2

meal. This is certainly older, considerably older, than the Mishnah; for (1) the Mishnah refers to differences in the use of it: according to Beth Shammai only Ps. 113, according to Beth Hillel also Ps. 114, was sung after the second cup, the remainder according to both schools being sung after the fourth cup;' (2) the passage already cited from Gamaliel I 'we should say Halleluiah' implies the use of the Hallel, and if the ascription of the saying to Gamaliel be correct, implies its use by at most before the middle of the first century A. D.; (3) the Mishnah (Pes. 10") says the Hallel should conclude with a benediction for redemption and cites two formulas, one upheld by Akiba († A. D. 135), the other by his contemporary Tarphon (Trypho). The formula maintained by Trypho may be more ancient: it runs Blessed is he who redeemed us and our fathers from Egypt and has brought us to this night'. Akiba's longer form is obviously later than A. D. 70, and runs: 'So may the Lord our God and the God of our fathers bring us to other festivals, which shall come round to us (np Dan D'bab), in peace, and in joy for the rebuilding (of the Temple), to eat of the Paschal victims and (other) sacrificial victims whose blood reaches the wall of thine altar acceptably and we will thank thee for our redemption. Blessed art thou O Lord, the Redeemer of Israel.' But if in even the briefer form the Benediction of redemption be later than A. D. 70, the probability that the singing of the Hallel itself is earlier than A. D. 70 and reaches back at least far into the first century A. D. is great. But if so, added to the recitation during the evening of God's redemptive act in history at the Exodus was prayer and song that in unambiguous terms expressed the hope and the passionate conviction that Israel would not always as now be in servitude to the nations. These were among the strains that closed the meal, 'The Lord is on my side, I will not fear what men can do unto me. . . All nations compassed me about, but in the name of the Lord I will cut them off. The Lord is my strength and song, and he is become my salvation.... The voice of rejoicing and salvation is in the tents of the righteous: the right hand of the Lord doeth valiantly.... I shall not die but live, and declare the works of the Lord.... The stone

which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner. . . Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.'1

...

Doubtless the Paschal meal, like other religious rites, was discharged by different companies with much difference of spirit, meaning, and emotion. To some it was pre-eminently a meal, a festal meal, with abundance of fare as well as certain unusual elements in the menu, and with abundance of wine. In some cases the sacred meal may even have been marked by excess. To others the Paschal meal, like other elements in the Jewish ritual, was doubtless pre-eminently the fulfilment of a commandment; God had commanded the rites, and without inquiring as to the meaning of the rites or caring for anything beyond they performed the rites as divine commands. But to those to whom it was neither merely a meal nor merely a succession of rites, but far more, who came, as Philo says, not to gratify the belly but to fulfil their ancestral custom with prayers and songs of praise, what did it mean? It was a sacrificial meal; but how much did that mean in these later times? Negatively it must be said that there is not a tittle of evidence that any sense survived that the eating of the Paschal flesh was an act of communion; if in that idea the custom of sacrificial meals arose, it has grown dim; neither Jubilees nor Philo, nor Josephus nor the Mishnah give any hint that the company assembled in order by or through the eating in itself of the Paschal victim to renew their spiritual life or to ward off dangers. When Beer (Pesachim, p. 100) says: 'The Paschal meal is a mystic meal which, working like a mysterious medicine, gives the participants immunity for a year from all dangers, unites them with one another and at the same time with their God Yahweh, who is induced by the abundance of sacrificial blood flowing in his honour to fulfil the darling dream of his people', he is associating ideas with Passover which may have attached to it in primitive ages, but which there is nothing to show still attached to it, whereas there are definite indications that other ideas prevailed. The one passage which in addition to modern theories of the original idea of sacrifice Beer seems to have in mind is that passage in Jubilees which sees in Passover a means of gaining immunity for a year. But Jubilees gives not

[1 Ps. 1186, 10, 14 f., 17, 22, 26.]

the slightest hint that this immunity came from any mysterious Paschal medicine; to that writer at least the whole virtue of Passover lies in the fact that it is a divine command: 'No plague shall come upon them to slay or to smite in that year in which they celebrate the Passover in its season in every respect according to His command.... Every man shall eat it in the sanctuary of your God... for thus it is written and ordained that they should eat it in the sanctuary of the Lord.'1

The Paschal victim was not in this later age a mysterious medicine. Yet for other reasons, and as a result of elements that had been introduced into the celebration in the course of the long history of the rite, the meal was still a great solemn occasion, charged with historical associations calculated to kindle and nourish religious emotions. It was at once historical in character and eschatological. It appealed by symbol, exposition, and song to a great redemptive act in the past as the pledge of a great redemptive act in the future.

[1 Jub. 4915, 16]

XXV

PASSOVER AND THE NEW TESTAMENT

a fact

As in the Old Testament, so also in the New Testament, Passover is mentioned more frequently than any other festival of the Jews. But the mere frequency of reference in the New Testament is not the reason that Passover has left a deeper mark than other Jewish festivals on Christian terminology and Christian thought. This must rather be sought in the fact that the supreme acts of our Lord's life coincided with the Passover seasonwhich at once accounts for the great majority of the uses of the term 'Passover' and of the explicit references to the festival in the New Testament. These explicit references number thirty-one. Of these, twenty-two occur in the narratives of the Passion-four in Matthew, five in Mark, six in Luke, and seven in John. Of the remaining references, four-one in Luke1 and three in John 2 -occur in definitions of the date of events in earlier years of our Lord's life; two date events in the early history of the Church in the narrative of Acts, one occurs in the historical survey of the heroes of faith in Heb. 1128, and the remaining reference is in 1 Cor. 57, where the term used, not of course of the Paschal festival, but, according to Biblical and frequent Rabbinic usage, of the Paschal victim is applied to Christ.

3

To what extent Passover is indirectly referred to in the New Testament, or what we may term Paschal practice or ideas may have affected the practice or thought of the New Testament, turns largely on the exact significance of the explicit references and the exact nature of the transference of ideas from the older to the younger religion where association of some kind is unmistakable. I propose to complete my present course of lectures by some discussion of this interesting but difficult question— difficult in no small degree because of the wealth of discussion and the 3 124, 20® (ἀζύμων).

1 241.

2 213, 23, 64.

prodigality of theories that have been lavished on various aspects of it, and the large degree of uncertainty as to details that remains, in spite of all the discussion and investigation that have been devoted to them.

It will be convenient first to summarize certain conclusions reached in the previous lectures. Passover originally referred to the rites performed on a single day, or rather during a single night; later, after this ritual had come to coincide in time with the first of the seven days during which leavened bread was taboo and which was termed the Feast (Hag) of Unleavened Bread, the term 'Passover' covered the whole period of seven days. At all periods, perhaps, and certainly in the later, 'Passover' was applied either to the celebration or period of celebration, in other words to the festival, or to the victim, which in the later periods was thus sharply distinguished from the large quantity of other victims that were sacrificed during the entire period of seven days, which were never designated 'Passover', nor were subjected to the peculiar ritual of the Passover victim. In the earlier stage of the history that can be clearly discerned the Paschal ritual consisted of two elements-the application of the Paschal blood to the outside of houses, and the consumption of the Paschal meal within. Possibly these two elements were not of equal antiquity, and probably for a time at least the blood ritual became the more prominent, and was regarded as possessing the chief virtue. The purpose of the early blood ritual was not kathartic but apotropaic; it was designed not to 'unsin' or purify the house, but to keep something unwelcome out of it. This blood ritual was already obsolescent by the seventh century, and must have passed out of use not so long afterwards; yet the apotropaic idea that had been associated with it survived in at least some quarters, and appears at the end of the second century B. C., and may have survived in the form of a belief that a punctilious discharge of the ordinances regulating the surviving Paschal ritual kept plague and calamity at bay. The blood ritual of later times was entirely different; the blood was poured away at the base of the altar; associated with this was, not perhaps very vividly, the thought of a gift to God (korbān), but so far as our evidence goes no belief in any special kathartic value in this blood. With the obsolescence of the original blood