Susan2

Anyone who has ever made bread knows that this is not true, that it was unleavened. The bread was leavened.

Anat

Slight correction: Urim is lights, Purim is lots (as in games of chance).

semiopen

Passwover is probably a combination of old holidays. The Torah talks about Pesach (passover) and Chag Hamatzot (Holiday of Matzot) separately. In addition, there is other springtime stuff going on.

Oddly, Easter which is during passover usually, is more closely associated with Purim (Esther).

Joan of Bark

Can you quote the passage in question? And are you arguing that one atrocity justifies another? And for that matter, why would an omnipotent God ever need to resort to slaughter?

A handful of Hebrews may have escaped from Egyptian captivity, or perhaps they were paid workers who merely returned home.

Most vindicated? By whom? Where do you get the 70% number?

Anat

The Hebrews did not escape from Egypt, they were never there (at least not in large numbers that anyone would notice). The Israelites and Judahites were subgroups of Canaanites that settled in the hill country around the time the Egyptian armies left Canaan. And the festival of booths is obviously a harvest festival of settled farmers, not a festival of wilderness nomads.

semiopen

Call me conservative but I tend to agree with Ms Bark, there must have been a couple of people there.

The Hebrews of Elephantine might deserve a mention; true, not because of passover, but because they built a temple and they spoke Aramaic dealing blows to those who suggest that worship of JHWH (or YAHU as the locals called him) was designed to be centralized in Jerusalem, in addition to the doubters of the prevalence of Aramaic among the Jews.

gdeering

Judging from some seders I've been to the celebration should be called "pass out" - which would better fit their uninformed idea of what the holiday celebrates. I seem to always be reminding them that it's celebrating the angel of death (as mentioned above) not the flight - which was rather a triumphal pillage and exit if you ask me.

But perhaps my heart has been hardened?



Gregg

Anat

OK, but wrong time period. Those were the people who escaped to Egypt around the last days of Judah, in the 6th century BCE, not in the Bronze Age.

semiopen

Thanks, I knew that but not much more.

Elephantine_papyri

This thing says they got there about 650 BCE.

Here is a passover document from there, King Darius seems to know quite a bit about the holiday.

http://web.archive.org/web/200702251...ne_papyri.html

I don't think they knew the Torah, but they did manage to build a temple like Solomon's "alongside that to the local ram-headed deity, Khnum."

Anat

So that's extra-biblical evidence for Passover in the late 5th century BCE. Thanks. I wonder if there'd be anything in the 6th or 7th centuries BCE.