PASSOVER, a spring festival celebrated by the Jews in com memoration of the, Exodus from Egypt by a family feast in the home on the first evening, and by abstaining from leaven during the seven days of the feast. According to tradition, the first Pass over ("the Passover of Egypt") was preordained by Moses at the command of God. The Israelites were commanded to select on the tenth of Abib (Nisan), a he-lamb of the first year, without blemish, to kill it on the eve of the fourteenth, and to sprinkle with its blood the lintel and side post of the doors of their dwellings so that the Lord should "pass-over" them when he went forth to slay the first-born of the Egyptians. The lamb thus drained of blood was to be roasted and entirely consumed by the Israelites, who should be ready with loins girded, shoes on feet and staff in hand so as to be prepared for the Exodus. In memory of this the Israelites were for all time to eat unleavened bread (Mazzoth) for seven days, as well as keep the sacrifice of the Passover on the eve between the fourteenth and the fifteenth of Nisan. This evening meal was not to be attended by any stranger or uncircum cised person. "On the morrow of the Sabbath" a wave-offering of a sheaf of barley was to be made.
Various theories have been from time to time proposed to account for this complex of enactments. J. Spencer in his De legibus Hebraeorum (1685) saw in the Passover a practical pro test against the Egyptian worship of Apis. Vatke considered it a celebration of the spring solstice, Bauer a means of removing the impurity of the old year. Lengerke recognized a double motive : the lamb for atonement, the unleavened bread as a trace of the haste of the early harvest. Ewald regarded the Passover as an original pre-Mosaic spring Festival made to serve the interest of purity and atonement.
Investigations based on minute literary analysis of the Penta teuch, were begun by Graf, continued by Kuenen, and culminated in the work of Wellhausen and Robertson Smith. The modern view claims to determine the respective ages and relative chrono logical position of the various passages in which the Passover is referred to in the Pentateuch, and assumes that each successive stratum represents the practice in ancient Israel at the time of composition, laying great stress upon the omissions as implying non-existence. The main passages and their contents are arranged
chronologically in the following way : A. In the Elohist Book of the Covenant (Exod. xxiii.).
B. In the Yahwist Source (Exod. xxxiv. 18-21, 25).
C. In the Yahwistic History (Exod. xii. 21-27, 29-36, 38-39, xiii. 3-16).
D. The Deuteronomist (Deut. xvi. 1-8, 16-17).
E. In the Holiness Code (Lev. xxiii. 4-8, 9-14).
F. In the Priestly History (Exod. xii. 1-20,28-31, xiii. 1-2).
G. In the Secondary Sources of the Priestly Code (Exod. xii. 43-50, ix. 1-14, xiv. Many discrepancies have been observed by critics in the dif ferent portions of this series of enactments. Thus in the Elohist and in Deuteronomy the date of the festival is only vaguely stated to be in the month of Abib, while in the Holiness Code and in the Priestly History the exact date is given and so on.
As regards the character and significance of the two feasts it may be noted that the Passover (Nisan 15) is taken back to the beginning of the national history. It originally connoted a pastoral feast celebrating the birth of the lambs. It goes back to the desert period, whereas the Feast of Unleavened Bread is an agricultural observance and cannot have been practised before the entry into Palestine. The "sheaf of first-fruits of your harvest" mentioned in Lev. xxiii. 1o, is associated in Jewish tradition with the barley harvest (Mishna, Menachoth x.).
The folk-etymology of the word Passover given in Exod. xii. 23 seems to connect the original of the feast with a threshold cove nant (see Trumbull, Threshold Covenant, 1902) ; the daubing of the side-posts and lintel with blood at the original Passover, which finds its counterpart in Babylonian custom (Zimmern, Beit. z. Bab. Rel. ii. 126-7) and in Arabic usage (Wakidi, ed. Kremer, p. 28), implies a blood covenant.