Pesach and Chag HaMatzot: The Feast of Redemption, the Lamb and the Unleavened Bread

The names of the feast

The Torah uses two names that later tradition joins together. Pesach (פסח) is first the name of the sacrifice, the lamb slaughtered on the afternoon of 14 Nisan: “it is Hashem’s passover” (Exodus 12:11). The verb pasach means to pass over, to skip, and also to shield or protect; Isaiah uses it of Hashem defending Jerusalem “as birds flying,” “passing over He will preserve it” (Isaiah 31:5).² Chag HaMatzot (חג המצות), “the Feast of Unleavened Bread,” is the seven-day festival that begins on 15 Nisan (Leviticus 23:6). In Second Temple usage the two names had already merged; Luke writes, “Now the feast of unleavened bread drew nigh, which is called the Passover” (Luke 22:1).

In the festival prayers Pesach is also zeman cheruteinu, “the season of our freedom,” and the Torah ties it to spring: “Observe the month of Aviv” (Deuteronomy 16:1), when the barley is in the ear. A Chasidic teaching notes that the Torah calls it Chag HaMatzot, praising Israel’s faith, while Israel calls it Pesach, praising Hashem who passed over their houses.³

Pesach in the Torah

Exodus 12–13: the night of the lamb

The commandments of Pesach are the first given to Israel as a people, and they begin with the calendar: “This month shall be unto you the beginning of months” (Exodus 12:2; see Shabbat HaChodesh). On the tenth of the month each household takes a lamb or kid, “a male of the first year, without blemish” (12:5), keeps it until the fourteenth, and slaughters it “between the evenings,” bein ha-arbayim, in the late afternoon. The blood is put on the doorposts and lintel with hyssop. The meat is roasted whole and eaten that night with matzah and merorim, bitter herbs, by people dressed for travel: “ye shall eat it in haste: it is Hashem’s passover” (12:11).

Three details deserve attention. The blood is a sign for Israel: “the blood shall be to you for a token upon the houses where ye are: and when I see the blood, I will pass over you” (12:13). Hashem does not need a mark to know His people; painting the doorpost was an act of faith and public identification in the middle of Egypt. No bone is broken: the lamb is eaten whole, by one household, in one night, “neither shall ye break a bone thereof” (12:46). The stranger may join: a “mixed multitude” went up with Israel (12:38), and a circumcised stranger may keep the Passover, for “one law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger” (12:48–49). From its first night, Pesach is a feast with an open door.

Then comes the festival of matzah: seven days without chametz (leaven), beginning and ending with a holy convocation (12:15–20), because the Israelites left so quickly that “the people took their dough before it was leavened” (12:34). Chapter 13 adds the sanctification of the firstborn (the background of Ta’anit Bechorot) and the commandment that made Pesach a teaching feast:

And thou shalt shew thy son in that day, saying, This is done because of that which Hashem did unto me when I came forth out of Egypt.

The Haggadah’s “four sons” grow out of the four places where the Torah imagines a child being taught about the feast (Exodus 12:26; 13:8, 14; Deuteronomy 6:20). The night itself is called leil shimurim, “a night to be much observed unto Hashem” (12:42), a night of watching: Hashem kept watch over Israel, and Israel keeps watch for Him.

Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy

Leviticus 23 sets Pesach in the cycle of the mo’adim, the appointed times: “In the fourteenth day of the first month at even is Hashem’s passover. And on the fifteenth day of the same month is the feast of unleavened bread unto Hashem: seven days ye must eat unleavened bread” (23:5–6). The first and seventh days are holy convocations (23:7–8). Numbers 28:16–25 lists the additional (musaf) offerings for each day of the feast, which the synagogue still reads as the maftir throughout the festival.

Numbers 9:1–14 records the first Pesach in the wilderness and the plea of men made impure by a dead body: “wherefore are we kept back?” (9:7). Hashem answered with a second chance on 14 Iyar (see Pesach Sheni), while warning that whoever could keep the Passover and did not “shall be cut off” (9:13). Pesach is covenant identity.

Deuteronomy 16:1–8 adds the decisive geographical rule for later history:

Thou mayest not sacrifice the passover within any of thy gates, which Hashem thy God giveth thee: but at the place which Hashem thy God shall choose to place His name in.

The household feast of Egypt became, in the Land, a pilgrimage feast at the one sanctuary. Deuteronomy also gives matzah its most famous name, lechem oni, “the bread of affliction,” eaten “that thou mayest remember the day when thou camest forth out of the land of Egypt all the days of thy life” (16:3). The rabbis read “all the days” as including the nights, which is why the Exodus is mentioned in the evening Shema; Ben Zoma’s teaching on that phrase is quoted in the Haggadah.⁴

Pesach in the Prophets and Writings

The historical books mark Israel’s turning points with Passovers.

• Gilgal (Joshua 5:10–12). After crossing the Jordan on 10 Nisan (Joshua 4:19), Israel kept the Passover on the plains of Jericho. “On the morrow after the passover” they ate unleavened cakes and parched grain from the Land, and the manna ceased.
• Hezekiah (2 Chronicles 30). Hezekiah invited Judah and the remnant of the northern tribes to Jerusalem and, because the priests were not ready, held the feast in the second month under the provision of Numbers 9. Many ate without proper purification, and he prayed, “The good Hashem pardon every one that prepareth his heart to seek God” (30:18–19); Hashem “healed the people” (30:20).
• Josiah (2 Kings 23:21–23; 2 Chronicles 35). After the Book of the Torah was found, Josiah commanded, “Keep the passover unto Hashem your God, as it is written in the book of this covenant,” and “surely there was not holden such a passover from the days of the judges.”
• The returning exiles (Ezra 6:19–22). At the dedication of the Second Temple the exiles kept Pesach, and with them “all such as had separated themselves unto them from the filthiness of the heathen of the land, to seek Hashem God of Israel” (6:21). Once again people from the nations joined Israel’s table.

Ezekiel’s vision of the restored Temple includes Pesach on the fourteenth of the first month, “a feast of seven days” (Ezekiel 45:21). The feast does not disappear in the age to come.

From Elephantine to the Temple courts

The Passover papyrus

One of the oldest documents about the feast outside the Bible comes from Elephantine, an island on the Nile where Judean soldiers served the Persian empire. A fragmentary Aramaic letter dated to the fifth year of Darius II (419 BCE), from a certain Hananiah to Yedaniah and the Jewish garrison, instructs them (as scholars reconstruct it) to keep the festival of unleavened bread from 15 to 21 Nisan, to be pure, not to work on the first and last days, not to drink fermented drink, and to seal away leaven.⁵ The papyrus is badly damaged and the word “Passover” is restored, not preserved, but it shows Jews far from Jerusalem being taught to keep the Torah’s dates.

Pilgrimage and the multitude of lambs

By the late Second Temple period Pesach was the greatest of the three pilgrimage feasts (Deuteronomy 16:16). Yeshua’s parents “went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the passover” (Luke 2:41), and “many went out of the country up to Jerusalem before the passover, to purify themselves” (John 11:55) with the ashes of the red heifer (see Shabbat Parah). The Mishnah describes the slaughter in three shifts, with rows of priests passing gold and silver basins of blood to the altar while the Levites sang the Hallel (Psalms 113–118).⁶ Philo of Alexandria marveled that on this day the whole people was raised to the dignity of the priesthood, since each household slaughtered its own offering.⁷

Josephus reports that when the Roman governor Cestius wished to show Nero the size of the Jewish nation, the high priests counted the Passover offerings:

…they found the number of sacrifices was two hundred and fifty-six thousand five hundred.

Josephus reckons at least ten people to each offering and gives a total of 2,700,200 pure worshippers.⁸ Historians regard these numbers as inflated (the arithmetic does not even match his own reckoning), and estimates of the real crowd vary widely.⁹ Still, the report shows how a first-century Jew pictured the feast: a city overflowing, every courtyard filled with households eating the lamb.

From the Temple table to the Seder table

Mishnah Pesachim 10

The tenth chapter of Mishnah Pesachim is the earliest description of the Passover meal as a structured order (seder). Its main elements are still recognizable at every Seder:

• Reclining and four cups. “Even the poorest person in Israel should not eat until he reclines, and they should give him no fewer than four cups of wine.”¹⁰ On this night every Jew dines as a free person.
• The child’s questions. After the second cup the son asks, and if he cannot, his father teaches him. Manuscripts and the two Talmuds preserve different lists (three or four questions, about matzah, dipping and roasted meat); the roasted-lamb question fell away after the Temple’s destruction, and the question about reclining appears later, in Saadia Gaon and Rambam.¹¹
• From disgrace to praise. The father “begins with disgrace and ends with praise,” expounding Deuteronomy 26:5–8, “A wandering Aramean was my father,” to the end of the passage.¹²
• Rabban Gamliel’s three things. “Rabban Gamliel used to say: Whoever has not said these three things on Pesach has not fulfilled his obligation, and these are they: Pesach, matzah and maror.”¹³ The lamb because Hashem passed over our fathers’ houses; matzah because they were redeemed; bitter herbs because the Egyptians embittered their lives.
• Hallel and the final cup. The first part of Hallel is sung before the meal and the rest after it, over the fourth cup.¹⁴
• The afikoman rule. “One may not add an afikoman after the Pesach.”¹⁵ The Talmud debates the word; the most widely accepted derivation is a Greek term for after-dinner revelry (epikomos). In time it came to mean the last piece of matzah, after which nothing else is eaten.¹⁶

The Talmud adds one beloved custom from the Temple period. “They said of Hillel that he would wrap them together and eat them,” the Pesach lamb, matzah and maror, fulfilling “with unleavened bread and bitter herbs they shall eat it” (Numbers 9:11) in a single bite.¹⁷ The korech sandwich of the modern Seder, matzah and maror without the lamb, is eaten “in remembrance of the Temple, as Hillel did.”

How the Haggadah grew

Scholars disagree about how much of the Seder goes back to the Temple period. Joachim Jeremias read the Mishnah as describing first-century practice; Baruch Bokser argued that the rabbis shaped the Seder after 70 CE to keep the feast alive without the sacrifice.¹⁸ Many note that its form (reclining, wine, appetizers, learned conversation) resembles the Hellenistic symposium, transformed into a meal of sacred memory.¹⁹ The full Haggadah text first appears in the prayer books of the Geonim, Rav Amram (ninth century) and Saadia (tenth century); medieval communities added the closing songs, the opening of the door, and the cup of Eliyahu.²⁰ The Haggadah is both ancient and living.

Keeping Pesach: halacha and custom

The laws of Pesach fill a large section of the Shulchan Aruch (Orach Chaim 429–494). The main features are these.

Removing chametz. The Torah forbids eating chametz and also owning it or letting it be seen (Exodus 12:15, 19; 13:7). On the evening that begins 14 Nisan the household conducts bedikat chametz, the search for leaven “by the light of a lamp,”²¹ and recites kol chamira, an Aramaic declaration nullifying any chametz missed; the next morning the remaining chametz is burned. Chametz is one of five grains (wheat, barley, spelt, rye, oats) that has fermented in water. Ashkenazi custom also refrains from kitniyot (rice, legumes and similar foods), while most Sephardi and Mizrahi communities eat them; both are honorable inheritances.

Matzah. The Torah obligation to eat matzah applies to the first night (Exodus 12:18); during the rest of the week one simply eats no chametz.²² Many use shemurah matzah, guarded from the harvest, for the Seder.

The Seder. The traditional order has fifteen steps: Kadesh (the first cup and Kiddush), Urchatz (washing), Karpas (a vegetable dipped in salt water), Yachatz (breaking the middle matzah and hiding the larger half as the afikoman), Maggid (the telling), Rachtzah (washing before bread), Motzi and Matzah, Maror, Korech, Shulchan Orech (the meal), Tzafun (eating the afikoman), Barech (grace after meals, with the third cup), Hallel (with the fourth cup), and Nirtzah (conclusion). The Seder ends with the words L’shanah haba’ah birushalayim, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

Two days outside Israel. In Israel the first and seventh days are yom tov. Outside the Land, where messengers announcing the new moon could not arrive in time, communities kept two days out of doubt, and even after the calendar was fixed by calculation the sages ruled that the diaspora should “be careful with the custom of your fathers.”²³ So outside Israel the first two and last two days are yom tov, and there are two Seders, on the nights of 15 and 16 Nisan. On the second night the counting of the Omer begins.

Chol HaMoed. The intermediate days are semi-festive: work that is not urgent is avoided, and the days are given to family and study. The full Hallel is said only on the first day (two outside Israel), and “half Hallel” thereafter; a later explanation applies the midrash in which Hashem rebukes the angels, “the work of My hands is drowning in the sea, and you would sing?”²⁴ Tradition dates the crossing of the Sea to the seventh day, when the Song at the Sea (Exodus 15) is read.

Readings and prayers. The first day’s Torah reading is Exodus 12:21–51, with the first Passover in the Land (Joshua 5) as haftarah; the second day outside Israel reads Leviticus 22:26–23:44 with Josiah’s Passover (2 Kings 23). The last day’s haftarah is Isaiah 10:32–12:6, the shoot from the stem of Yishai. The prayer for dew (Tal) is said on the first day, and many Ashkenazi communities say Yizkor on the last. See the readings for Pesach.

Song of Songs. Many communities read Shir HaShirim on the Shabbat of Chol HaMoed: “For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth” (Song of Songs 2:11–12).²⁵ The sages read it as the love between Hashem and Israel, whose betrothal began at the Exodus; Rabbi Akiva called it “the holy of holies.”²⁶

The Omer. On the eve of 16 Nisan Israel begins counting forty-nine days to Shavuot (Leviticus 23:15–16). In Temple times the first sheaf (omer) of barley was offered on 16 Nisan: the Pharisees and rabbis read “the morrow after the sabbath” (23:11) as the day after the first festival day, while the Boethusians read it as the Sunday of the festival week.²⁷ The count links the freedom of Pesach to the Torah of Shavuot.

Messianic: “Messiah our Passover”

The Last Supper

The first three Gospels present Yeshua’s last meal with his disciples as a Passover meal. “Then came the day of unleavened bread, when the passover must be killed,” and Yeshua sent Peter and John to prepare it (Luke 22:7–8). At the table he said:

With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer: for I say unto you, I will not any more eat thereof, until it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God.

He took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and said, “This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.” After supper he took the cup: “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is shed for you” (Luke 22:19–20). The words echo “the blood of the covenant” at Sinai (Exodus 24:8) and the “new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah,” with the Torah written on their hearts (Jeremiah 31:31–33). The meal ends with a hymn (Mark 14:26), which most scholars take to be the rest of Hallel, and many connect the “cup after supper,” which Paul calls “the cup of blessing” (1 Corinthians 10:16), with the third cup over the grace after meals. These are reasonable inferences, though the Gospels do not describe a Seder as later practiced.

The chronology debate

Here honesty requires a careful word. The Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) place the Last Supper on the evening of the Passover meal, so that Yeshua was crucified on 15 Nisan, the first day of the feast (Mark 14:12). The Gospel of John seems to place events a day earlier. On the morning of the trial the priests would not enter Pilate’s headquarters “lest they should be defiled; but that they might eat the passover” (John 18:28), and the crucifixion takes place on “the preparation of the passover, and about the sixth hour” (19:14). On that reading Yeshua died on the afternoon of 14 Nisan, at the hour when the lambs were being slaughtered in the Temple.

Scholars have proposed several solutions: that Yeshua followed a different calendar, perhaps the solar calendar known from Qumran (Annie Jaubert); that “eat the passover” in John 18:28 means the festival offerings of the week, especially the chagigah, so the Gospels agree; that the Last Supper was a Passover-style meal held a day early; or that one tradition shaped the dates for theological reasons.²⁸ No solution commands universal agreement. What the four Gospels share matters more: Yeshua died at Pesach, in Jerusalem, and his disciples understood his death through the feast.

“Therefore let us keep the feast”

Paul’s most direct word on Pesach comes in a letter to a mixed congregation of Jews and Gentiles in Corinth:

Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Messiah our passover is sacrificed for us: therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

The passage assumes the readers know the practice of removing leaven before Pesach. Paul uses it to call for moral cleansing, and his conclusion is “let us keep the feast,” not “the feast is over.” In the same letter he plans to stay in Ephesus “until Pentecost,” that is, Shavuot (16:8), and Paul’s company sailed from Philippi “after the days of unleavened bread” (Acts 20:6). The apostolic communities lived by Israel’s calendar, and the plain sense of 1 Corinthians 5 is a call for Jews and Gentiles in Messiah to keep the feast in sincerity and truth.

The lamb whose bones were not broken

Yochanan the Immerser (John the Baptist) points to Yeshua with the words “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). At the cross the soldiers do not break his legs, and John comments that “the scripture should be fulfilled, A bone of him shall not be broken” (John 19:36), citing the rule of the Passover lamb (Exodus 12:46; Numbers 9:12). Peter speaks of redemption “with the precious blood of Messiah, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot” (1 Peter 1:19). This reading does not replace the lamb of Egypt; it sees in Yeshua’s death the fullest meaning of what that lamb signified, Israel’s firstborn protected by the blood of an innocent substitute.

The afikoman: a hypothesis and its uses

Many Messianic Seders give the afikoman special attention: the middle of three matzot is broken, half is hidden, then “found” and eaten at the end. In 1966 the Jewish legal historian David Daube proposed in He That Cometh that afikoman might reflect a Greek participle meaning “he who comes” or “he who has come,” and that the hidden matzah may once have symbolized the awaited Messiah. He pointed to the second-century Passover homily of Melito of Sardis, which speaks of Messiah as “the one coming” with a related Greek form.²⁹ Daube was a serious scholar, but this remains a hypothesis; most scholars derive the word from after-dinner revelry, and the custom of hiding the afikoman is documented only much later.

Popular readings built on it (three matzot as Father, Son and Spirit; the stripes and piercings of the matzah as Messiah’s wounds) are homiletical, not historical, and the first does not fit our confession that Hashem is One. Jewish tradition explains the three matzot as the two loaves of every festival meal plus the broken “bread of affliction,” or as Kohen, Levi and Yisrael. The afikoman can serve as a teaching picture of the Messiah who was hidden and will be revealed, so long as everyone at the table knows it is a picture, not a secret history of the Seder.

How the church separated Easter from Passover

The early followers of Yeshua remembered his death and resurrection within Pesach. In Asia Minor the Quartodecimans (“fourteeners”) marked it on 14 Nisan, appealing to the custom of the apostle John; others chose the following Sunday, and the dispute grew sharp in the second century.³⁰ In 325 CE the Council of Nicaea under Constantine resolved that all churches should keep Easter on the same Sunday, independent of the Jewish calculation. Constantine’s letter, preserved by Eusebius, gives the motive plainly:

…it appeared an unworthy thing that in the celebration of this most holy feast we should follow the practice of the Jews… Let us then have nothing in common with the detestable Jewish crowd.

That sentence is a monument of replacement theology: the attempt to keep the memory of Israel’s Messiah while cutting it loose from Israel’s calendar, people and Torah. It sits uneasily beside Paul’s warning to Gentile believers, “Boast not against the branches … thou bearest not the root, but the root thee” (Romans 11:18). Benei Avraham keeps Pesach on 15 Nisan, as Yeshua and his apostles did, and we remember Constantine’s letter not with bitterness but as a lesson in what happens when the branches forget the root.

Prophetic: the greater exodus

“No more be said”

The prophets promise that the redemption from Egypt is not the last word but the first:

Therefore, behold, the days come, saith Hashem, that it shall no more be said, Hashem liveth, that brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt; but, Hashem liveth, that brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north, and from all the lands whither He had driven them.

Isaiah sees Hashem setting His hand “again the second time to recover the remnant of His people,” gathering “the outcasts of Israel” and “the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth,” with a highway “like as it was to Israel in the day that he came up out of the land of Egypt” (Isaiah 11:11–16). Micah hears Hashem’s answer: “According to the days of thy coming out of the land of Egypt will I shew unto him marvellous things” (Micah 7:15). The Talmud records a debate on whether the future redemption will come in Nisan or Tishrei; Rabbi Yehoshua taught, “In Nisan they were redeemed and in Nisan they will be redeemed in the future.”³¹ The ancient Aramaic translations of Exodus 12:42 expand the “night of watching” into a poem of four nights (creation, the binding of Yitzchak, the Exodus, and the final redemption), the last being the night when the Messiah will come.³² None of these sources gives a date, and the sages forbade calculating one (Sanhedrin 97b). They teach the shape of hope, not a timetable.

Eliyahu’s cup and “next year in Jerusalem”

The last prophet of the Tanakh closes with a promise: “Behold, I will send you Eliyahu the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of Hashem: and he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers” (Malachi 3:23–24; 4:5–6 in many Bibles). At the Seder a cup is poured for Eliyahu and the door is opened, a later custom often linked with the unresolved question of a fifth cup, left for Eliyahu to settle.³³ (See Shabbat HaGadol.) Every Seder closes with “Next year in Jerusalem,” a prayer in exile and, since the regathering of the twentieth century, a promise partly kept and still awaiting its fullness.

The cup in the kingdom

Yeshua’s words at the Passover table point forward: “I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom” (Matthew 26:29). The Last Supper was a vow, made over a festival cup, that he would sit at the feast again when the kingdom comes; “ye do shew the Master’s death till he come” (1 Corinthians 11:26). “Next year in Jerusalem” and “until that day” express one hope.

Firstfruits of them that slept

Paul calls the risen Messiah “the firstfruits of them that slept,” and adds, “every man in his own order: Messiah the firstfruits; afterward they that are Messiah’s at his coming” (1 Corinthians 15:20–23). The image comes from the Omer, the first sheaf of the barley harvest waved before Hashem during Pesach (Leviticus 23:10–11), which permitted the rest of the harvest to be eaten. The dead are not yet raised; they sleep, as Daniel says, until they “awake, some to everlasting life” (Daniel 12:2). Yeshua’s resurrection is the first sheaf that guarantees the harvest.

The exact calendar match should be stated with care. In the rabbinic reckoning, the Omer was offered on 16 Nisan whatever the day of the week; in the Boethusian reckoning, on the Sunday after the Shabbat of the festival week. On John’s chronology (crucifixion on 14 Nisan, a Friday), the resurrection on the first day of the week falls on 16 Nisan, the day of the Omer by both reckonings. On the Synoptic chronology (crucifixion on 15 Nisan), the rabbinic Omer would fall on the Shabbat and the resurrection on the next day. Either way, the resurrection belongs to the days of Pesach and the season of firstfruits, which is Paul’s point; the precise day depends on questions scholars still debate.

Keeping the feast

Pesach is above all a feast kept in homes. A few general suggestions:

• Prepare the house and the heart. Clean out the chametz, and use the search on the eve of 14 Nisan as Paul did, as a picture of searching out “malice and wickedness.”
• Hold a Seder with a traditional Haggadah. Learn the order and the songs; let children ask. If you add readings about Yeshua, place them where they fit (the matzah, the third cup, the closing hope), and mark clearly what is Israel’s ancient text and what is your own reflection.
• Remember the second night. Outside Israel, keep the second Seder and begin counting the Omer, so that the freedom of Pesach leads toward the Torah of Shavuot.
• Open the door. Invite the stranger, the convert, the lonely and the curious. The Haggadah begins, “Let all who are hungry come and eat.”
• Keep the whole week. Eat matzah, avoid chametz, rest on the festival days, and use Chol HaMoed for family, study, and the Song of Songs.

See our calendar for this year’s dates. And when the Seder ends, say it with meaning: next year in Jerusalem.