What does Passover commemorate?

Why it is called Passover

The name comes from the last plague. The Hebrew verb pasach means to pass over, or to spare, and Exodus builds the explanation into a conversation at home:

It will happen, when your children ask you, ‘What do you mean by this service?’ that you shall say, ‘It is the sacrifice of Yahweh’s Passover, who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt, when he struck the Egyptians, and spared our houses.’

From the start, then, this is a feast made to be asked about, and that is still its shape. The night itself, with the plagues before it, is told in the ten plagues of Egypt. One more thing the name gave the world: in many languages, Easter comes from the same word, through Greek and Latin pascha. Spanish says Pascua, French Pâques, Portuguese Páscoa. English and German are the odd ones out.

A memorial, commanded

Exodus makes the day permanent: “This day shall be a memorial for you” (Exodus 12:14). Two foods carry the memory. The lamb, roasted and eaten with bitter herbs (Exodus 12:8). And unleavened bread, because the people left in such a hurry that the dough had no time to rise (Exodus 12:39). Deuteronomy calls it “the bread of affliction,” eaten for seven days “that you may remember the day when you came out of the land of Egypt all the days of your life” (Deuteronomy 16:3).

The feast begins on the fourteenth day of the first month, at evening (Leviticus 23:5), the spring month later called Nisan, and the Feast of Unleavened Bread follows for seven days. Jews in Israel keep seven days; many communities elsewhere keep eight. Before it starts, homes are cleared of chametz, anything leavened.

The Seder table

In Temple times, families had their lambs slaughtered in Jerusalem and ate them in the city, which is why Jesus’s family went up every year (Luke 2:41). After the Romans destroyed the Temple in AD 70 the sacrifice stopped, and the home meal carried the feast. The Mishnah, written down around AD 200, already sets out its order, seder in Hebrew. On the table today:

• Matzah, the flat unleavened bread. A broken piece, the afikoman, is hidden, and the children hunt for it.
• Maror, bitter herbs such as horseradish, for the bitterness of slavery.
• Charoset, a paste of apples, nuts and wine, for the mortar of the bricks.
• Karpas, a green vegetable dipped in salt water, for tears.
• A roasted bone and an egg, reminders of the Passover lamb and the festival offering.
• Four cups of wine, and a cup poured for the prophet Elijah, whose return is awaited.

The Haggadah, the telling

The book read at the table is the Haggadah, “the telling,” named for a command in Exodus:

You shall tell your son in that day, saying, ‘It is because of that which Yahweh did for me when I came out of Egypt.’

So the youngest child asks the Four Questions, beginning “Why is this night different from all other nights?” The adults answer with the story: slavery, the plagues, recited with a drop of wine spilled for each, and the way out. They sing Dayenu, “it would have been enough,” and end with “Next year in Jerusalem.” In every generation, the Mishnah says, each person should see himself as if he had come out of Egypt (Pesachim 10:5).

Passover and the first Christians

Mark, Matthew and Luke make the Last Supper a Passover meal, and Paul writes, “Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed in our place” (1 Corinthians 5:7). But the Seder as it is kept now took shape after AD 70, so the meal Jesus ate was not a modern Seder. The oldest form of the feast survives elsewhere: the Samaritans still sacrifice lambs on Mount Gerizim every spring.