involved in other forms of cooking. Clearly, by the time of the biblical prohibition to boil they had, but by then roasting has become the traditional method for the Pesach and the Bible codified that in a prohibition against using other forms of cooking.^[12] 

All of these modern critical explanations are neither provable nor falsifiable, since we know so little about pre-Israelite cultic practices.

 Traditional Approaches

The classical Jewish peshat Bible commentators addressed these questions in a different way.  They sought meaning within the Bible, not in postulated pre-biblical ceremonies.

Rashbam – Indications of Speed
Rashbam (Rabbi Samuel ben Meir; 12^th century Northern France), for example, relates many of the details to the theme of the haste involved in the Israelites’ departure from Egypt.  The Torah writes this explicitly (Exod 12:11):

Rashbam adds (commentary to Exod 12:8) that many other details can be explained on the basis of this same principle: roasting is the fastest way of cooking; when you are in a hurry you do not cut up the animal before roasting it but you roast it whole; and when you eat it you do not take the time to break open the bones and suck out the marrow.^[13] 

Not Eating Marrow as a Sign of Wealth: Sefer Ha-Hinukh and Arnold Ehrlich
Sefer ha-hinukh (anonymous, 13^th century Spain) gives another rationale for not breaking a bone: on this holiday of freedom, Israelites are to behave like wealthy free people who do not need to break open the bones to suck the marrow.^[15]  Ehrlich writes in his commentary to the verse that he used to understand the law against breaking a bone in a different way, but then he came to the conclusion that the Torah was telling Israelites not to act like poor people who suck the marrow of bones at the Passover celebration.^[16]

Taunting the Egyptians – Hazzekuni 
Rabbi Hezekiah ben Manoah (Hazzekuni; 13^th century France) offers the creative suggestion that roasting the animal was the most effective way of taunting the Egyptians (Exod 12:8).  According to the common Jewish understanding of some biblical verses, the Egyptians worshipped sheep.^[17]  When all the Israelites in Egypt roasted sheep at the same time, then,

Hazzekuni suggests further that eating the sacrifice with an unpleasant-tasting herb, merorim, was a further way of degrading the god of the Egyptians.^[18]  The Israelites, he says, purchased the animal four days in advance for the same reason—so that the Egyptians would see their god helpless and degraded for four days.^[19] 

An unnamed Tosafist suggests that the commandment to roast the sheep whole was to the same end—that an onlooker would have no doubt that what the Israelites were roasting and eating was a sheep.^[20]

The Impetus to Understand the Rituals of the Paschal Sacrifice: Defense Against Christian Exegesis

Why were medieval Jewish commentators—including many who, like Rashbam, were committed to peshat—so interested in figuring out the rationale for the details of the laws of the paschal sacrifice?  This question is especially pertinent since they do not, for example, show the same level of interest in explaining the details of the sacrifices in Leviticus, or, as noted above, many other biblical laws. Certainly Passover plays a central role in the Jewish religious experience, and this may explain, in part, why these particular laws were explicated in such detail.  But another historical factor may also be at work.

Christian Exegesis: Jesus as the Paschal Lamb
We might understand their motives better when we study the passage about Exodus 12 in the late 13^th-century Ashkenazic anti-Christian polemical work Sefer Nitztzahon Yashan.^[21] This book, a primer for Jews in their debates with Christians, goes through passages from Tanakh in order, offering Jewish interpretations that rebut Christian claims.  The author shows good acquaintance with Christian texts and often vituperates against Christians and Christianity in extremely strong language.  It is not surprising that the book is anonymous.

Concerning Exodus 12, Sefer Nitztzahon Yashan writes:

Ever since the New Testament, the paschal lamb has been interpreted as prefiguring Jesus.[23]  In subsequent centuries, Church Fathers and later clergy taught that Jesus was the lamb of God, the new Passover sacrifice.^[24] The Christian who is quoted or paraphrased in Sefer Nitztzahon Yashan makes the curious argument: the difficulty of offering any rational reason for the details of the paschal sacrifice in Exodus 12 “proves” that the text requires an allegorical explanation,^[25] and it must be an allegory about Jesus.  This seems to have led Jews to work harder to prove that, on the literal level, the rules were meaningful, not arbitrary.

Suffering of the Jewish People – Sefer Nitztzahon Yashan

The most surprising Jewish interpretation of Exodus 12 is the one provided by the author of Sefer Nitztzahon Yashan himself.  He argues (perhaps tongue in cheek) that the text is an allegory, but goes through the details in a long explanation to prove that the allegory is not about the suffering of Jesus, but about the suffering of the Jewish people.  For example, he explicates the requirement of merorim as follows:

Such is the nature of allegorical explanations.  Christians claimed that the allegory was about Jesus, but there was nothing to stop another allegorist from giving a totally different explanation, in this case, that it was about the Jewish people as a whole.^[27]

We must be cautious when attributing anti-Christian polemical motives to any individual Jewish commentator who does not specifically identify his motives as such.  But the longstanding nature of the Christian “paschal lamb” claim about Jesus and the explicit Christian anti-Jewish polemical comments, coupled with Jewish thinkers in Christian countries’ extensive explanations for the details about that paschal lamb, make such motives likely in this case.

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Rabbi Dr. Marty Lockshin is University Professor Emeritus at York University and recently made aliyah. Marty’s primary area of scholarly expertise and writing is the history of Jewish biblical interpretation, particularly the interplay between tradition and innovation.  Most of his research has been centered on those medieval biblical commentators who valued tradition intellectually, who lived traditional lives and who still innovated unabashedly in their understanding of the Bible.  The largest part of his scholarship has been about Samuel ben Meir (12th century Northern France), a traditionalist Bible commentator with an uncanny knack for offering new understandings of biblical texts—his conclusions are often strikingly similar to the “discoveries” of biblical critics seven or eight hundred years later. Professor Lockshin received rabbinical ordination while he studied in Yeshivat Mercaz Harav Kook in Israel.

[1] See the opinion that Maimonides mentions in Guide of the Perplexed 3:31.

[2] See the argument about Solomon presented in b. Sanhedrin 21b.

[3] Guide of the Perplexed 3:26.  See especially his remark: “Accordingly, in my opinion, all those who occupy themselves with something of these particulars are stricken with a prolonged madness in the course of which they do not put an end to an incongruity, but rather increase the number of incongruities” (S. Pines trans. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963], p. 509.

[4] Commentators argue whether the words בן שנה mean that the animal is before its first birthday or after.  For example, see ibn Ezra’s longer commentary to Exodus 12:5 and Arnold Ehrlich, Miqra ki-feshuto to the same verse.  Ehrlich offers the interesting suggestion that younger animals are preferable since they would not yet be sexually active.  See also William Propp, Exodus 1-18: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, the Anchor Bible, volume 2 (New York: Doubleday, 1999), p. 389.

[5] The exegetes struggled with resolving this verse with the one in Deuteronomy 16:7 that implies it should be boiled. Editor’s note: See discussion in Robert Harris’ TABS essay, “The Cow that Laid an Egg (!): Korban Chagigah from the Torah to the Seder Plate.”

[6] For example, Brevard Childs concludes that “it seems increasingly evident that both the Passover and the maṣṣôt traditions stemmed from pre-Israelite cultic practices and were later adapted by Israel for her own needs.” Brevard Childs, The Book of Exodus: A Critical, Theological Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974), p. 187.

[7] John Durham, Exodus (Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1987), p. 159. Arnold Ehrlich (Exod 12:8) surprisingly asserts that unleavened bread is more desirable than leavened, and for this reason it was chosen for the holiday of freedom.

[8] Nahum Sarna, Exploring Exodus: The Heritage of Ancient Israel (New York: Schocken, 1986), p. 89.

[9] Propp, p. 396.  Later in the same text, Propp admits that “the Bible never describes the Paschal sacrifice as vicarious” (p. 438).

[10] See e.g. Nahum Sarna’s explanation of maror in Exodus 12 in The JPS Commentary on Exodus: “Probably referred originally to the kind of pungent condiment with which pastoral nomads habitually season their meals of roasted flesh.”

[11] Propp, p. 394.  He mentions one further theory, which he himself labels “implausible,” that “the herbs were a mild toxin administered as an ordeal.”

[12] Ehrlich, ibid.

[13] See also Rashbam’s commentary to Exodus 12:9 and 12:46.  Perhaps when Rashbam wrote: כל ענייני אכילה הללו—all these details about the eating,” he meant also the instruction that the bread that accompanies the meat should be unleavened.  Following the logic of 12:39, when in a hurry, people prepare and eat bread that did not have time to leaven.

[14] Other commentators either follow Rashbam’s lead or reach the same conclusions independently. See the notes in my Peirush ha-Rashbam al ha-Torah (Jerusalem: Chorev, 2009), volume 1, page 206.

[15] Sefer ha-hinukh, mitzvah 16. 

[16] Propp (p. 418) disagrees: “Ehrlich’s argument that sucking marrow is unworthy of freemen smacks of subjectivity.”  Neither Ehrlich nor Propp attributes the explanation to Sefer ha-hinukh.

[17] See, for example, Gen 46:34 and Exod 8:22, and Rashi’s comments to both verses. Editor’s note: For a discussion of the Torah’s claim about Egyptian worship of sheep, see Jan Assmann and Zev Farber’s TABS essay, “Sacrificing a Lamb in Egypt.”

[18] Ibid.—כל זה דרך בזיון שיאכלוהו עם דבר רע ומר.

[19] Commentary to 12:6: כדי שיראו המצרים את יראתם קשורה בבושת ובביזוי בבתי היהודים וישמעוה צועקת ואין מושיע לה.

[20] Baalei ha-Tosafot al ha-Torah to verse 9.

[21] A critical edition of the text of Sefer Nitztzahon Yashan and an English translation are found in David Berger, The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages (Philadelphia: JPS, 1979). 

[22] The Hebrew of the passage quoted is found in Berger, on p. 13 of the Hebrew section, and the English on p. 52 of the English section.

[23] See, for example, John 19:36 and I Corinthians 5:7.

[24] See the many sources cited by Berger, pp. 243-244.

[25] The logic is somewhat akin to what Rashi often writes, e.g. in his commentary to Gen 1:1: אין המקרא הזה אומר אלא דרשני.  In other words, since the peshat is unsatisfying, another level of interpretation is required.

[26] Berger, page 54 of the English section and page 14 of the Hebrew section.

[27] The same debate occurs with the suffering servant in Isaiah 52-53. Editor’s note: For another example of the Jewish response to Christian use of “Jesus as paschal lamb” imagery, see Malka Simkovich’s TABS essay, “The Fusion of Passover with Chag HaMatzot: And Jesus’ Association with the Paschal Lamb.”