“From the Abomination of the Egyptians to the Rite of the Christians”: The Metamorphosis of a Zoharic Homily

• In Event: Competing Voices and Textual Traditions in Thirteenth Century Kabbalah

Abstract

In this paper, I plan to show how some Zoharic homilies reveal a clear interconnection between Passover and Easter. This observation is the result of a joint study with Prof. Israel J. Yuval.
According to the Torah, the paschal sacrifice had to be a lamb, but the Torah doesn’t explain why. In the writings of the Talmudic Sages, however, we find for the first time the insight that the lamb was the god of Egypt. Sacrificing the lamb was meant to prove to the Egyptians that their god was worthless. We suggest to understand it as a Jewish response to the Christian identification of the paschal sacrifice with Jesus and his representation as Agnus Dei. The Sages depicted the Egyptians (Mitzrim) as a paradigm of the Christians (Notzrim) just as Christians used Passover as a paradigm for Easter.
This first step was elaborated in later Jewish literature, reaching its height in the 13th century in the book of Zohar, in which the biblical story about the sacrifice of Pesach is transformed into a drama with theatrical features. While in prison, the lamb cried for help. The Egyptians tried to save their god but to no avail. They identified themselves with his suffering "as if they themselves were being killed." This is reminiscent of the Christian ideal of Imitatio Christi, which became very central among the Franciscans in the 13th Century. Moreover, The Zohar emphasizes the public nature of the sacrifice, portraying it as a form of humiliation. The story of a lamb that is believed to be a god but cannot save himself echoes Matt 27:40: "He saved others, and he cannot save himself."
This pseudo-biblical story of the Zohar is an attempt to create a counter-narrative to the story of the Crucifixion. In our research, we reconstruct the building blocks from which the Zohar composed the entire narrative. The identification of these sources proves that Jews in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages offered a counter-interpretation of their own Pessach story in order to meet the challenge of Easter and its centrality in Christianity.

Author

• Jonatan Moshe Benarroch, Hebrew University of Jerusalem