ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY EDUCATION NETWORK EXODUS DR. DAVID ADAMS #37 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> I have some Jewish friends. And when they celebrate the Passover, it doesn't look much like the ceremony described in Exodus 11 and 12. They have made it very symbolic. How did Israelites in the Old Testament conduct the Passover ceremony each year? >> Well, Eric, it's clear that God intended this celebration of the Passover to be one of the most important rituals in the Old Testament faith celebrated each year. Not only does it recall the redemptive act of God in bringing his people out of Egypt, but it also incorporates each new generation into that redemptive community by allowing them to relive that event and see themselves as part of that event. But the question really is: How faithful was Israel in keeping God's command? If you want to know how they conducted the Passover ceremony in the Old Testament times, I think we first have to ask whether they actually did ever conduct this ceremony or not. And the truth is, once you get outside the Pentateuch, evidence for the Passover is pretty scanty in the Old Testament. There's very little evidence that they did celebrate the Passover very often. There's one Passover mentioned in the book of Joshua. I think we can take it for granted there that they did celebrate the Passover more often because it is at least mentioned. But the next time that a Passover is mentioned isn't until the time of King Josiah in 621, some 500 years later. Not only that, but listen to what it says about King Josiah's Passover. And here I'm going to read from II Kings Chapter 23 beginning with Verse 21. "The king commanded all the people 'Keep the Passover to the Lord your God as it is written in the Book of the Covenant." And now here is the clencher, Verse 22: "For no such Passover had been kept since the days of the judges who judged Israel or during all the days of the kings of Israel or of the kings of Judah." So according to II Kings, they hadn't been keeping the Passover, at least not very regularly. II Kings 23 Verse 22 says, "No such Passover had been kept since the days of the judges for over 500 years." So if you believe this text, they went something like 500 years without keeping the Passover. Now, I think this may be just a little bit of an exaggeration on the part of the author here. I think what he may mean when he says "no such Passover" is that they didn't have a big public celebration of the Passover. Presumably there were some faithful Israelites that did celebrate the Passover in private in their own homes. It just wasn't, if you will, a publicly recognized holiday. It wasn't celebrated by the community as a whole. And the reason I think that is that II Chronicles 30 also mentions that Hezekiah had sent out an order to observe the Passover. And that would have been about a century before the time of King Josiah. Certainly not more than a century before. So I think from all of this text we can probably draw a reasonable conclusion that would be something like this: That the pious celebration of the Passover was not generally practiced in much of Israel's history. It may have been kept by, you know, some faithful members of the covenant community. But it wasn't observed by the community as a whole, except on some pretty rare circumstances. And then perhaps even in a pretty small and insignificant way. That may be the meaning of II Kings 23 when it says "no such Passover." You know, not an absolute denial that no Passover had ever been observed. But that no public celebration of the Passover had been held in a major way. So that's probably a shock to realize that this was the situation in the Old Testament. This is also probably one of the places where conservative scholars and critical scholars will simply disagree about the significance of the facts. Critical scholars will often use things like this in the Old Testament to argue that the faith of the Old Testament was never really practiced in Old Testament times. That the faith that the Old Testament presents as standard was, in fact, an invention of the postexilic period. That it never was really observed. In fact, it probably wasn't even heard of until the exile or after that. And so they will often argue that what's presented as Orthodox Yahwehism in the Old Testament is really at best just one of a number of faiths of the -- of Israel. That there were really many different faiths of Israel. And that the one that we have in the Old Testament is just the one that kind of won out in the end. And therefore, is pictured unrealistically as the one that was the true Orthodox one all along. Well, it should be pretty obvious to you that conservatives would prefer a more biblical way of interpreting the text. I think we can go along with critical scholars in recognizing that passages like this make it clear that the Israelites were not generally being all that faithful to God's commands. At least not on some issues. And I think we can recognize that there was probably a wide divergence of religious practice within Israel and the Old Testament period. The Old Testament is pretty frank about that. Not only about the Passover but other issues, as well. But I think that's where we would probably part ways with critical scholars, as well. I think we would argue that it doesn't follow logically necessarily. That just because the Israelites were unfaithful to what God had commanded, it doesn't follow from that that the religion didn't actually exist and that it was made up at a later date and sort of projected artificially back into the past. I think we would simply say that the Old Testament is right in picturing what happened when it says that God instructed them to do it this way and that they were simply unfaithful in doing it. That they simply didn't keep the commands that God gave them. That's a very consistent view within the Bible. Within the Old Testament. And I think it's one that's also, you know, logically defensible, as well. And it's certainly one that's more consistent with the biblical picture than the critical view which sort of invents a later invention for an unnecessary reason. Well, the point here that I'm trying to make is -- with regard to the Passover at least is that there's really not all that much evidence in the Old Testament that Israel was faithful in keeping God's command to celebrate an annual Passover. There was even some pretty significant evidence that they didn't do it on a regular basis at all. Now, you mentioned the Passover as it's celebrated among contemporary Jews. The Passover Haggadah -- that's the name of the traditional Passover service among Jews. The Passover Haggadah is clearly a postexilic development. That is the ritual as it's practiced today comes from postexilic times. Now, there is some considerable evidence to suggest that Israel was much more faithful in keeping the Passover after the exile than it had been before the exile. And perhaps for good reasons. They learned the lesson that came from their faithlessness and then were better at it later on. After the destruction of the temple when it was no longer possible for them to do ritually pure sacrifices, the Passover Haggadah tended to do what we see today. It was modified to sort of spiritualize or symbolize the actions that are depicted as literal actions in the book of Exodus. And so the actions of the Passover Haggadah become a kind of symbolic act of remembrance. And that's why the Passover as it's celebrated among Jews today doesn't really look very much like the Passover ritual as God commands it in Exodus 12. There's maybe one other point we might want to mention here since you were talking about the way it's practiced today. Many Christians have taken up the Passover Haggadah and observe a seder meal. Seder, by the way, probably comes from a Hebrew word that's only used one time in the Old Testament, which means something like an arrangement or an order. And so the term seder meal probably means something like a ritual meal or a liturgical meal. But in any case, many Christians observe a seder meal as a way of connecting to the Old Testament roots of our faith. And that's good. There's nothing wrong with that. Many of these seder meals have or -- unfortunately don't do a very good job of connecting the Passover meal in the Old Testament to Christ as the fulfillment of the Passover and the completion of the Passover in God's redemptive plan for all mankind on the cross. Generally they may throw in the term Lamb of God or something like that. But they usually don't do all that good of job of making the connection. So I would say if you're ever going to have a seder meal in your congregation, make sure that you do a good job of connecting this Old Testament redemptive act to the central redemptive act in the New Testament. The sacrifice of the Passover lamb not merely to deliver Israel but to deliver all mankind. And in that sense, a seder meal could both be a positive way of reminding Christians of the Old Testament roots of their faith, but also teach them some useful theology, as well. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***