Passover, a well-known feast of the Jews. The English word passover is a translation of the Hebrew pesach, which in Aramaic with the post-positive article becomes pascha; whence the Greek, Latin, and various Romance forms of the word. The original meaning of the verb may perhaps be traced in 1 Kings, xviii. 26, where it is rendered 'leap' or (revised version margin) 'limp,' and suggests a religious dance. The root occurs in Tiphshah (1 Kings, iv. 24) or Thapsacus, an important ford or ferry over the Euphrates. The Passover is one of the oldest recurrent sacrifices of the Hebrews; an account of its origin is given in Exod. xii.; famous celebrations of it are described in 2 Chron. xxx., xxxv., and Ezra vi.; and the laws and regulations relating to it will be found in Exod. xii. 1-51, xiii. 3-10, xxiii. 14-19, xxxiv. 18-26, Lev. xxiii. 4-14, Numb. ix. 1-14, xxviii. 16-25, Deut. xvi. 1-8. These laws were formerly held to be all practically contemporary pieces of legislation; but they are now known to be of very various dates and to relate to widely-different religions and social conditions (see PENTATEUCH). In all of them the Passover is intimately associated with the Feast of Unleavened Bread; but the latter is essentially an agricultural festival, and the earliest origin of the Passover must doubtless be sought in the times when the Israelites were still a purely nomadic and pastoral people, and gave religious expression to their thankfulness for the annual increase of their flocks and herds by sacrifices 'of the firstlings of the flock and the fatlings thereof' (Gen. iv. 4). The recollection of such an annual festival, which would naturally be held in spring, survives in the Jehovistic narrative of the events preceding the exodus, which largely turned on the refusal of Pharaoh to allow the people to go out into the wilderness to sacrifice. It was, we infer, a nocturnal lunar feast, held at the spring full moon, and this character it retained throughout; it consisted of the firstlings of the flock and of the herd, and even as late as the close of the 7th century B.C. the victim was not necessarily a lamb (Deut. xvi. 2; cf. 2 Chron. xxxv. 7: 'lambs, kids, bullocks'). With the settlement of the Israelites as an agricultural people in Canaan, the agricultural festivals, marking the various stages of harvest and ingathering, naturally gained in prominence, and the pastoral Passover came to be more and more closely associated with a harvest feast which also fell in spring—that of unleavened bread—when after the presentation of the first sheaf before Jehovah the people entered at once upon the enjoyment of the new corn, without waiting for the tedious process of leavening their dough. The usages of the various local and domestic sanctuaries in the land were made uniform (Deut. xvi. 1-16) by the promulgation of the law of one exclusive place of worship. Of subsequent modifications made on the Deuteronomic code by the Priestly legislation the most interesting perhaps are the stricter definition of the kind of victim, the substitution of roasting for 'boiling' (see Deut. xvi. 7, revised version margin), and the interpolation of an additional day into the accompanying feast (Deut. xvi. including the Passover in the seven days of unleavened bread, while Numbers xxviii. counts the seven days from the 15th, not the 14th, of the month).
The celebration of the Passover in later times had public and official aspects which were invested occasionally at least with great pomp and ceremony, as may be gathered from the descriptions already referred to in Chronicles and Ezra; but, just like great ecclesiastical functions in our own day, it also had its private and domestic side. From Talmudic sources we gather a good deal that is of interest as to Passover customs in connection with the life of Jesus and the last supper. The company for a single lamb varied from ten to twenty; first the cup of consecration, over which the master of the house had pronounced a blessing, was drunk; then hands were washed and the meal served, consisting of bitter herbs, cakes of unleavened bread, a sauce called haroseth, made from dates, raisins, and vinegar, the paschal lamb, and the flesh of subsidiary (Denteronomic) sacrifices. The master of the house dipped a morsel of unleavened bread into the haroseth, and ate it, and a similar 'sop' was given to every one present. Afterwards the paschal lamb was eaten, and three other cups of wine were drunk at intervals with thanksgivings and singing of the Hallel (Psalms cxiii.-cxviii.). To the Jews of the Dispersion the Passover, together with the Feast of Unleavened Bread, has always had great importance, though the lamb, not being slain at the Temple, is not regarded as strictly the paschal lamb of the law.
That the paschal lamb typified Christ is taught by Paul (1 Cor. v. 7), and also by the author of the fourth gospel (John, xix. 36), who, as is well known, represents the crucifixion as having taken place at the time of the Passover, and attaches importance to the fact.
For the history of the Passover in its bearings on Old Testament criticism, see Wellhausen's History of Israel (1885), Dr W. H. Green's Hebrew Feasts (New York, 1885), and other works cited under PENTATEUCH and BIBLE. For later Jewish practice, see Bartolocci's Bibliotheca Rabbinica or Bodenschatz's Kirchliche Verfassung der Juden.