Bible Verse Lookup
Passover Haggadah
The earliest rabbinic sources take for granted that there is a domestic liturgy on the first Passover night, but its earliest format was not lengthy. It constituted the usual festival benedictions relating to the wine and the meal, some references to the unleavened bread, the paschal lamb and the bitter vegetables of Exod. 12.8 , the exposition of the passage from Deut. 26.5–8 summarizing the Egyptian bondage and the exodus, and ending with a special redemption blessing and the Hallel. This domestic celebration generated a large number of additional liturgical and pedagogical offshoots, many of them with biblical content. Already in talmudic times, the early rabbinic interpretations of the Exodus story and of the requirement to relate it (Exod. 12.26; 13.8, 14; Deut. 6.20 ) were incorporated and expanded, as were the references to the meal and the special foods. In the Middle Ages, the persecution of the Jews elicited a liturgical response in the form of the recitation of biblical verses calling for divine retribution, as in Pss. 79.6–7; 69.25 (and other verses in that chapter); and Lam. 3.64–66 . The secular Zionists of the 20th century created novel texts that stressed the themes of springtime and of national freedom, already recorded in the Exodus story, but with a contemporary application.
