In the course of our lives, certain foods have the ability to powerfully evoke memories: the taste of your favorite birthday dessert, the smell of a hot dog at a baseball game, or the combination of turkey, mashed potatoes, and gravy at Thanksgiving. A meal’s multi-sensory experience can connect the food to past events and the people with whom we shared them.
It is unsurprising, then, that as the Israelites stand on the precipice of their departure from Egypt in the book of Exodus, the Lord commands them to prepare and eat a meal, a shared meal that will be about remembering what God has done for his people.
The first part of the book of Exodus tells of the great redemptive event of the Old Testament, the Lord rescuing his people from slavery in Egypt. God heard their cry for help, enacted 10 plagues to demonstrate his sovereign might over the powers of Egypt, led his people out of slavery, and delivered them through the Red Sea. This is an event that Israel will rehearse in song (e.g. Psalms 78, 105, and 106) in the same way that we sing hymns about the death and resurrection of Jesus.
One of the climactic moments in this dramatic rescue story is the tenth and final plague, in which the firstborn of Egypt was killed, but the Lord passed over the firstborn of Israel. This incident would precipitate an urgent exit from Egypt for the people of Israel (Exodus 12:33–34), and the Lord prepared them in advance with a series of instructions so that they would be ready. A central element of those instructions is the Passover meal.
The Lord’s directions for this first Passover meal were specific, both what was to be eaten and how, all of it carrying significance. The three specified food items for the meal can be found described in Exodus 12:1–13: a lamb without blemish, unleavened bread, and bitter herbs.
The Elements of the Passover Meal
The lamb is at the very heart of the meal, and it receives the most detailed instructions for its preparation and eating. Preceding the meal itself, this lamb played a critical role in the events of the first Passover. Its blood was to be placed on the doorposts and lintels of the home in which the animal was to be eaten. The Lord’s judgment would fall upon the firstborn of Egypt, but every house marked by the lamb’s blood would be passed over, such that none of the children in those houses would die (Exodus 12:13, 21–23).
Though the sacrificial system outlined in Leviticus had not yet been established, this act of preservation by way of the lamb’s blood is best understood as being sacrificial in nature (see Exodus 12:27). The life of the lamb had been given in place of Israel’s firstborn.
Seeing the lamb as sacrificial helps to better understand the preparation and eating of the lamb. First, the lamb must be “without blemish” (Exodus 12:5), like many of the sacrifices prescribed in Leviticus (Leviticus 1:3; 3:1; 22:19, 21). It would be inappropriate to offer something of compromised value to the Lord (Malachi 1:8). Second, the lamb had to be eaten in its entirety that night, and any leftovers were to be burned (Exodus 12:10). This too is akin to various sacrifices in Leviticus (Leviticus 7:15–16; 19:5–6), and indicates the sacred nature of the lamb, that it should not be treated irreverently.
Due to the lamb’s function as a sacrifice, eating its meat as a part of the meal should remind Israel of the Lord’s provision of salvation. God had given the lamb so that their houses would be passed over, and their firstborn spared. For this reason, New Testament authors will make connections between the Passover lamb and Jesus (more on this below).
In addition to the lamb, the Passover meal was to include unleavened bread. Why was the bread to be prepared without leaven? Following the death of the Egyptian firstborn, we read: “The Egyptians were urgent with the people to send them out of the land in haste. For they said, ‘We shall all be dead’” (Exodus 12:33).
So great and decisive was the Lord’s final plague that the Egyptians glimpsed the power of the Israelites’ God and could not wait to get them out of town. As a part of the hurried departure from the land, there was no time for bread to be leavened (Exodus 12:34, 39). The inclusion of unleavened bread in the Lord’s instructions for the meal, then, is in anticipation of this great and decisive act, in which God would demonstrate the strength of his mighty hand in the land of Egypt.
The lamb was also to be eaten with bitter herbs. For Israel, these were likely intended to remind the people of the bitter servitude of their lives in Egypt. This notion is supported by the fact that the Hebrew word for bitter herbs is related to a word used earlier in the book of Exodus, describing their situation under Egyptian oppression: “So they ruthlessly made the people of Israel work as slaves and embittered (my translation) their lives with hard service, in mortar and brick, and in all kinds of work in the field. In all their work they ruthlessly made them work as slaves” (Exodus 1:13–14).
As a part of this meal, the Lord wants his people to look backwards, even as he is rescuing them out of Egypt. Eating the meal with bitter herbs, then, serves as a reminder of the terrible circumstances from which he delivered them.
The Lord intended the elements of the Passover meal to have specific meaning for the people of Israel. The lamb, unleavened bread, and bitter herbs pointed to features of his redemptive work, the harsh servitude they had experienced in Egypt, his great power to deliver them, and the provision of a sacrifice given on their behalf.
In terms of how the meal was to be eaten, the Lord directed each household to share a lamb. Exodus specifies each man taking a lamb according to “their fathers’ houses,” a designation that would have included more than what we think of as a nuclear family, but rather several generations of a family living together. If that proved to be too much food for a smaller household, a lamb should be shared with a neighboring household (Exodus 12:3–4). The key point here is that the Passover meal is explicitly communal. God’s redemption was experienced in the context of the covenant community, and this meal further strengthens the bonds of that community.
The Repetition of the Passover Meal
But this special shared meal was not intended as a one-time event for that first group coming out of Egypt. Rather, it was to be repeated every year, annually commemorating the great redemption that Israel had received from the Lord: “This day shall be for you a memorial day, and you shall keep it as a feast to the Lord; throughout your generations, as a statute forever, you shall keep it as a feast” (Exodus 12:14). Each year, the people of Israel were to eat the meal again (Exodus 12:25, 43–49), and then for seven days eat only unleavened bread (Exodus 3:3–10).
From the biblical text, we can see at least two functions for this ongoing commemoration. First, it provided an opportunity for each new generation of Israelites to remember the Lord’s great act of redemption in bringing them out from the land of Egypt. In the instructions for the ongoing observance of the Passover, on multiple occasions the people of Israel are explicitly told how they should communicate the significance of the memorial to their children (Exodus 12:26–27; 13:6–8). We can consider it akin to a Christian celebration of Good Friday and Easter, and how parents speak to their children on these days about Jesus’ death and resurrection.
Second, this annual Passover celebration gave each new generation of Israelites an opportunity to recognize their own inclusion in the redeemed people of God. Language used in the text makes clear that new generations are not simply to look back and reflect upon a community that lived long ago, but to see that they themselves are now part of this redeemed community.
In the book of Deuteronomy, Moses speaks to the people of Israel about Passover commemoration after 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. A number of those in his audience would have been born since the Exodus. As such, they themselves would not have experienced those events. And yet, Moses says to the entire group: “You shall eat no leavened bread with it. Seven days you shall eat it with unleavened bread, the bread of affliction—for you came out of the land of Egypt in haste—that all the days of your life you may remember the day when you came out of the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 16:3, emphasis mine).
The Significance of the Passover Meal Today
For Christians today, we can learn from this meal and what it represents. God has delivered us from slavery to sin by an act of his great power, through the shed blood of his Son. We have an even greater redemption in Christ, who delivers his chosen people from the slavery of sin and death!
It is no wonder that the New Testament regularly makes connections between the Passover and Jesus’ saving work. To mention just a few examples, the Apostle Paul refers to Jesus as “Christ, our Passover lamb,” who “has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7). In his Gospel, John writes that while being crucified, Jesus’ bones were not broken (John 19:33–36), a possible allusion to the unbroken bones of the Passover lamb (Exodus 12:46). Finally, Matthew, Mark, and Luke all specify that the Last Supper was a Passover meal (Matthew 26:17–19; Mark 14:12–16; Luke 22:7–13).
As we reflect on that even-greater redemption we have in Christ, we remember that we too have now been incorporated into the people of God which spans history and geography, called to live our lives as Christians in our own time and place. This is why in the New Testament, the Apostle Peter can draw on language from Exodus 19:4–6, when he writes, “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy” (1 Peter 2:9–10). This adds a sense of purpose to our daily activities, as we seek to follow Jesus.
For we know that as a part of this redeemed people, God is weaving our lives into his great tapestry of redemption, as was true of our ancestors in the faith who ate that very first Passover meal.
Aaron Goldstein is assistant professor of Old Testament at Covenant Theological Seminary.