The Atlantic's Yair Rosenberg recently pointed to his April 2022 piece, "Is 'Passover' Actually a Mistranslation?" I'm not Jewish, but all things historical and linguistic fascinate me, and Rosenberg's article certainly did. I thought his remarks might be of interest to you as well, particularly to observant Jews celebrating ... Passover? ... this week and into the next.
His lede: "A few years ago, I learned that I’d been misled about Passover for my entire life." And from the evidence he presented, it seems that's true. In 2019 "I discovered that according to the original Jewish sources, 'Passover' is far from the most intuitive translation of the holiday’s name." I'll cut right to the chase.
Rosenberg noted that one "foundational Jewish" translation of the Hebrew Bible appeared in the third century, the Aramaic Targum Onkelos (Onkelos, a Roman nobleman who converted to Judaism). What we know as Passover — the flight of the enslaved Israelites from Egypt — Onkelos called "Pesach" in Exodus 12. Here, Moses instructed that a lamb be sacrificed and that its blood should mark the Israelites' homes to render the inhabitants invulnerable to the plague killing Egypt’s first-born males.
Said Moses: "For when the Lord goes through to smite the Egyptians, He will see the blood on the lintel and the two doorposts, and the Lord will pasach on the door and not let the Destroyer enter and smite your home.... And when your children ask you, 'What do you mean by this rite?' You shall say, 'It is the Pesach sacrifice to the Lord, because He pasach on the houses of the Israelites in Egypt."
As Rosenberg observed, the words pesach and pasach would seem logical to translate as "pass over"; the Lord will pass over the homes marked with the blood of the lamb. And sure enough, that's precisely how Saint Jerome, "the Christian author of the Vulgate, the fifth-century Latin translation of the Bible" — not to be pedantic; just correcting the record: more accurately it was a late 4th-century translation — wrote it out. As did others.
Onkelos, however, translated Pesach in Exodus 12:23 as: "God will appear to strike the Egyptians, and He will see the blood upon the lintel and upon the door posts, and God will be compassionate on your threshold and not permit the destruction to enter your houses to smite." (Bold, Rosenberg's.)
In Exodus 23:27, he continued: "When your children ask you, 'What do you mean by this rite?' You shall say, 'It is the sacrifice of compassion before God, who had compassion upon the houses and children of Israel in Egypt, when He struck the Egyptians and spared our houses.'"
Rosenberg concluded that "the implications of this alternative understanding are significant. For one, it gives greater moral meaning to the observance of Pesach. Rather than marking a morally antiseptic act of omission—the 'passing over' of Jewish homes—the holiday celebrates a deliberate act of compassion toward an enslaved people, and calls on us to emulate that divine conduct ourselves."
In 2024, I shall pass over the tragic irony of Rosenberg's 2022 words.
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