Shabbat HaGadol: The Great Shabbat Before Pesach

Why “the Great Shabbat”?

The miracle of the tenth of Nisan

The classic explanation is given by the Tur, the fourteenth-century code of Rabbi Yaakov ben Asher, and repeated in the Shulchan Aruch: “The Shabbat before Pesach is called Shabbat HaGadol because of the miracle that was done on it.”¹ The miracle is reconstructed from a chain of sources.

1. The command. In Egypt, Hashem commanded: “In the tenth day of this month they shall take to them every man a lamb, according to the house of their fathers” (Exodus 12:3), and keep it until the fourteenth (12:6).
2. The day of the week. The Talmud and the chronicle Seder Olam hold that Israel left Egypt on a Thursday, 15 Nisan.² Counting back, 10 Nisan in that year was a Shabbat.
3. The miracle. A midrash cited by the Tosafot on that passage of the Talmud relates that when Israel took the lambs, the sheep that the Egyptians honored, the Egyptian firstborn asked why. On hearing that Hashem was about to strike the firstborn of Egypt, they demanded that Pharaoh release Israel, and when he refused they fought against their own people. The midrash reads Psalm 136:10 this way: “To Him that smote Egypt in their firstborn,” that is, by means of their firstborn.³ The Tur adds that the Egyptians, though they saw their sacred animals being taken, were powerless to harm Israel.⁴

Because the miracle happened on a Shabbat, the Tur explains, it is remembered on the Shabbat before Pesach rather than on the date 10 Nisan, which moves through the week from year to year.

It should be said plainly that this is a midrashic tradition, not an event narrated in Exodus. The Torah tells us of the command to take the lamb on the tenth; the war of the firstborn and the Shabbat date come from rabbinic chronology and midrash.

Other explanations

The Tur’s reason is the best known, but it is not the only one.⁵

• The great day of Malachi. The haftarah ends with Eliyahu coming “before the coming of the great and dreadful day of Hashem” (Malachi 3:23). The Shabbat, some suggest, is named for the “great day” of its haftarah.
• The long sermon. The medieval Shibbolei HaLeket notes that on this Shabbat the rabbi delivered a long discourse on the laws of Pesach, and the service ran long; the people, half joking, called it “the great (long) Shabbat.”
• The first mitzvah. Other authorities, such as Abudarham, point out that the taking of the lamb, the first commandment Israel performed as a people, fell on this Shabbat.
• “Great” in Christian usage. The nineteenth-century scholar Leopold Zunz suggested that the name might echo the Christian “Great Sabbath” before Easter, itself rooted in John 19:31, where the Shabbat after the crucifixion is called “an high day,” literally a “great” day. Most Jewish scholars do not accept the suggestion, but the connection is interesting.

The tenth of Nisan in Scripture

Taking the lamb

The command to take the lamb on the tenth and keep it until the fourteenth (Exodus 12:3–6) gave Israel four days with the animal in their homes, in full view of their Egyptian neighbors. The Mekhilta asks why the lamb had to be taken four days early, and answers with Ezekiel 16: Israel in Egypt was “naked and bare,” without commandments, and Hashem gave them the mitzvot of the Passover blood and of circumcision so that they would have merit to be redeemed.⁶ Taking the lamb was a public act of faith and courage.

The rabbis note that this four-day requirement was specific to the first Passover. The Mishnah says that the Pesach of Egypt was taken from the tenth, while the Pesach of later generations was not.⁷ The Talmud discusses whether the lamb of later generations, like the daily tamid offering, required inspection for blemishes for four days before slaughter, and derives such a requirement for the tamid from the language of the Passover.⁸ This background matters for the Messianic reading discussed below.

Crossing the Jordan

Forty years later, the tenth of Nisan was again a day of decision: “And the people came up out of Jordan on the tenth day of the first month, and encamped in Gilgal, in the east border of Jericho” (Joshua 4:19). The generation that had been born in the wilderness entered the Land on the day their parents had taken the lamb in Egypt, were circumcised, and kept the Passover at Gilgal on the fourteenth (Joshua 5:2–10).

Jewish tradition also dates the death of Miriam to 10 Nisan. The Torah says only that she died “in the first month” at Kadesh (Numbers 20:1); the date is recorded in the list of days on which the pious fast, and tradition connects her death with the drying up of the well that had followed Israel in her merit.⁹

Customs of Shabbat HaGadol

The great drashah. In many communities the rabbi gives a major address on Shabbat HaGadol, traditionally on the laws of Pesach (searching for chametz, kashering the kitchen, the order of the Seder) and often weaving in aggadah and moral teaching. Together with the sermon on Shabbat Shuva, it was historically one of the two great public sermons of the year.

Reading the Haggadah. The Rema records the Ashkenazi custom of reading part of the Haggadah at the afternoon prayer, “from Avadim hayinu until lechaper al kol avonoteinu,” that is, from “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt” through the opening narrative.¹⁰ It is a rehearsal for the Seder, since, by tradition, the redemption began on this Shabbat.

The haftarah. The haftarah is Malachi 3:4–24 (in many printed Bibles, Malachi 3:4–4:6, since Christian editions divide the chapter). Because the book ends with the word “curse,” the next-to-last verse (3:23) is repeated after the last so that the reading ends with the promise of Eliyahu. Customs vary: most communities read it every year, while some read it only in certain years, depending on whether the eve of Pesach falls on Shabbat.¹¹

Malachi 3: the haftarah

The haftarah begins with a promise to Judah and Jerusalem: “Then shall the offering of Judah and Jerusalem be pleasant unto Hashem, as in the days of old, and as in former years” (Malachi 3:4). It continues with a warning to those who oppress the hired laborer, the widow, the orphan and the stranger (3:5), a statement of Hashem’s faithfulness, “For I am Hashem, I change not; therefore ye sons of Yaakov are not consumed” (3:6), and an invitation: “Return unto Me, and I will return unto you” (3:7). It speaks of tithes and the windows of heaven (3:10), of a “book of remembrance” for those who feared Hashem and spoke often one to another (3:16), and of a day when “unto you that fear My name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings” (3:20; 4:2 in many Bibles).

The book closes with two commands that frame all that follows in Israel’s story:

Remember ye the Torah of Moshe My servant, which I commanded unto him in Horeb for all Israel, with the statutes and judgments. 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, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.

The last words of the Prophets are “remember the Torah” and “Eliyahu will come.” Torah faithfulness and messianic hope are not rivals; they are the two hands of Malachi’s final blessing.

Messianic: the King enters before the feast

Yeshua’s entry into Jerusalem

All four Gospels tell of Yeshua’s entry into Jerusalem a few days before his last Passover. John gives the most precise timing: “Then Yeshua six days before the passover came to Bethany” (John 12:1), and “on the next day much people that were come to the feast, when they heard that Yeshua was coming to Jerusalem, took branches of palm trees, and went forth to meet him, and cried, Hosanna: Blessed is the King of Israel that cometh in the name of Hashem” (12:12–13). The crowd sang from Psalm 118, the climax of the Hallel sung at Pesach, and John and Matthew see the fulfillment of Zechariah 9:9: “Behold, thy King cometh unto thee … lowly, and riding upon an ass.” Mark adds that Yeshua went into the Temple, “looked round about upon all things,” and returned the next day to drive out the money changers, quoting Isaiah 56:7: “My house shall be called of all nations the house of prayer” (Mark 11:11, 15–17).

The connection with this Shabbat’s haftarah is striking. Malachi 3, just before our reading begins, promises: “the Lord (ha-Adon, “the Master,” not the divine Name), whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple, even the messenger of the covenant,” and “he shall purify the sons of Levi … that they may offer unto Hashem an offering in righteousness” (Malachi 3:1, 3). The Gospel writers saw Yeshua’s coming to the Temple before Pesach in that light: as the arrival of Hashem’s appointed messenger, calling for a purified service.

The “lamb inspected four days”: a reading, not a timetable

Many Messianic teachers say that Yeshua entered Jerusalem on 10 Nisan, the day the lambs were chosen, and was “inspected” for four days by the priests and teachers who questioned him in the Temple, before being crucified on 14 Nisan as the Passover lamb. It is a moving picture, and it draws on real themes: John calls Yeshua “the Lamb of God” (John 1:29), the Gospels show him questioned and found without fault (Luke 23:4), and the tradition of four days’ inspection of offerings is ancient.

But honesty requires several cautions.

• The Gospels do not make the link. None of the evangelists says that the entry took place on the tenth or connects it with selecting the lamb.
• The chronology is uncertain. John’s “six days before the passover” can be counted in different ways, depending on whether “the passover” means 14 or 15 Nisan and whether the counting is inclusive. The “next day” of the entry could be 9 or 10 Nisan, and Christian tradition places it on a Sunday, which fits some chronologies and not others. The Synoptics and John also differ on whether the crucifixion fell on 14 or 15 Nisan (see Pesach).
• The tenth-day selection was for Egypt. As noted above, the Mishnah teaches that only the Passover of Egypt required taking the lamb on the tenth.

So the “lamb inspected four days” is best offered as a homiletical reading, a way of meditating on Yeshua’s last days in light of Exodus 12, not a proven chronology. What the Gospels do say is enough: Yeshua came to Jerusalem before the feast, was examined publicly, and was found blameless.

Yochanan and Eliyahu

The Brit Hadashah (the New Testament) reads Malachi’s promise of Eliyahu with care. The angel tells Zechariah that his son Yochanan will go before Hashem “in the spirit and power of Eliyahu, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children” (Luke 1:17), quoting Malachi 3:24. Yeshua says of Yochanan the Immerser (John the Baptist), “if ye will receive it, this is Eliyahu, which was for to come” (Matthew 11:14), and after the transfiguration: “Eliyahu truly shall first come, and restore all things. But I say unto you, That Eliyahu is come already, and they knew him not” (Matthew 17:11–12). Yet when the priests asked Yochanan, “Art thou Eliyahu?”, he answered, “I am not” (John 1:21).

The texts fit together. Yochanan was not Eliyahu returned in person, and he refused that title; but he came in Eliyahu’s spirit and power and did Eliyahu’s work of turning hearts before the Messiah’s first coming. Yeshua’s words “Eliyahu truly shall first come, and restore all things” still look forward. The Mishnah describes the future Eliyahu as one who comes not to quarrel over lineages but “to make peace in the world,” quoting Malachi 3:24.¹²

Prophetic: the great and dreadful day

Malachi names the goal of history “the great and dreadful day of Hashem.” It is great because Hashem will be revealed as King and the righteous will “go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall” (3:20). It is dreadful because evil will be judged and “the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble” (3:19). Before that day Hashem sends Eliyahu, so that families and generations, fathers and children, and in a wider sense Israel and its estranged children, will be reconciled. The Mishnah ends its tractate Sotah with a ladder of virtues that leads to the Ruach HaKodesh, then to the resurrection of the dead, which “comes through Eliyahu, of blessed memory.”¹³

This is why Eliyahu has a cup at the Seder table and a chair at every circumcision, and why his name is sung at the close of every Shabbat. On the Shabbat before Pesach, Israel hears the promise again, and a few nights later opens the door to welcome him. For followers of Yeshua, the hope is doubled: Yeshua who came once, whom Yochanan announced, will come again as Mashiach ben David, to gather Israel, raise the dead who sleep, and reign in Jerusalem. As Yeshua said, Eliyahu “shall first come, and restore all things.” No one knows the day (Mark 13:32); we only know whom we are waiting for.

Keeping Shabbat HaGadol

• Study the laws of Pesach. Attend or read a Shabbat HaGadol teaching, and finish the practical preparations for the feast.
• Read the Haggadah in the afternoon. Follow the old custom of reading from “Avadim hayinu” so that the text is fresh for the Seder.
• Hear Malachi. Let the last words of the Prophets, “Remember the Torah of Moshe” and “I will send you Eliyahu,” shape your preparation.
• Turn hearts. Malachi’s mission is reconciliation. Before the Seder, seek peace with family members and invite those who might otherwise be alone.

See our calendar for this year’s dates.