A Forgotten Pesach Ritual

Martin S. Cohen

A fundamental principle of all classical rabbinic exegesis is that the Torah never repeats itself pointlessly, that there is always some point for the reiteration of any detail at all that appears, or that seems to appear, more than once in the text.1 One famous example of how the rabbis of old applied this principle is on prominent display in the Passover Haggadah, where each of the Torah’s repeated references to latter-day Israelites telling the story of Passover to their children is taken to refer to a distinct and at least slightly dissimilar obligation to address the children separately and differently based on their level of intellectual ability and emotional engagement. Although there is no suggestion in Scripture that these are meant to be different kinds of children, the Haggadah imagines them as such: three whose levels of curiosity vary and one too inarticulate even to formulate a question in the first place.2 The passage in the Haggadah is famous and known to all who have ever attended a Passover seder. But in the context of Scripture itself, those passages are not about different kinds of children and their varying levels of interest and engagement at all; rather, they are about how the different rituals connected with the holiday are intended to provoke the kind of natural curiosity that will lead children to inquire about its backstory. One, the last, supposes a child—one who morphs into the Haggadah’s wise one—looking out at the whole complex of Passover rituals and asking what scriptural passages underlie their detail.3 But the other three single out specific rituals intended by their very nature to arouse the interest of less exegetically curious children.

The first is the transformation into an annual ritual of the detail from the story about the Israelites slaughtering lambs and kids and using the blood to paint the doorposts and lintels of their homes. There is indeed a lot in that story to pique the curiosity of young onlookers. For example, the narrative features families slaughtering those animals in a non-sacrificial context and then preparing the meat of those animals for consumption by themselves according to certain specific rules, whereas the eventual ritual will require slaughter in the context of sacrifice. Also mysterious is the way that some of the rituals ordained for the original consumers of the flesh of the slaughtered animals became laws for all time—for example, the meat must be roasted whole, its bones unbroken, and eaten matsot ʿal merorim (whatever that means)—but others did not; the Israelites in Egypt were told to consume the lamb or kid with their staffs in their hands and their hiking boots (or at least their shoes) on their feet, and to gobble it down quickly, but those details failed to become ritualized for future generations to mimic (Exodus 12:8 and 11, respectively). But most challenging of all is the detail, both fully present and totally ignored in the scriptural narrative, that God clearly had no trouble keeping the Israelites safe when inflicting the nine other plagues on Egypt, thus raising the question of why the Israelites had to mark their homes with blood at all.4

And so we find the first of three ritual-specific questions in Exodus 12:26: “And so, when your children ask what this whole commemorative undertaking means to you, you shall answer, ‘This is the Passover sacrifice to the Eternal One Who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt to smite the Egyptians while making safe our own homes.’”5 That question ends up memorialized in the Haggadah as the question of the obstreperous child, but in context it simply supposes that all the disconnects between the scriptural narrative and the latter-day ritual will productively confuse young observers (who presumably have not gotten so used to the details that they can still see the trees and not solely the forest) and prompt them to ask what it is all intended to mean.

The second has to do with the substitution of matzah for bread for the full week of the festival. This, too, is presented in the text in a way that children will find confusing. Exodus 12:39 more or less says that the Israelites left Egypt with such obedient alacrity that they did not even have time to linger long enough for their dough to rise and so, having no choice, they baked it in its unrisen form to create matzah. It is a famous explanation, but it does not make all that much sense that the Israelites would occupy themselves between dining and departing Egypt by baking rather than by packing and taking leave of their neighbors, as we would expect them to.6 Nor does it seem clear how to connect the note in Exodus 12:8 to the effect that the Israelites were instructed weeks before leaving Egypt that the paschal beast, once slaughtered and its blood drained, must be eaten with matzah. So, too, can the presence of matzah on the seder table trigger a teaching moment, one specifically directed at children:

Matzah cakes shall be eaten for all seven days; indeed, there shall be seen in your midst no leavened foodstuffs nor shall even any leavening agent be seen anywhere within your borders. And you shall tell this story to your children on that day, saying “All this is because of that which the Almighty did for me by bringing me forth from Egypt” (Exodus 13:7–8).7

In the Haggadah, perhaps because matzah is the sole trigger symbol that has nothing to do with dead animals or dead children, this ends up as the response offered to the child who fails even to ask what is going on. Why scare such a passive, uninquisitive child until absolutely necessary?

And the third ritual is pidyon haben, the redemption of the firstborn sons of Israel. This eventually turns into the question of the Haggadah’s simple child, but, in its scriptural context, pidyon haben is presented as the kind of ritual that will by its nature arouse the curiosity of children, thus creating the context in which to tell them about the exodus:

Furthermore, when the Almighty finally brings you to the land of the Canaanite…and formally gives it over to you, you shall respond by offering to the Almighty the first living thing to emerge from every human womb, as well as the first to emerge from the womb of every animal you own. Indeed, in both cases shall such a male belong to the Almighty. The first to emerge from a donkey’s womb, however, shall be redeemed with a lamb. If you fail to redeem it, then you must break its neck instead. But all human firstborn among your sons must be redeemed. And so shall it come to pass that, when your child one day asks you, “What is all this about?,” you shall answer by saying, ‘With a mighty hand did the Almighty bring us forth from Egypt, from the house of bondage. And, indeed, when Pharaoh was recalcitrant about sending us forth, the Almighty responded by killing every firstborn male in the land of Egypt, both human and animal. And it is for that specific reason that I both offer up to God the firstborn male of every animal as a sacrifice and redeem the firstborn among our children. And this act shall be a sign upon your hand and a symbol between your eyes, for the Almighty brought us forth from Egypt with a mighty hand (Exodus 13:11–16, emphasis mine).8

So that seems clear enough. Three rituals are deemed weird or peculiar enough to arouse the natural inquisitiveness of children: the ingestion of the paschal offering, the substitution of matzah for bread on the dinner table, and the obligation to sacrifice or redeem firstborn animals but always to redeem firstborn Israelite sons. These three things are ordained by Scripture precisely to guarantee that the story of Israel’s redemption from bondage to Pharaoh in Egypt is never forgotten.

But that in turn raises a different question, one that will have already occurred to readers familiar with Jewish life. It hardly bears saying that the seder meal—all that is left of the paschal sacrifice in our Temple-less day—is a Passover ritual. (This is so obvious that it seems odd even to write it out. What else could it be?) And just as universally known, including by non-Jews, is the connection of matzah with Passover. But who thinks of pidyon haben as a Passover ritual? The answer—no one at all—has to do with the fact that it is not, in fact, a Passover ritual and that, despite the clear and plain sense of the passage cited above from Exodus 13, there is no concept in today’s Jewish world of families, say, bringing their newborn sons to a local kohen on the eve of Passover each year formally to fulfill the injunction to use the redemption of the firstborn to create just the kind of bizarre ritual that will get children interested enough to ask the question to which the answer will be that God passed over the homes of the Israelites when setting out to smite the firstborn of Egypt, which act led directly to Pharaoh, whose son also died that night, finally allowing the Israelites to leave.9 Yet that is certainly the most obvious way to read the passage, taking the ritual later known as pidyon haben as a Passover ritual like the others intended to arouse the curiosity of children and create the context for telling them the story of the exodus.10

There is evidence to suggest that such a ritual actually did exist in the Second Temple period, although the reference is in a part of Scripture that is never read out loud in synagogue and rarely studied by anyone other than academic students of the biblical text. Nehemiah ben Hakhaliah, a kind of wine steward to the king of Persia living in the middle of the fifth century BCE, tells the story of his life and work openly and very appealingly in the scriptural book that bears his name.11 It happened one day that a traveler from the Land of Israel—at the time, a province of the Persian Empire—arrived in Shushan, the capital city, and reported to Nehemiah that things were not going well for the Jews of Yehud. The gates to Jerusalem that had been burned when the Babylonians sacked the city almost a century and half earlier had never been repaired and neither had the walls of the city been rebuilt. Nehemiah responds to this by bursting into tears and then turning to God in prayer. A few months pass. And then, when the king finally notices how downcast his steward is and asks him what the matter might be, Nehemiah screws up his courage and asks for permission to head west to Jerusalem and there personally oversee the rebuilding of the city’s walls.

Many adventures ensue. The non-Jewish locals are actively hostile. But somehow the work gets done and, after only fifty-two days of work, the walls have been successfully repaired.12 Nehemiah has the idea that this kind of structural renewal needs to inspire in its wake some kind of spiritual recommitment as well. And so, on the first day of the seventh month, the day latter-day Jews know as Rosh Hashanah, Ezra—who has been absent from the narrative, but who was apparently still in town—is brought forward to read “the scroll of the Torah of Moses which God had bequeathed to Israel” (Nehemiah 8:1).13 An elaborate recommitment ceremony ensues as Nehemiah steps forward specifically to mention those laws of the Torah that the people must now agree to obey in order to signal their renewed commitment, all of them presumably rules and rituals that had somehow fallen into desuetude and were now being brought back as the meat and potatoes of the people’s renewed commitment to God’s law.14

The rules he lists will, for the most part, seem familiar to modern Jews: a commitment to endogamy, a return to strict observance of Shabbat and the sabbatical year, and a willing commitment to pay an annual tax to the Temple.15 Others are more obscure. For example, he cites the obligation to provide wood for the Temple altar as a commandment from the Torah.16 And then, having begun to mention annual rituals and commitments, he mentions the following several:

and to bring annually to the Temple the first fruits of our land—which is to say the first of every kind of fruit from every kind of tree that grows in our land, as well as our firstborn sons and the firstborn of our livestock as is written in the Torah—including the firstborn of our cattle and our sheep: to bring them [all] to the Temple [and to hand them over] to the priests who serve there, in the Temple (Nehemiah 10:36–37, emphasis mine).17

The passage can be read in lots of different ways. He goes on to talk about paying a tax on dough as well as something he calls terumah taxes, as well as taxes on fruit, wine, and oil, which he says must be delivered to the priests who serve in the Temple chambers devoted to the collection of such taxes. But what are we to make of the reference to the redemption of firstborn sons as an annual Temple ritual? Is Nehemiah simply reading the Torah and determining, as I suggested above, that pidyon haben was intended to be an annual ceremony in which families bring their firstborn sons to the Temple to be redeemed by priests, thereby provoking older children to ask about the point of the ritual? One could certainly read the passage to say that. Or is he saying that this ritual was actually known to him, that the commitment renewal ceremony over which he was presiding was going to require a return to various rituals and practices that had fallen away over the years? One could certainly read the text that way, too. It is not necessarily important that Nehemiah fails to connect this annual redemption ritual explicitly with Passover. The ritual of bringing the firstfruits of one’s harvest to the Temple took place on Shavuot, but Nehemiah does not mention that either. The far more important point is that he describes both of the above as annual rituals observed in the Temple by people who travel to that place to do that thing.18

So was Nehemiah’s comment reportage or exegesis? David J. A. Clines published a fascinating essay decades ago in which he described Nehemiah 10 as “a small treasure house of post-exilic interpretations of earlier Israelite law.”19 That could well be, but to read Nehemiah as calling upon his audience to observe a law that the man merely felt ought to have existed and not one he knew once actually to have been a feature of Temple life—that seems at best a strange way to create a context for people to demonstrate their allegiance to the Torah and its laws. Therefore, I choose the latter possibility as the most likely.

The ritual redemption of the firstborn sons of Israel is mentioned several other times in the Torah, none of which contradicts my reading of the passage from Exodus 13 above. After the incident of the golden calf, for example, Moses is told to carve two tablets like the first ones so that God can inscribe upon them the same words that were on the first set. This Moses does, lugging the tablets up to the top of the mountain, whereupon God descends to earth in a cloud and an extended colloquy begins.20 God reveals some divine attributes. Moses prostrates himself and in that position begs for forgiveness for the people. Apparently convinced, or at least mollified, God decides to renew—or at least not to cancel—the covenant, but certain of its terms are mentioned specifically, presumably to indicate their status as deal-breakers: God will still drive the Canaanites from Canaan, but the Israelites are going to have to hew to certain specific instructions in return. Among those crucial rules are these:

Observe the Festival of Matzah annually in the month of Aviv by eating matzah for seven days just as I have commanded you, for it was in the month of Aviv that you set forth from Egypt. The firstborn out of every womb belongs to me, as do the firstborn males of your oxen and sheep. The firstborn donkey, however, you shall redeem by replacing it with a lamb. Alternately, you may break the donkey’s neck, but every firstborn among your sons you must redeem, for you may not come into My presence empty-handed (Exodus 34:18–20).

Since the notion of coming into God’s presence empty-handed is an unambiguous reference to the custom of participating in one of the three annual pilgrimages to Jerusalem, is this passage not saying—and clearly—that the redemption of human firstborn sons is to be part of annual festival observance?21 It certainly sounds that way, even if it does not explicitly say that the point of the ritual is to trigger questioning by children about the larger history of the exodus from Egypt.22

We are used to reading the remaining references to firstborn sons being redeemed in the Torah in light of later practice, but the remaining ones either support the connection with Passover or at least do not contradict it. In the beginning of the book of Numbers, for example, we read that the firstborn were formally decommissioned, if that is the right word, from being “owned” by God:

As for Me, I am personally selecting the Levites from amidst the Israelites in place of all the firstborn—or at least in place of those firstborn sons of Israel who “opened” their mothers’ wombs at birth—so that they shall henceforth belong to Me just as has every firstborn son been Mine since the day on which I struck out at all the firstborn sons of the land of Egypt, thus simultaneously sanctifying unto Myself every firstborn in Israel, both human and animal. They are all Mine, and I Myself am the Eternal (Numbers 3:12–13).

This is not presented as mere theorizing either. The text actually goes so far as to present Moses being shown a practical way to deal with the problematic detail that there were precisely 273 more firstborn-of-their-mothers sons among the Israelites than there were eligible-to-serve men of the tribe of Levi and how to go about redeeming the firstborn into whose sandals there were no Levites available to step.23 The important point here is that this is specifically not a reference to the commandment to redeem the firstborn sons of Israel—nor would it make any sense to read it that way; since Levitical status was inherited, why would any subsequent generation of firstborn sons have to be redeemed at all once the initial transfer of belongingness to God has been achieved?24

Yet, when Scripture returns one final time to the ongoing obligation to redeem firstborn sons, the passage is a strange one. God is unambiguously depicted as speaking directly to Aaron, the high priest of Israel. (Use of second person throughout the oracle makes sense only if Aaron is the one being addressed.) So God instructs Aaron as follows:

Every womb-opening creature of any type that be brought nigh unto the Almighty, be it beast or human, shall be yours with the proviso that you redeem both human firstborn and the firstborn of unclean animals. This redemption shall take place when the creature-to-be-redeemed is at least one month old and the amount to be paid as the redemption price shall be five shekels according to the [weight of] holy shekels, which is to say the kind equal to twenty geirahs (Numbers 18:15–18).25

The text then goes on to explain in detail how Aaron is to deal with pure—namely, sacrificeable—animals.

Moderns familiar with contemporary Jewish practice read through this passage and see confirmed the law requiring that pidyon haben be done only for a child older than thirty days.26 But the text here says something quite different—namely, that firstborn sons must be brought to Aaron (here standing in for the priests of any generation) and handed over precisely in the same way that firstborn animals must be. The difference between the two is, of course, not negligible: animals that are impure—that cannot be sacrificed—and children are to be redeemed by the priests themselves and then presumably returned to their parents. Who can say whether that means that the priests facilitate the redemption by accepting the five shekels from the infant’s parents or, as the text seems to say, they themselves are to redeem such babies before returning them?27 But the fact remains that there are no passages in the Torah that contradict the plain meaning of the passage from Exodus 13 cited above to the effect that the parents of babies who are the firstborn to their mothers are to be brought to the Temple and there redeemed (by someone!) as part of the ritual run-up to Passover, and this was intended to serve as a kind of trigger ritual that will prompt the kinds of questions that parents can answer by telling the story of Israel’s exodus from Egypt.

What happened to pidyon haben as a Passover ritual is an excellent question. Perhaps as the Jewish world spread out into the diaspora, it was simply no longer possible to bring every firstborn child all the way to Jerusalem to be redeemed. Perhaps the reality of a Levitical priesthood in Jerusalem made the notion that firstborn sons still, after so many generations, needed formally to be decommissioned from the priesthood lose traction among the pious. Once the Temple was destroyed, rescheduling the pidyon ceremony for the thirty-first day of a boy’s life would certainly have been one of many adjustments enacted or informally adopted to speak to the new normal and to preserve what were then understood as rituals rooted in hoariest antiquity regardless of how they needed to be revised and revamped. In any event, the custom developed its own rules and was eventually detached completely from Passover. Is that something to regret? Maybe it is!28

Martin S. Cohen, Ph.D., is Rabbi of the Shelter Rock Jewish Center in Roslyn, New York, and a past editor of this journal.