Discovering meaningful and impactful interpretations of the Haggadah is a blessing for anyone tasked with leading a Pesach Seder. As well as a great meal there should always be plenty of meaty discussion to sink your teeth into. I hope this special feature enhances your understanding of the Exodus in its historical context.
Learning from Egyptology
The song Walk Like an Egyptian was a number one hit for 1980s pop band The Bangles, but the Torah tells us to do the exact opposite: “You shall not copy the practices of the land of Egypt where you dwelt… nor shall you follow their laws.” (Leviticus 18:3).
How can this biblical directive be fulfilled without some knowledge of the lives and beliefs of the ancient Egyptians? This is provided by the study of hieroglyphic texts and artefacts unearthed from the region, which also shed new light on the Exodus story.
For instance, the “mighty hand” (yad hazakah) of God is a recurring phrase in the confrontation with Pharaoh (Exodus 3:19, 6:1; 13:9 etc). Throughout the Torah, it only ever appears in that context. The related phrase “outstretched arm” (zero’a netuyah) is also exclusive to God’s conflict with Egypt (Exodus 6:6, Deuteronomy 26:8).
Neither is ever used when facing the empires of Assyria, Babylon, Persia, or any of the kingdoms in Israel’s vicinity. This is because they are a specific response to Egyptian oppression.
The image of a pharaoh smiting his enemies with a mighty hand and outstretched arm is a common pose in ancient Egyptian relief sculptures. The smiting motif can be traced back to king Narmer, the first Pharaoh, who reigned more than 5,000 years ago. It demonstrates the supreme power of the king at the very moment he is crushing his enemies.
And so, it is wholly fitting that the most-commonly repeated phrases that describe God’s actions in the Exodus story are His “mighty hand” and “outstretched arm”. More than likely, the Torah intentionally employed these anthropomorphisms to undermine Pharaoh’s authority. To free the Israelite slaves, God harnessed Egyptian imagery to out-Pharaoh the Pharaoh.
Living in London I can visit the British Museum regularly. Guiding people on tours through the Egyptian galleries brings the Exodus story to life in unforgettable ways.
On the following two pages you will find explanations of four ancient Egyptian artefacts that relate to specific parts of the Haggadah. A code number appears for each one which can be used to download a high-resolution picture from britishmuseum.org/collection/. Enter the code in the search facility and all the information and images will appear. For instance, the code EA35714 reveals king Narmer smiting a captive.
Early hieroglyphics on the Narmer Palette, 31st century BCE. Photo by Wikimedia common, Youssef Alam
Early hieroglyphics on the Narmer Palette, 31st century BCE. Photo by Wikimedia common, Youssef Alam
You can print these pictures out (for non-commercial use) and show them at your Seder table to prompt discussion. We also offer suggestions for the point in the Seder at which each could be brought out.
Relevant quotations and page numbers are also given, referring to The Jonathan Sacks Haggada (Maggid, 2013).
This year, let a knowledge of ancient Egypt (Mitzrayim) give you a deeper appreciation of the Exodus from Egypt (Yetziyat Mitzrayim). As you will see, this still has so much meaning for us today.
The London School of Jewish Studies is a premier provider of teacher training, adult learning and degrees in education. LSJS is transforming the UK Jewish community and beyond by delivering inspiring educational programmes which transmit a lifelong love of Jewish learning and achieve excellence in teaching.
Rabbi Dr Raphael Zarum is dean of LSJS and Rabbi Sacks chair of modern Jewish thought, established by the Zandan family. For more information on LSJS courses and events, see www.lsjs.ac.uk
ARTEFACT 1: STATUE OF YOUNG RAMESSES II – EA19
Statue of Ramesses II: Photo from Wikimedia commons, Yousseff Alam
Statue of Ramesses II: Photo from Wikimedia commons, Yousseff Alam
When you begin your Seder: “We were slaves” - Avadim hayinu (p.28-29).
As the retelling of the Exodus opens in the Haggadah, we all say: “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt.” But which Pharaoh was it exactly?
There are several reasons to conclude that Ramesses II is the most likely candidate. Firstly, he was the third king of the 19th dynasty, which puts his reign in the correct time period, 13th century BCE.
Secondly, he built a new capital city at Qantir called Pi-Ramesses (‘House of Ramesses’) in the northern delta region of Egypt, which is where the Israelites seem to have settled. Previous Pharaohs focused their power further south at Karnak, but due to increased trade and relations with Canaan, Ramesses relocated north. In the Torah the Israelites set off from this very place when they left Egypt: “And they departed from Ra’amses in the first month, on the 15th day of the first month, the day after Passover” (Numbers 33:3).
Thirdly, Ramesses II was a prodigious builder, erecting new buildings and monuments all over Egypt. The Torah says the Israelite slaves were forced to build “store cities called Pitom and Ra’amses” (Exodus 1:11). This verse appears in the Haggadah.
Fourthly, Ramesses II reigned for over 60 years, accomplished many military conquests and fathered numerous children, making him one of the most successful pharaohs.
The largest object in Room 4 of the British Museum is the huge granite bust of Ramesses II. The portrayal of the young king was found at Ramesseum, one of his great palaces in western Thebes, on the River Nile.
Ramesses means “born of Ra”, Ra being the great sun-god at the apex of ancient Egyptian worship. Ra’s name in hieroglyphs is a circle with a dot in the centre, depicting the sun. The knowledge needed to decipher hieroglyphics was lost for centuries until Jean-François Champollion decoded the Rosetta stone in 1822. However, some symbols always remained recognisable, and this was surely one of them. Indeed, Abraham Ibn Ezra, the 12th century biblical commentator, explained the word Ra’amses to mean ayin hashemesh, the “eye of the Sun”.
You may have noticed that the sun-god’s name, Ra, is almost identical to rah, the Hebrew word for evil. This is a telling bilingual pun: Ra is rah. It signals the Torah’s disdain for Egypt’s premier deity and characterises Ramesses as the literal bad (rah) guy of the story.
Though Ramesses tried to secure his legacy by constructing huge edifices fronted with statues of himself, the age of the pharaohs is now well past, and their palaces are ruins in the dust.
This point was dramatised by the 19th century poet, Shelley, in his poem about the great pharaoh’s statue. It ends: “On the pedestal these words appear: / ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings; / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ / Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare/ The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
In contrast, though our ancestors were enslaved to this mighty tyrant, it is their faith and traditions that have survived. This is the miraculous story we celebrate every year on Pesach.
ARTEFACT 2: BRONZE SERPENT STAFF – EA52831
Late Egyptian inlaid bronze cobra: Photo from Wikimedia commons, Youssef Alam
Late Egyptian inlaid bronze cobra: Photo from Wikimedia commons, Youssef Alam
As you reach the Ten Plagues: “This is the staff” - Zeh hamateh (p.66-67)
God brought us out of Egypt “with awesome power, with signs and with wonders” (Deuteronomy 26:8).
The Haggadah explains: “Signs — This is the staff, as it says: [God said to Moses] ‘Take this staff in your hand; with it you shall perform the signs.’ (Exodus 4:17).”
The staff of Moses is mentioned 18 times in the Exodus story. With it, Moses performed miracles, initiated plagues, and split the Reed Sea. What began as a humble shepherd’s crook became an incredibly powerful instrument.
Only in this biblical narrative does a staff turn into a magical wand to rival that of Harry Potter. Again, this is a response to the specific cultural context. Magic was practised by every part of ancient Egyptian society. They believed it was given to them by the gods to heal and protect, or to curse and cause harm.
In 1911, a staff in the shape of a serpent, with an extended hood and long undulating tail, was discovered at a gravesite in Thebes. Made of solid bronze, it measured 166cm in length, and dated back to the 16th century BCE.
In Egyptian mythology serpents were symbols of great power. Like this staff hood, the serpent on the brow of the pharaoh’s headdress was believed to spit fire, endowing the wearer with strength. Thus, the bronze serpent staff would have been a mighty wand with which to perform spells and magical rituals.
Now we can better understand what happened at the Burning Bush: “And the Lord asked Moses: ‘What is that in your hand?’ ‘A staff,’ he replied. ‘Throw it to the ground,’ said the Lord. He threw it, and it turned into a snake; and Moses fled back from it. Then the Lord told Moses: ‘Reach out your hand and take hold of its tail.’ He reached out his hand and grasped it, and in his hand it turned back into a staff.” (Exodus 4:2-4). This performance was to serve as a sign of God’s presence and intention when Moses met the Israelite leadership, and later when he stood before Pharaoh, accompanied by his brother Aaron. The magic-obsessed Egyptians and assimilated Israelites would both have understood the significance of Moses’s snake-staff. It was a cultural icon they all knew well.
When the king saw this performance, he thought it was a magic contest: “So Pharaoh summoned his sages and sorcerers, and the Egyptian magicians did the same thing by their sorcery. Each threw down his staff, and they became serpents…” (Exodus 7:11-13). At this point, however, “Aaron’s staff swallowed up theirs.” (7:11). The Egyptians were terrified, but Pharaoh was obstinate. He was unmoved by the spectacle, “just as God had predicted.” (7:12). This entire episode was to mock the superstitious nature of Egyptian culture. God taught Moses to play along with their puerile enchantments. This would get their attention but also reveal Pharaoh’s stubbornness, even when he was exposed to magic superior to his own.
After leaving Egypt, Moses’s staff never turned into a snake again. The need for magic games was over. Now he would lead by human virtues that he passed on to Joshua, “being strong and of good courage.” (Deuteronomy 31:6).
ARTEFACT 3: SMALL SPHINX WITH PROTO-SINAITIC
HEBREW – EA41748
Proto-Sinaitic script: Photo by Wikimedia commons Roger Fund
Proto-Sinaitic script: Photo by Wikimedia commons Roger Fund
When you sing Hallel (p.94-95)
The second paragraph of Hallel begins: “When the Israelites went out from Egypt… from a people of strange tongue.” (Psalms 114:1).
Rabbi David Kimchi, the 13th century commentator, wonders how the Israelites could have found the Egyptian language strange (loez in Hebrew) given that by then they had lived in Egypt for more than two centuries. The Israelites were culturally assimilated, but had retained their Hebrew names and language (Leviticus Rabbah 32:5).
Maybe what was strange was how the language was written down. Egyptian hieroglyphs are among the oldest writing systems in the world. The symbols represent objects or specific sounds or sound groups. Hieroglyph, meaning “sacred carving,” is a Greek translation of the Egyptian phrase ‘words of the god’ as many texts were religious in nature.
In 1905, when Sir Flinders Petrie was excavating an ancient Egyptian turquoise mine in the Sinai Peninsula, he found a small statuette of a sphinx made of reddish sandstone. Between the paws, in Egyptian hieroglyphs, was carved “Beloved of Hathor, Lady of the turquoise”. But on the left shoulder and base he found other inscriptions. They were like hieroglyphs, but alphabetic.
Petrie inferred that this was a script the turquoise miners devised for themselves, using signs borrowed from Egyptian hieroglyphics. Those have hundreds of symbols, but this had fewer than two dozen. The signs came to be known as Proto-Sinaitic script, precursor to alphabetic scripts. It is surprisingly similar to ancient Hebrew writing and is likely to have been its origin.
Rabbi Professor Marc-Alain Ouaknin, of Bar Ilan University, pointed out that it was only the familiarity with ancient Hebrew which enabled archaeologists to decipher Proto-Sinaitic “by applying the theory that the sound that each picture represented was the initial sound of the Hebrew nouns for the objects represented by the characters. So, for instance, the outline of a house, for which the Hebrew word is bayit, would denote the sound ‘b’; the outline of a camel or a camel’s hump, called gamal in Hebrew, would produce the sound ‘g’.”
It is remarkable that the names of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet we know today almost exactly match the images found in Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions: aleph means ‘ox’, bet means ‘house’, gimmel means ‘camel’, etc. This led Ouaknin to suggest that the dialect spoken by the miners “may well have been Hebrew or a very similar language.” (Mysteries of the Alphabet, 1999). The names of the letters also appear in ancient Canaanite texts. Later they made their way into Greek: alpha, beta, gamma, etc. This ultimately led to the modern English alphabet.
The sandstone sphinx dates to 1500 BCE, which coincides with the long Israelite slavery in Egypt. Thus, though our ancestors had their own distinct oral language, they may have played a role in developing a new form of writing that evolved into Hebrew and was much more accessible than its hieroglyphic origin. This might explain the rapid growth of literacy and supreme importance of reading for our people from the earliest times.
ARTEFACT 4: MAKING BREAD AND BEER – EA32738
Loaf of bread found in an Egyptian tomb: Photo by Wikimedia commons, Roger Fund
Loaf of bread found in an Egyptian tomb: Photo by Wikimedia commons, Roger Fund
During your meal (p.98-100)
When we think about Pesach and the Seder, one thing that always comes to mind is matzah — how many boxes to buy, the munching and blandness, deciding between machine and hand-baked, and finding the best spread. (I prefer butter or lemon curd.)
We all know the reasons for this fixation with flat bread. It is because our ancestors left in a hurry: “They baked the dough that they had brought out of Egypt into matzah cakes, for it had not leavened, since they had been driven out of Egypt and could not tarry” (Exodus 12:39). And it’s because matzah is called lechem oni, “the bread of affliction” (Deuteronomy 16:3).
But why does the Torah also insist, “For seven days no leaven shall be found in your homes… Nothing that is leavened shall you eat” (Exodus 12:19-20)? What is this fastidious obsession with ridding ourselves of any trace of bread and leavened foods such as beer? Egyptology provides explanation.
Eating bread and drinking beer were the mainstay of the ancient Egyptian diet. Their production was a major focus of daily life. The combined hieroglyphs of bread and beer were used as the symbol for food.
However, their role went far beyond nutrition, as both were central to the economy and to ritual. They were the first items offered to the gods. Workers were often paid in bread and beer, or in measures of grain. Numerous tomb reliefs, paintings and models show the various stages of bread preparation. Grinding the grain into flour was done by hand, mainly by women. The range of varieties of loaf found in lists of sacred offerings is astounding. Other ingredients besides cereal grain were added to bread, such as figs, dates and crushed coriander seeds. Beer was also consumed every day, especially by the lower classes. Yeast from fermenting beer was used to leaven bread.
The typical daily Egyptian meal consisted of bread, beer, onions and fish. Comparably, the Israelites were nostalgic for the fish, cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic they ate as slaves in Egypt (Numbers 11:5).
Meat and wine were consumed mainly by the wealthy. Wine production was laborious and costly. Game hunting was a leisure pursuit of the affluent.
Museums around the world house hundreds of preserved bread loaves from ancient Egypt. See, for instance, EA40942 on display in the British Museum. It looks like centuries-old matzah.
With this knowledge, the Seder makes so much more sense. We are preoccupied with bread because that typified life in ancient Egypt. We purge our homes of leaven as a denunciation of that civilisation.
We drink four cups of wine and eat a festive meat meal to celebrate our release from the poor and wretched life of slaves. This is also memorialised by the matzah we eat.
The Torah wants us to relive our ancestors’ experiences in Egypt by eating and drinking in ways that are both similar and opposite to them. The entire Seder is a delightfully dramatic retelling of their story.
The Mishnah (Pesachim 10:3) established the Seder plotline: “Begin with genut (shameful servitude) and end with shevach (joyful praise).” The Haggadah is the script, and you and your guests are all players in the evening’s performance.
I hope you have a meaningful and memorable time: On with the show!
