We have a religious obligation to talk about Pesach and the exodus from Egypt, in the hope of building a connection between us and the Hebrews of Moses’ time.

How we do this is laid out in the Hagadah, a mash-up of writings assembled over several hundred years but first edited in about 200 CE by Judah HaNasi (Judah the Prince, or Leader) and published in Tractate Pesachim in the Mishnah. This sets out the basics: the Four Questions; the requirement to expound the Exodus story; the drinking of four cups of wine; and the explaining of symbols (matzah, shankbone and maror).

Over the next 300 years, the Talmud (~200–500 CE) adds to this, with interpretations of biblical verses, and anecdotes about the seder nights (e.g., the rabbis at Bnei Brak who went on talking until it was time for shacharit).

In the second half of the first millennium, the Geonic period (~600–1000 CE), the Hagadah becomes more fixed, especially in the tenth century, under the Egyptian-born Saadia Gaon (the Very Excellent Saadia), who became head of the Sura academy in Babylonia. Saadia produced one of the first known hagadah texts, which we recognise for such standards as Ha Lahma Anya, Dayeinu and Chad Gadya.

In this sense, the Hagadah can be seen as a walk through time: 1. The Biblical core; 2. The Mishnah layer; 3. The Talmudic layer; 4. The Geonic layer; 5. Medieval additions; and 6. Later embellishments (1500 CE to today).

But there’s a significant gap: we have no specific information about how to celebrate Pesach, or how Pesach was celebrated, from the Exodus to the rabbinic period about 1,500 years later. At most, there are passages in the books following the Exodus that describe how Passover was observed in practice, especially the sacrifice and the eating of the lamb, but they do not prescribe how we should—either because it was understood and there was no need or because it had been forgotten. 

In particular, we have Joshua 5:10–12, where the Israelites camp in Gilgal after entering Israel, celebrate Pesach and eat roasted grain and matzah. (It’s at this point that the daily supply of manna stops.)

In 2 Kings 23, we have the Temple-era Passover, in which King Josiah institutes a major national Pesach celebration, sacrifices are performed in the Temple, and the people are told to keep the feast “as written in the book of the covenant”, which confirms that the practice had been lost. Here, commemoration of Pesach relies on centralised Temple worship; there is no obvious seder narrative. 

And third, and very much later, 2 Chronicles 30 and 2 Chronicles 35 tell us about the reforms of the Second Temple period. Here, in chapter 30, King Hezekiah restores Passover, the people gather in Jerusalem, and they celebrate with joy and prayer. Some irregularities are also noted: late observance and mixed participation.

In 2 Chronicles 35, looking back to Josiah’s Passover maybe 80 years later, we have a detailed description of the sacrifices, we see that the priests and Levites are heavily involved, and that there was a large-scale, highly organised slaughter of lambs. This, says Chronicles, was unlike any Passover kept since the days of Samuel.

This last passage is the most detailed description of how Passover was actually performed and, although historic, it was recounted between ~400 to 300 BCE. That means more than a century after the release of the Jews from exile in Babylon by Cyrus (~538 BCE). 

That still leaves us with a significant gap—the period from 400 BCE to the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. What did the Jews do then?

One hint comes from a fragment of papyrus discovered in 1907, now known as “The Passover Papyrus from Elephantine”. Elephantine, an island on the Nile in Upper Egypt, once had a large Jewish presence, under the protection of the Persians. It also housed a Jewish temple — the only temple we know of apart from Jerusalem, and one where only grain and incense were offered, not animals. It was destroyed in about 410 BCE (either in an anti-Jewish pogrom or after a petty domestic feud between two leaders). 

Between 1893 and 1910, Aramaic papyri were found on the island, including this one, discovered by the German archaeologists Otto Rubensohn and Friedrich Zucker. “The Passover Papyrus from Elephantine”, dated to 419 BCE, is part of a letter from “Hananiah” to “Yedaniah”, the leader of the Elephantine Jewish community. 

It seems to discuss how to observe Pesach, because the text talks about refraining from work and not eating leavened bread, but it may in fact have related to other religious practices, including those influenced by Persian Zoroastrianism. (We have to be cautious here because it’s not certain that the Jewish community in Elephantine followed Biblical practice at the time.)

That said, this letter does not indicate any obvious divergence from the practices prescribed in the Torah. It is odd, however, that the celebration of Passover needed explaining.

[To my brothers, Ye]daniah and his colleagues the Jewish ga[rrison,] your brother Hanan[i]ah. May God/the gods [seek after] the welfare of my brothers [at all times.] And now, this year, Year 5 of King Darius, it has been sent from the king to Arsa[mes ……… …]

Now, you thus count four[teen days in Nisan and on the 14th at twilight ob]serve [the Passover] and from the 15th day until the 21st day of [Nisan observe the Festival of Unleavened Bread. Seven days eat unleavened bread. Now,] be pure and take heed. [Do] n[ot do] work [on the 15th day and on the 21st day of Nisan.] Do not drink [any fermented drink. And do] not [eat] anything of leaven [nor let it be seen in your houses from the 14th day of Nisan at] sunset until the 21st day of Nisa[n at sunset. And b]ring into your chambers [any leaven which you have in your houses] and seal (them) up during [these] days. …

[To] my brothers, Yedaniah and his colleagues the Jewish garrison, your brother Hananiah s[on of ??].

There are two important features to this letter. First, it was written in Aramaic, which the Jews had picked up in Babylonia during their captivity, and not Persian, the new lingua franca. The other is that God is referred to in the plural, which suggests the idea of a pantheon or of a realm in which “our” God was the chief god.

The text points to features that are recognisably Biblical, but raises (for us) a question that could have been asked a millennium earlier: why were bread and fermented drink—i.e. beer—unacceptable during Pesach? One answer may be that the production of both was effectively a state monopoly in Egypt. In removing ourselves from Egypt, we were therefore also rejecting one of its main sources of economic power. The equivalent today might be to refuse to drive a car.

What then happened in the period immediately before Mishnaic Judaism? For that we have to look at the Egyptian city of Alexandria, on the western edge of the Nile River Delta. For three centuries Alexandria functioned as the Greek capital of Egypt and its main port, and its Jewish population alone is said to have grown to at least 500,000. 

The Jews there created the Septuagint (LXX) version of the Bible, written in Koine (Coptic/Egyptian) Greek, which they evidently preferred to the Hebrew version.

The intellectual energy of Alexandria was astounding, and the Alexandrian era was one of the greatest periods in Jewish history. It has, however, been wiped from our cultural memory by the rabbonim. That seems to be because the intellectual thrust of the period was to harmonise Judaism and Greek culture. However popular this was, it was later seen as compromising, especially when its solidly established Jewish texts, written in Greek, became the bedrock of Early Christianity. At that point, a new fundamentalism saw the rabbis urging a return to the original Hebrew.

Compared with the six books and 63 tractates of the Mishnah, and the 30 or 40 volumes of the Talmud (depending on which edition one reads), very little now remains of the Alexandrian period—with one exception: the magisterial figure of Philo, whose writings seem to have survived in full.

Very much in Philo’s shadow are Aristobulus of Paneas, fragments of whose writings remain; Aristeas, the pseudonymous author of the Letter of Aristeas; Demetrius the Chronographer, known through later citations, and Eupolemus, of whose writings we have fragments only.

We have little idea of how the Alexandrians conducted their seders, but we can assume, from the survival of the Afikomen (a Greek word) that the seder was a Hellenistic emulation of the Greek symposion, a scene recognisable from murals and vase decorations of the time. It is from this period that we have the tradition of sitting on couches and reclining to the left, as the Greek elite did. 

(Whether they were also skimpily dressed—at best—and whether the seder was an event for men only is a matter on which we can only speculate.)

Alexandrian Jews may have been the first to engage in Scripture-based storytelling in a vernacular language, and thus in Greek. But Greek banqueting culture must have influenced the style of the seder, with the drinking of multiple cups of wine and the holding of structured philosophical conversations about the significance of the Biblical story.

At the most elevated level, the discussion is likely to have been influenced by Hellenism. What was novel in Alexandria was that Philo tended to interpret biblical events allegorically, connecting historical events in Exodus to moral and philosophical ideas, not something favoured by the later rabbonim. Philo promoted the Stoic idea of Logos—the rational order that shapes the universe—as the rational expression of God’s wisdom, and so his seders may have included ethical reflections and allegory.

Among the most important of Philo’s works is “On the Life of Moses”. For us, as Jews, the book is perhaps a little tepid. It contains an extended interpretation of the Exodus narrative, including the events that Passover commemorates such as the plagues, the crossing of the sea, and the drowning of the Egyptian troops. Oddly, there is no reference to the Children of Israel sacrificing lambs on the night of the last plague. From this, one might infer that his text was designed to frame the Jews, and Jewish history, in a way mostly likely to appeal to his Hellenistic contemporaries, dignifying Judaism as much more than a mere cultic practice—something far more intellectually aspirational.

Three aspects of Philo of Alexandria’s writing seem especially significant. First, that the Exodus represents the liberation of the soul and that the physical escape from Egypt can be seen as an escape from passion and moral slavery, leading to philosophical purification and the inner mastery of the self. By the same token, this reading sees Egypt as symbolic of disorder, ignorance and materialism. 

Second, in Philo’s allegorical style, unleavened bread represents simplicity and purity, while leaven represents inflation, pride and excess. This is one of the closest ancient parallels to symbolic explanations in the Hagadah once these became popular much later. 

And third, Philo frames the Exodus festival not just as a historical remembrance but as a continuous ethical and spiritual event. (In fact, he elsewhere states that there were ten Jewish festivals, of which the first was “Every Day”.) That idea of continuously “celebrating Passover” is embedded in our daily prayers and in our memory of the Exodus when making kiddush.  

None of this became codified into an Alexandrine hagadah, to be repeated every year—at least, no such text exists. But fragments seem to have survived into the formalisation of the seder in the Mishnaic period: we just have to know how to look for—like hunting the Afikomen at the end of the meal.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)