Pesach in Egypt ⇄ Pesach in Jerusalem

God commands the Israelites that on the night of the final plague they should be in their homes eating the paschal offering:

^{שמות יב:יא} וְכָכָה תֹּאכְלוּ אֹתוֹ מָתְנֵיכֶם חֲגֻרִים נַעֲלֵיכֶם בְּרַגְלֵיכֶם וּמַקֶּלְכֶם בְּיֶדְכֶם וַאֲכַלְתֶּם אֹתוֹ בְּחִפָּזוֹן פֶּסַח הוּא לַי־הוָה.

^{Exod 12:11} This is how you shall eat it: your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it hurriedly: it is a paschal offering to YHWH.

This paschal ritual includes both the eating of the offering and the spreading of its blood on the doorposts.  Its goal is protecting the Israelites in Egypt from being killed alongside their Egyptian neighbors:

^{שמות יב:יג} וְהָיָה הַדָּם לָכֶם לְאֹת עַל הַבָּתִּים אֲשֶׁר אַתֶּם שָׁם וְרָאִיתִי אֶת הַדָּם וּפָסַחְתִּי עֲלֵכֶם וְלֹא יִהְיֶה בָכֶם נֶגֶף לְמַשְׁחִית בְּהַכֹּתִי בְּאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם.

^{Exod 12:13} And the blood on the houses where you are staying shall be a sign for you: when I see the blood I will protect (or “pass over”)^[1] you, so that no plague will destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.

The next verse declares that in the future, the paschal offering will be a yearly ritual, as a reminder of the one-time event in Egypt:

^{שמות יב:יד} וְהָיָה הַיּוֹם הַזֶּה לָכֶם לְזִכָּרוֹן וְחַגֹּתֶם אֹתוֹ חַג לַי־הוָה לְדֹרֹתֵיכֶם חֻקַּת עוֹלָם תְּחָגֻּהוּ.

^{Exod 12:14} This day shall be to you one of remembrance: you shall celebrate it as a festival to YHWH throughout the ages; you shall celebrate it as an institution for all time.^[2]

But precisely how is this yearly ritual to be celebrated? In Exodus, Moses tells the elders that in the future, when they have settled in the land, they will follow the same procedure that they did in Egypt for the paschal offering:

^{שמות יב:כד} וּשְׁמַרְתֶּם אֶת הַדָּבָר הַזֶּה לְחָק לְךָ וּלְבָנֶיךָ עַד עוֹלָם. ^יב:כה וְהָיָה כִּי תָבֹאוּ אֶל הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר יִתֵּן יְ־הוָה לָכֶם כַּאֲשֶׁר דִּבֵּר וּשְׁמַרְתֶּם אֶת הָעֲבֹדָה הַזֹּאת.

^{Exod 12:24} You shall observe this as an institution for all time, for you and for your descendants. ^12:25 And when you enter the land that YHWH will give you, as He has promised, you shall observe this rite.

Deuteronomy, however, commands that the paschal offering take place at the centralized worship site, far from the people’s homes:

^{דברים טז:ה} לֹא תוּכַל לִזְבֹּחַ אֶת הַפָּסַח בְּאַחַד שְׁעָרֶיךָ אֲשֶׁר יְ־הוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ נֹתֵן לָךְ. ^טז:ו כִּי אִם אֶל הַמָּקוֹם אֲשֶׁר יִבְחַר יְ־הוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ לְשַׁכֵּן שְׁמוֹ שָׁם תִּזְבַּח אֶת הַפֶּסַח בָּעָרֶב כְּבוֹא הַשֶּׁמֶשׁ מוֹעֵד צֵאתְךָ מִמִּצְרָיִם. ^טז:ז וּבִשַּׁלְתָּ וְאָכַלְתָּ בַּמָּקוֹם אֲשֶׁר יִבְחַר יְ־הוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ בּוֹ וּפָנִיתָ בַבֹּקֶר וְהָלַכְתָּ לְאֹהָלֶיךָ.

^{Deut 16:5} You are not permitted to slaughter the paschal sacrifice in any of the settlements that YHWH your God is giving you; ^16:6 but at the place where YHWH your God will choose to establish His name, there alone shall you slaughter the paschal sacrifice, in the evening, at sundown, the time of day when you departed from Egypt. ^16:7 You shall cook and eat it at the place that YHWH your God will choose; and in the morning you may start back on your journey home.

In short, Exodus envisions a reproduction of the original, apotropaic ritual as a homebased, private offering, with blood on each family’s doorposts, while Deuteronomy depicts a public offering during a pilgrimage festival in Jerusalem, far from people’s homes, with no blood on doorposts.

Scholars have suggested various explanations for this difference:

Centralization—Deuteronomy reflects a rethinking of the older ritual based on its ideology of centralized worship; if all sacrifices must be offered in Jerusalem, that must include the paschal offering as well.^[3]

Historicization—The paschal offering began as an apotropaic ritual having nothing to do with the exodus story. At one point, it was historicized and associated with memorializing the Exodus.  Its apotropaic function was thus lost, so it was moved from the home to a public location.^[4]

Narrativization—Originally, the paschal offering was a standard festival sacrifice. Its inclusion in the Priestly version of the exodus story, however, caused a problem for the Priestly writers, who were bothered by the implication that a sacrifice could have been offered before the revelation at Sinai, so they reimagined it as an apotropaic ritual, which fit well with the story.^[5]

As Mira Balberg and Simeon Chavel have noted, none of these approaches, however, is fully persuasive, and it is unlikely that we can recreate the ritual’s development.^[6] Nevertheless, we can trace the relationship between the conflicting descriptions of the paschal offering we find in Exodus and Deuteronomy, and their reception in Second Temple and Rabbinic texts.

Indeed, such a study reveals that aspects of the home ritual can still be seen in the Temple version, and aspects of the Temple ritual seep into depictions of the home ritual in Egypt. Understanding this interplay thus has interpretive value for understanding certain unusual expressions in the text, as well as halakhic-theological value in how it explains the way the sages understood the Israelites as one family and how that effected the way they envisioned the ritual. Below I will show how this works by focusing on one verse and how it has been interpreted.

Slaughtering the Pesach on the 14^th

In the instructions of the Priestly text for slaughtering the paschal offering in Egypt, the first part of the verse speaks in the second person, and the latter part of the verse speaks in the third person:

^{שמות יב:ו} וְהָיָה לָכֶם לְמִשְׁמֶרֶת עַד אַרְבָּעָה עָשָׂר יוֹם לַחֹדֶשׁ הַזֶּה וְשָׁחֲטוּ אֹתוֹ כֹּל קְהַל עֲדַת [תה"ש, נ"ש: בני] יִשְׂרָאֵל בֵּין הָעַרְבָּיִם.

^{Exod 12:6} You shall keep watch over it until the fourteenth day of this month; and all the assembled congregation of [LXX, SP: the children of] Israel shall slaughter it at twilight.

Shimon Gesundheit of Hebrew University argues that the third person laws are the older substrate, which have been rewritten and expanded in a midrash-like form, with God delivering the commands to Israel through Moses.^[7]

Another grammatical shift is the surprising move in the latter half of the verse from the plural verb “all shall slaughter,” which refers to the commanded group “all of Israel” and the singular “it,” which refers to the paschal offering.^[8] The shift is not technically a problem, since the plural refers back to the subject and the singular to the object, and therefore, the sentence can be parsed thus: “the entire congregation, each man individually, must slaughter his paschal animal at the same time,” as the next verse says explicitly:

^{שמות יב:ז} וְלָקְחוּ מִן הַדָּם וְנָתְנוּ עַל שְׁתֵּי הַמְּזוּזֹת וְעַל הַמַּשְׁקוֹף עַל הַבָּתִּים אֲשֶׁר יֹאכְלוּ אֹתוֹ בָּהֶם.

^{Exod 12:7} They shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they are to eat it.

Nevertheless, some ancient scribes had trouble with this shift between singular and plural, and “fixed” the text by making the object plural. For instance, 4QpaleoExod^m (Fragment A) reads אותם “them” in verse 6, while the Septuagint (LXX) translation makes this adjustment in verses 7 (αὐτὰ) and 9 (αὐτῶν).

Egyptian Passover: Between Public and Private

The plural/singular tension is rooted in an overall ritual tension in the text’s depiction of the paschal offering in Egypt.  Here it is a domestic, apotropaic ritual, in which each family slaughters its animal, puts the blood on the doorpost, and consumes the offering at home, away from the night’s dangers. At the same time, the text describes the slaughter as being done by כֹּל קְהַל עֲדַת [בני] יִשְׂרָאֵל “all the assembled congregation of [the children of] Israel” (v. 6), which gives the impression of a ritual act that requires the presence of the entire people.^[9]  

Given its context, the command for all Israel to slaughter the paschal animal in the twilight lends itself to a temporal interpretation, that everyone’s act of slaughter needs to take place at the same time, wherever they were living in Egypt. As Umberto Cassuto writes:

 ^{קאסוטו שמות יב:ו} כאילו להגיד שאף על פי שהם דרים במקומות שונים, מתאחדים הם לקהל אחד במעשה פולחן משותף לכולם בזמן אחד.

^{Cassuto Exod 12:6} As if to say that even though they live in different places they join together as one people in the joint act of worship that they all participate in at one time.^[10]

Nevertheless, the call for the entire congregation to bring the offering together may be an echo of the public offering at the central Temple, as in Deuteronomy, intruding into a text depicting a domestic ritual, as in Exodus.^[11] In other words, the “future” of the paschal offering casts textual shade on its “past.”

Just One Pesach?

The most extreme example of how this verse was interpreted appears in the Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael. Instead of correcting the singular/plural problem for the offering by adjusting the text, as did the LXX and the Qumran manuscript, Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus (2^nd cent. C.E.) interprets the reference to a single animal (v. 6) as allowing for a singular paschal offering to be brought on behalf of the entire congregation:

^{מכילתא דר"י פסחא ה} "ושחטו אותו כל קהל עדת ישראל"—ר' אליעזר אומר: "מנין אתה אומר שאם אין להם לישראל אלא פסח יחידי שכולן יוצאין בו ידי חובתן?" ת[למוד] ל[ומר] 'ושחטו אותו'."

^{Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael Pascha §5} “And all the assembled congregation of Israel shall slaughter it”— Rabbi Eliezer says: “How do you know that if the Israelites only offer one paschal sacrifice that all of them have fulfilled their obligations? The verse teaches ‘and they shall slaughter it.’”[12] 

The Jerusalem Talmud offers a similar reading:

^{ירושלמי פסחים ז:ה}"ושחטו אותו כל קהל עדת ישראל"—"אותו" אע"פ שאין שם אלא פסח אחד כולהון יוצאין בזריקה אחת.

^{j. Pesachim 7:5 5} “And all the assembled congregation of Israel shall slaughter it”— “It” even if there is only one paschal offering there, all the people fulfill their obligation with one sprinkling of the blood.^[13]

Thus, Rabbi Eliezer and the Jerusalem Talmud take the biblical text literally, and suggests that the Israelites can, if necessary, offer one joint sacrifice on behalf of the whole people.^[14] This approach allows us to uncover a similar, if subtler reading of this verse in the much earlier (second century B.C.E.) work, Jubilees, where its interpretation is part of an overall blending of the Deuteronomy and Exodus versions of the paschal offering.

Consuming the Paschal Offering in the Holy Precinct: Jubilees and Temple Scroll

The book of Jubilees describes the proper consumption of the paschal offering, following the laws of Deuteronomy, that the paschal offering is eaten in a communal setting in the area of the sacred precinct:

^{Jub 49:16} It is no longer to be eaten outside of the Lord’s sanctuary but before the Lord’s sanctuary. All the people of the Israelite congregation are to celebrate it at its time. ^49:17 Every man who has come on its day, who is 20 years of age and above, is to eat it in the sanctuary of your God before the Lord, because this is the way it has been written and ordained—that they are to eat it in the Lord’s sanctuary.^[15]

We see this in the Temple Scroll as well:

^{מגילת המקדש יז:8–9} ואכלוהו֯ ב̇ל̇י֯ל֯ה̇ ב̇חצרות̇ [ה]קודש והשכימו והלכו איש לאוהל̇ו֯.^[16]

^{Temple Scroll 17:8–9} And they shall eat it at night in the courts of [the] Holy Place, and they rise early in the morning, and each returns to his tent.

In contrast to the paschal offering in Egypt, that was eaten in people’s homes, and in contrast to the Tannaitic conception of the general paschal offering, that was to be eaten anywhere in Jerusalem (m. Zevachim 5:3), the book of Jubilees commands the people to eat the paschal offering in the Temple precinct specifically.^[17]

As my late teacher Aharon Shemesh (1953–2018) of Bar Ilan University taught, Jubilees’ unique phrasing “it is not fitting to eat it outside of the sanctuary of the Lord” seems to be translating the law in Exodus, which forbids the Israelites in Egypt from leaving their homes until morning on the night of the paschal offering.^[18]

In context, the law of staying in one’s home was part of the apotropaic ritual, to protect the Israelites from being killed during the smiting of Egypt’s firstborns. Jubilees’ requirement for all the Israelites to consume the paschal offering in the Temple precinct is a hybrid creation, with the entire assembly gathered (public ritual) in one “home” (private ritual), in this case, the Temple. Surprisingly, this requirement is based not only on the command in Deuteronomy but on the phrase in Exodus 12:6 depicting “all the assembled congregation of Israel” consuming the paschal offering in Egypt.^[19]

The Paschal Offering in the Mishnah: Egyptian Pesach in Jerusalem

The singular/plural tension in the verse is also behind the Mishnah’s depiction of the paschal offering,^[20] whose main theme is the division of the people into three cohorts:^[21]

^{משנה פסחים ה:ה} הפסח נשחט בשלש כיתים שנ[אמר]: "ושחטו אתו כל קהל עדת ישרא[ל] בין הערבים." קהל ועדה וישראל. נכנסה כת הראשונה, ונתמלת העזרה, נ(י)עלו דלתות העזרה, תקעו והריעו ותקעו. [...]  

^{Mishnah Pesachim 5:5} The Paschal sacrifice is slaughtered in three [successive] cohorts, as it is said (Exod 12:6): “And they shall slaughter it, the entire assembly of the congregation of Israel at twilight.”—“assembly,” “congregation,” and “Israel.” The first cohort entered: when the courtyard was full, they locked the doors to the court. They blew [a shofar]: sustained, staccato, sustained....^[22]

^ה:ז יצאת כת הראשונה ונכנסה שנייה. יצאת שנייה ונכנסה שלישית. כמעשה הראשונה כן מעשה שנייה ושלישית. קראו את [ה]הלל אם גמרו שנו ואם שנו שילשו אפ על פי שלא שילשו (ו)מימיהם. [...]

^5:7 The first cohort departed, and the second cohort entered. The second departed, and the third entered. Like the process for the first, such was the process for the second and the third. They recited Hallel; if they completed it, they repeated it. And if they had repeated it, they recited it a third time, even though they never recited it a third time….

On a practical level, dividing the people into three cohorts avoids overloading the Temple mount with too many people at one time (temporal), and, in the next part of the Mishnah, each group is situated in a different part of the Temple precinct after the animal is slaughtered (geographical). In theory, this system could derive from the need to accommodate the many visitors who would come to Jerusalem on pilgrimage from all over in the Second Temple Period,^[23] making it necessary to institute crowd-control methods into the day’s rituals.^[24] Nevertheless, I do not think this is the origin of the three-cohort law.

First, the Mishnah itself presents the requirement to slaughter the paschal offering in this manner as deriving from a midrashic understanding of the biblical verse.^[25] As such, the rabbis understood this halakha to have been operative already in Egypt. Second, this division of the people into three groups has no precedent in historical sources.^[26] Third, maintaining the division into three cohorts after the act of slaughter proves that we are not looking at a division borne of practical necessity, to avoid overcrowding in the Temple.

So what is the function of this halakhic midrash, which the Mishnah records in narrative style? The midrash is based upon Exodus 12:6, and it cuts the expression קְהַל עֲדַת יִשְׂרָאֵל “the assembled congregation of Israel” into three separate units: —“assembly,” “congregation,” and “Israel,” and learns from this that the act of slaughter itself must take place in three cohorts.

With that, the Mishnah turns the paschal offering into a joint act first by making all individuals part of one of three cohorts, second, by presenting the three cohorts as parts of one semantic unit, and finally and most significantly, by having each group, once their offerings have been slaughtered, wait for the other groups in its respective appointed place:

^{משנה פסחים ה:י} ...יצאת כת הראשונה וישבה לה [להר] (ל)הבית שנייה בחיל והשלישית במקומה....

^{m. Pesachim 5:10} … The first cohort departed and sat on the Temple Mount; the second on the ledge and the third stood in its place….

What emerges from this required waiting period is that all of the participants in that year’s paschal offerings are together on the Temple Mount at the time the third group’s animals are slaughtered. In that way, the instruction for “all the assembled congregation of Israel” to slaughter the paschal offering at twilight is fulfilled both temporally and geographically.

The requirement for the first two cohorts to wait in their respective areas until the third was finished further points to the entirely theoretical origins of this law: If dividing people into cohorts was really something that developed as a practical, crowd-control requirement, it would not have been necessary to maintain the division between the groups after the slaughtering was completed. Instead, each could simply take his slaughtered animal to wherever they plan on consuming it and start the roasting. Yet the Mishnah has them all wait until everyone’s animal has been slaughtered, and even adds:

^{משנה פסחים ה:י} חשיכה יצאו וצלו את פיסחיהם.

^{m. Pesachim 5:10} When it became dark, they went out and roasted their paschal offerings.^[27]

Given that the roasting and eating was to take place inside the confines of the city (m. Zevachim 5:8), why should they have to wait until it was dark?

Traditional commentators tried to make sense of this by positing that it applies only to when the fourteenth of Nissan falls out on a Shabbat, during which time it would have been forbidden to carry the offering out of the Temple precinct. Only when Shabbat ends at nightfall would they be allowed to carry the animals into the city.

While such a response is correct halakhically, the Mishnah says nothing at all about this law applying only on Shabbat.^[28] Rather, the waiting seems to be intrinsic to how the Mishnah understands the requirement for all of Israel to slaughter the paschal animal together at twilight.

Bringing Jerusalem into Egypt

The authors of the Mishnah are making a conscious choice when they use a verse (Exod 12:6) describing the paschal offering in Egypt to explicate the procedure for offering the public sacrifice at the Jerusalem Temple. The Jerusalem Talmud goes further, explicitly depicting the paschal offering in Egypt as already having followed the three-cohort system,^[29] even though such a depiction is not just anachronistic but defies any spatial logic, and even requires miraculous intervention:

^{ירושלמי פסחים ה:ה} ניתן כח בקולו של משה והיה קולו מהלך בכל ארץ מצרים מהלך ארבעים יום. ומה היה אומר ממקום פלוני עד מקום פלוני כת אחת וממקום פלוני ועד מקום פלוני כת אחת.

^{j. Pesachim 5:5} Moses’ voice was given power, and his voice went throughout Egypt for an area covering a forty-days march. And what would it say: “From this spot to that spot is cohort one. From this spot to that spot is the next cohort.”

Clearly, no practical reason for a system like this is necessary or even useful for the paschal offering in Egypt, certainly not if we envision the Israelites being separated from each other in an area covering a forty-day march. Instead, what we see here is how the rabbinic vision for the Jerusalem festival has been grafted onto the biblical account of the paschal offering in Egypt.

Melding Two Conceptions of the Paschal Offering

Painting the domestic paschal offering in Egypt in the colors of the Temple ritual in Jerusalem, and filling out the Temple paschal offering with motifs taken from the domestic version, are not just exegetical dynamics based on readings of the biblical text. The process also has theological meaning. The Mishnah’s use of three concentric cohorts, who join together in the Temple precinct without hierarchical distinction is a powerful image of how boundaries are crossed during Pesach.

The narrative frame of the Pesach story depicts the Israelites as a not-yet-organized group of slaves, with no formal, ritual center or leadership. In this sense, the Mishnah’s depiction of the three cohorts as non-hierarchical in nature reflects the spirit of the pre-Tabernacle Egypt story, and the home-ritual feel of the paschal offering.^[30]

In other words, just as the “future” Pesach as a Temple festival is projected back into the Egypt story in our verse (Exod 12:6), thus giving the domestic ritual a bit of the flavor of the Temple ritual, so too are aspects of the “past” non-priestly, non-hierarchical domestic ritual projected onto the later Temple ritual.

The book of Jubilees, as noted, envisions the Temple as a home with apotropaic properties, and the Mishnah turns the entire people of Israel into one household slaughtering their paschal offerings together, without any distinction or hierarchy between the groups. The cross-pollination between the two models and its theological message are summarized nicely by the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria (ca. 20 B.C.E—ca. 50 C.E.), who describes how during this offering specifically, all of Israel become like priests:

^{Special Laws 2:145, LCL trans.} On this occasion, the whole nation performs the sacred rites and acts as priest with pure hands and complete immunity.^[31]

Like the sources surveyed above, Philo too is dealing with the uniquely hybrid ritual of the paschal offering, which has aspects of Temple ritual and aspects of home ritual.

While we may not be able to determine the most ancient form of the paschal offering, and whether it began as an apotropaic home ritual or a standard festival offering at a local or central worship site, the fact that the Torah preserves both images bothered readers from earliest times. What all of the examples above have in common is their attempt to bring the two different images of the paschal offering closer together, a process which began already in the biblical text itself.