Passover and the Festival of Unleavened Bread as a Single Ritual Complex

What is it about?

This article challenges the idea that Passover and the Festival of Unleavened Bread, described in the Hebrew Bible, originated as separate rituals among different groups of ancient peoples. Such an idea underlies the description of the rituals in the Bible itself, and is also expounded by many scholars of the Hebrew Bible. In contrast, by comparing the biblical rituals to other ritual writings that have been discovered in excavations of the ancient city called Emar (dating about 1250 BCE, a few centuries before the formation of ancient Israel as a monarchy), we can observe that festivals similar to Passover and Unleavened Bread were practiced by other nearby peoples, and that they follow a similar paradigm of connecting rituals of the first month on the 14th (like the Bible’s Passover) with a seven-day festival starting on the 15th (like the Festival Unleavened Bread). This not only suggests that the biblical festivals were conjoined from the beginning, but also that they cannot be used as sources for thinking about what separate groups of people may have practiced them, as scholars have often done.

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