Passover and the Festival of Unleavened Bread as a Single Ritual Complex

Abstract

Discussions of the prehistory of the rituals Passover and the Festival of Unleavened Bread have frequently held that they stem from distinct origins and purposes. In part, this claim corresponds with the biblical presentation of the rituals as distinct and separable. But in an academic tradition reaching back to the early 19th century, scholarly reconstructions have additionally assumed that the rituals suggest sociological details about the putatively distinct populations that observed them—that Passover was a rite associated with nomadic pastoralists and Unleavened Bread served an agrarian populace. This article challenges such notions based on ritual texts from Emar. Emar’s ritual writings—especially those detailing the zukru festival—demonstrate that Passover and the Festival of Unleavened Bread share a structure for equinoctial ritualizing that suggests a history of those rites as integral to one another and refutes notions of their separability based on equation with social lifestyles.