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Overview
The Passover Anthology describes the varied experiences of the Jewish Passover throughout the lands and the ages: the story, the many facets of its celebration in the Jewish home and community, the laws and the prayers, the seder plate and the songs, the art and the dances, and—of course—the games. Showcasing modern writings by Winston Churchill, Heinrich Heine, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, and others, the volumeis a rich resource that today’s reflective readers will not wish to pass over.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780827613904 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The Jewish Publication Society |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2018 |
| Series: | The JPS Holiday Anthologies |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 552 |
| File size: | 20 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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CHAPTER 1
THE ORIGINS OF PASSOVER
The Bondage and Exodus of Israel
HARRY M. ORLINSKY
The second important epoch in the career of ancient Israel began with the descent of a group of Hebrews into Egypt sometime around the late seventeenth or early sixteenth century B.C.E. By the time their descendants had found their way back to Canaan, several centuries later, they were on the verge of nationhood. The Egyptian experience was a decisive factor in the development of Israel as a people. Here the Hebrew families grew in number, and their conception of God and His covenant with them was extended to cover the entire Hebrew folk. Here also they continued to oppose state autocracy, in contrast to the spineless submission of the Egyptian people at large. The ancient custom of deifying kings, nowhere more elaborately developed than in Egypt, left them fundamentally untouched. In this great episode, the heroic figure of Moses stands out in epic grandeur.
EISODUS: EGYPT AND THE HYKSOS
Whenever a drought and famine desolated the region of Palestine, it was common for whole tribes to pick up their belongings and seek refuge in Egypt. There the periodic overflow of the Nile gave life to the land, as it does today, and helped to regulate the agriculture of the country. The Egyptians learned early to dig channels for the seasonal flood and to irrigate the grain-producing land. Migration into Egypt was therefore an ancient expedient.
In Palestine, on the other hand, the rains did not always come when needed. A late thirteenth-century Egyptian document, for example, tells how the semi-nomadic in-habitants of Edom, south of Palestine, left their homes in time of drought to come to Egypt "to keep themselves alive and to keep their cattle alive." It was famine, too, as the Bible says, which compelled Abraham and Isaac in an earlier period to go south (Gen. 12 and 26), and the same reason is given for Jacob's sending his sons to Egypt, where grain could still be procured even in a time of general drought (Gen. 42 ff.). As a result of this mission, the entire family finally settled there.
At the same time, this Eisodus — a "going into," as distinguished from the Exodus, a "going out of" — may also have been encouraged by certain ethnic disturbances which for a period disrupted Egyptian suzerainty in Canaan and reduced the sovereignty of the Egyptian homeland as well. Following upon the increasing disintegration of the Egyptian state, a mixed group of Asiatics, apparently mostly Semites, known generally as Hyksos (literally, "rulers of foreign countries"), appeared in the north and swarmed down through Syria and Palestine. By about 1720 B.C.E. they had crossed the land bridge into Africa and conquered much of Egypt, a domination that was not to be completely broken until about 1550.
Between the Hyksos and the Hebrews there appear to be a number of points of contact. It is known, for in-stance, that a certain Hyksos chieftain in Egypt bore the name Jacob-el, or perhaps Jacob-har, which means "May El, or Har [the mountain god], Give Protection." Another Hyksos leader was called Jacob-baal, "May Baal Protect." The verbal element, Jacob, which means "protect," is identical with the name of the Hebrew patriarch Jacob who settled in Egypt. Again, the historical kernel which resides in the dramatic story of the career of Joseph in Egypt, of the coming to power of a Hebrew in the Egyptian court, could well have derived from the period of the Hyksos, when Semites, and in all probability Habiru* among them, were prominent among the new rulers of Egypt. For it was not Egyptian habit to nourish the ambitions of strangers in their midst. Further-more, it would seem to be more than a mere coincidence that the Hebrews, according to the Bible, settled in Goshen in the Delta, the very area which the Hyksos built up around their new capital, Avaris, the later Tanis.
In this connection it is also interesting to note that Josephus, the Jewish historian of the first century C.E., quotes the Egyptian historian Manetho (about 275 B.C.E.), to the effect that a large number of Hyksos made their way from Avaris to Canaan and there built Jerusalem. These Hyksos, according to Manetho, were "not fewer in number than 240,000," a figure which re-calls the biblical statement (Nu. 1.46) that 603,550 Hebrew males, exclusive of Levites, women, and children, participated in the Exodus from Egypt.
All these facts suggest that the Hebrews and the Hyksos may have been on terms of considerable intimacy; so that the entry of the Hebrews into Egypt would have been facilitated by the presence of Hyksos in positions of power, and the bondage accounted for by the enslavement of foreign elements after the fall of the Hyksos invaders. If this hypothesis be accepted, it provides evidence that the biblical version of the Hebrew sojourn in Egypt (Gen. 39-50, Ex. 1 ff.) derives from the same period as the events which it describes. For the Egyptians themselves, humiliated by their conquest at the hands of the Hyksos, avoided and suppressed any reference to the events of the period, and it would have been well-nigh impossible for anyone to learn the historical details very much later.
THE SOJOURN
The Bible itself elaborates only on the final period of the bondage in Egypt. But what was there to say? After the Egyptians had overthrown the Hyksos, they enslaved those foreigners who had not fled, thus reversing the status of the non-Egyptians in the land as the Bible re-cords: And a new king arose in Egypt who did not know Joseph ... And they [the Egyptians] set taskmasters over them [the Hebrews] to afflict them with forced labor. And they built for Pharaoh store-cities, Pithom and Rameses (Ex. 1.8-11).
Under the Hyksos domination, Egyptian culture had sunk so low that the period has been described as "The Great Humiliation." But the successful war of liberation against the Hyksos led to an Egyptian revival on such a grand scale that the period of the New Kingdom which followed, especially during the Eighteenth and Nine-teenth Dynasties (about 15501150), has been called the Golden Age and was the subject of a recent book which bore the suggestive title, When Egypt Ruled the East? The development of literature, art, and building, the inculcation of individual physical prowess in sport and in battle, the marked extension of the influence of women in the royal court and in upper-class circles generally — all of these manifested a new cosmopolitanism, and even secularism, brought on by imperial expansion abroad and urbanization at home.
There was much in the Egyptian environment that the Hebrews could emulate. But the kind of life which they and others led in the Egyptian slave camp did not en-courage cultural apprenticeship. "Slave troops on a government building project," as one authority puts it, "have no opportunity for discussion with priests and scribes. Their simple desert souls would see and shrink from some of the abominations of the effete civilization and long to escape dreary enslavement rather than admire the cultural triumph of the land of bondage."
MOSES, LEADER OF THE EXODUS
It was probably sometime in the thirteenth century that a group of Hebrews and others united under the leadership of Moses, of the tribe of Levi, to escape from Egypt. This tribe was foremost in organizing those state slaves who were willing to chance the break for freedom. Several outstanding Levites bore Egyptian names — for example, Moses, Miriam, Hophni, Phinehas, Merari, Putiel, and perhaps Aaron. This alone indicates a considerable period of residence in Egypt, also a surprising degree of resistance and determination to be free, despite a long period of slavery.
The Bible makes it amply clear that many non-Hebrew elements, "the mixed multitude" of Exodus (12.38) and Numbers (11.4), accompanied Moses and the Hebrews out of Egypt. The Egyptian sources, in turn, provide a very clear background for this circumstance. Tens of thousands of workers, natives of many countries and members of different ethnic groups, labored for the Egyptian state. Already in the fifteenth century, as a result of the military conquests of Amenophis II in Syria and Palestine, large numbers of Semitic and non-Semitic captives of war, including 3,600 Apiru (Habiru), were brought to Egypt as state slaves. The military campaigns of other Egyptian kings, from the fourteenth to the twelfth centuries, produced similar results. The great building projects of Rameses II (about 1301-1234), at such places as Pithom and Rameses, employed these "mixed multitudes," many of whom were eager to escape from slavery.
Scholars have long been troubled by the fact that Egyptian records make no mention of Moses and the Exodus, and some have expressed the belief that a document or two may yet turn up with reference to them. Yet the modern student of ancient Egyptian history should share neither this worry nor this optimism. First, when the Egyptians lost a battle, they customarily either recorded it as a victory or else passed over it in silence. Thus the prolonged Hyksos rule was not mentioned in contemporaneous Egyptian sources until the Hyksos were expelled, and even the victory over them was apparently not officially recorded. And second, the scope of the Exodus and the significance of it for the Egyptian government were so meager as not to merit any documentary mention.
Israel in Egypt: The Historical Problems
JOSEPH H. HERTZ
WHO WAS THE PHARAOH OF THE OPPRESSION?
There are several candidates for the infamous title of "Pharaoh of the Oppression," under whom the bondage of the Israelites ended in a systematic attempt at their extermination. The majority of scholars identify him with the splendor-loving and tyrannical Rameses II, whose dates are variously given as 1300-1234 B.C.E. (Petrie) and 1347-1280 (Mahler). "He was a vain and boastful character who wished to dazzle posterity by covering the land with constructions whereon his name was engraved thousands of times, and who prided himself in his inscriptions upon great conquests which he never made" (Naville). The Exodus itself is held to have taken place under his son, Merneptah, with whom the decline of Egypt began. Merneptah (or Menephtah) was an obstinate and vain despot. He too had the habit of claiming as his own the achievements of others. He was "one of the most unconscionable usurpers (and defacers) of the monuments of his predecessors, including those of his own father, who had set him the example ... due to a some-what insane desire to perpetuate his own memory."
Some scholars, however, date the oppression and the Exodus in the century preceding Rameses II, and connect it with the religious revolution of Amenophis IV, or Ikhnaton (1383-1365). This extraordinary personality abolished the multitudinous deities of the Egyptian Pantheon, and devoted himself exclusively to the worship of the sun. These scholars hold that there was some relation between the faith of the Israelites and the solar monotheism of Ikhnaton, and that Israelite influence was partly responsible for this assault on the gross idolatry of Egypt. Ikhnaton was hated by the people as the "heretic king," and his innovations were abandoned by his son-in- law Tut-an-khamen who succeeded him, eventually to be altogether uprooted by Haremrab, the last pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty. When the native religion was restored — these scholars maintain — the Israelites suffered persecution and degradation; and the oppression formed part of the extirpation of Ikhnaton's heresy.
Other egyptologists go back still another century to Thotmes III (15031449), and declare him to have been the Pharaoh of the Oppression. They connect the oppression and the departure of the Israelites from Egypt with the movements of the Habiru people in the Amarna age and believe that the recently discovered inscriptions on the Sinai Peninsula likewise favor this theory.
One of the main reasons which induce both these groups of scholars to dissent from the general view that Rameses II. was the Pharaoh of the Oppression, is the fact that the name "Israel" is alleged to occur on an inscription of Merneptah. That inscription (discovered in 1896) is a song of triumph of Merneptah, describing in grandiloquent language his victories in Canaan; and, among other conquests, he boasts that "Canaan is seized with every evil; Ashkelon is carried away; Gezer is taken; Yenoam is annihilated; Ysiraal is desolated, its seed is not." From the phrase, "Ysiraal is desolated," these scholars deduce that the Israelites must in those days have been in posses-sion of Canaan, and that therefore the Exodus must have taken place long before the time of Merneptah. However, it is not at all certain that the words, "Ysiraal is desolated," refer to Israel. Thus, Professor Kennett takes the phrase as analogous with that concerning Ashkelon and Gezer, and therefore merely stating that Merneptah had devastated the district of Jezreel. And if "Ysiraal" does mean Israel, then it refers to the settlements in Palestine by Israelites from Egypt before the Exodus (Jampel). From various notices in I Chronicles we see that during the generations preceding the oppression, the Israelites did not remain confined to Goshen or even to Egypt proper, but spread into the southern Palestinian territory, then under Egyptian control, and that they even engaged in skirmishes with the Philistines. When the bulk of the nation had left Egypt and was wandering in the wilder-ness, these Israelite settlers had thrown off their Egyptian allegiance. And it is these settlements which Merneptah boasts of having devastated during his Canaanite campaign. There is, therefore, no cogent reason for dissenting from the current view that the Pharaoh of the Oppression was Rameses II, with his son Merneptah as the Pharaoh of the Exodus.
THE "INCONVENIENCE" OF BIBLICAL TRADITIONS
Little need be said in regard to the extreme and baseless skepticism, recently revived in Soviet anti-religious circles, that the Israelites never were in Egypt; and that, in con-sequence, there could not have been either an oppression or an Exodus.
There is one conclusive answer to the doubts as to the historicity of the Exodus and other crucial events in scriptural history; and that is, what has aptly been called the "inconvenience" of biblical traditions. One or two examples will both explain this argument and make clear its unanswerable force. The first example is taken from the story of Abraham. For centuries, the Hebrew tribes waged a life-and-death struggle with the native population for the possession of ancient Palestine. But instead of the Hebrews claiming that they too were natives of Canaan, or that they were the true aborigines of its soil, Bible tradition concerning the beginnings of the Hebrew people is emphatic that its ancestors were not born in Canaan, but were nomads, immigrant shepherds, and had their origin in Ur of the Chaldees. Now, even the skeptical historian is forced to admit that such a tradition must be based on strict history, as no people would invent such an "inconvenient" tradition in regard to a matter of vital importance like its right and title to its national home-land. To take another example. The record in Genesis that Isaac and Jacob married Aramean wives must be based on fact, and could not have arisen, as some Bible critics maintain, in the days of Monarchy. For throughout the days of the Monarchy, Aram was the hereditary enemy of Israel, and was guilty of the most hideous bar-barities in its continued attempts to annihilate Israel. It is clear that here too the tradition that the "Mothers" of the Israelite people were Aramean women, was an "inconvenient" one — and cannot therefore be an invention of later legend (Cornill, Jirku).
All this applies with immeasurably greater force in regard to the historicity of the oppression in Egypt. Com-pared with the Egyptian bondage and the deliverance there from, everything else in Bible history is of secondary importance. The memory of that bondage and deliverance is woven into the message of legislator, historian, psalmist, prophet and priest; and a large portion of Jewish life both in the biblical and the post-biblical ages is but a reminder of the Exodus from Egypt, an echo of that divine event which meant the birth of Israel as a nation. Now, it is unthinkable that any nation, unless forced to do so by the overwhelming compulsion of unforgettable fact, would of its own account have wantonly affixed to its forefathers the stain and dishonor of slavery in a foreign country. No people has ever yet invented a disgraceful past for itself. The invention by a later age of a story so humiliating to national self-respect would be still more astounding in the case of Israel, when we consider that after the days of Merneptah the decline of Egypt began, and the invented national bondage would have been to a weak and waning power. If, therefore, Israel's sojourn and bondage in Egypt were merely a fiction, such fiction would be quite inexplicable — in fact, a psychological miracle. Even a radical student of this question like Professor Peet sums up his conclusions as follows: "That Israel was in Egypt under one form or another no historian could possibly doubt; a legend of such tenacity representing the early fortunes of a people under so un-favorable an aspect, could not have arisen save as a reflection of real occurrences."
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations,
A Note from the Publisher,
Preface,
Acknowledgments,
BOOK ONE PASSOVER IN HISTORY,
I The Origins of Passover,
II Passover and the Last Supper, by Solomon Zeitlin,
III Passover and the Ritual Murder Libel, by Solomon Grayzel,
IV Passover in Many Lands,
V The Development of the Passover Haggadah,
VI The Baking of Matzot,
BOOK TWO PASSOVER IN LITERATURE, ART AND MUSIC,
VII Passover in the Bible,
VIII Passover in Post-Biblical Writings,
IX Passover in Talmud and Midrash,
X Passover in Medieval Jewish Literature,
XII Passover in Modern Prose,
XIII Passover in the Short Story,
XIV Passover in Poetry,
XV Music of Passover, by Judith K. Eisenstein,
XVI Passover in Art, by Rachel Wischnitzer,
BOOK THREE PASSOVER FOR YOUNG PEOPLE,
XVII Stories for Passover,
XVIII Poems for Passover,
BOOK FOUR PASSOVER REJOICING,
XIX Passover Curiosities,
XX Passover Folklore,
XXI Passover Programs and Projects,
XXII Dances for Passover, by Dvora Lapson,
XXIII Passover Dishes, by Hanna Goodman,
BOOK FIVE COMMEMORATION OF PASSOVER,
XXIV The Observance of Passover,
Glossary of Passover Terms,
Bibliography,
Notes,