A comprehensive guide to the Maggid, the principles and process of its composition, and how to use it at the Seder.

The formula מלמד שלא ירד להשתקע אלא לגור שם has relatively recently been found in a haggadah from the Cairo Genizah, which contains both Babylonian and Land of Israel elements in a way that makes it hard to categorize and which is hard to date exactly (see Appendix iii – haggadah iv). This haggadah also has an additional gloss on the side adding Bereishit 47:4, the same one we find quoted in our Maggid. In Sifrei we also find the following comment.

מלמד שלא ירד להשתקע אלא לגור שם *שמא תאמר שירד ליטול כתר מלכות תלמוד לומר לגור ש

This teaches that he did not go down to settle permanently, but [merely] to dwell there. *Lest you say he went down to take a royal crown, therefore it says ‘to dwell there’.

The exact chain of transmission is hard to pin down. It may be that the comment originated in Sifrei, was adapted and incorporated into some haggadot and from there adopted by the author of our Maggid. The manuscript evidence, however, indicates a slightly more complicated story. Looking at this extract from Sifrei, we see that it seems to repeat itself, first in simple language and then in a slightly more flowery form. It appears that the second comment (beginning at the asterisk) is original to Sifrei and the first part – which is absent from some manuscripts – was added by later scribes, probably familiar with it from the Haggadah. The author of our Maggid may have got the idea of including the verse, Bereishit 47:4 from an existing tradition or, as seems to me more likely, it was his innovation, in which case the gloss on the haggadah from the Cario Genizah reflects the growing influence of our Maggid after its publication in authoritative Geonic texts.

What we can say with certainty is this. The comment in its original form, either in Sifrei or earlier haggadot, is undoubtedly similar in its message to the one we just looked at, emphasizing as it does the importance of living in the land of Israel. Some trace of this message no doubt remains in our Maggid for those receptive to it, but the main function of the comment is not polemical. Instead, the goal is to direct the father to tell the next part of the story. After narrating how Ya’aqov and his sons went down to Egypt, his next task is to relate how they settled in the land of Goshen as an appropriate place to rear livestock.

במתי מעט
כמה שנאמר בשבעים נפש ירדו אבתיך מצרימה ועתה שמך יי אלהיך ככוכבי השמים לרב

At the opening of the book of Shemot, Ya’aqov and his seventy descendants are counted. The odd part of this comment is that we are not directed there, but to Devarim, where the same figure is given by Moshe retrospectively. The reason for this is that the author of our Maggid, as we have already seen, was not working from a blank slate. Once again, his comment is found both in some earlier haggadot, as well as Sifrei, where we read the following.

יכול באוכלוסים הרבה תלמוד לומר במתי מעט כענין שנאמר בשבעים נפש ירדו אבותיך מצרימה

One might have thought [he went down] with a great multitude, therefore it says ‘A few men’, as it says ‘with seventy souls your father went down to Egypt’

This comment had already been modified by an earlier haggadah author (see Appendix iii – haggadah iv) who removed the opening hypothetical as well as the extra linking word (שנאמר in place of כענין שנאמר). Except for adding the word כמה, the author of our Maggid absorbed this comment unchanged despite the proof text pointing to Devarim 10:22 rather than opening part of Shemot in which Ya’aqov’s tribe is counted, since these texts are equivalent in meaning. Once again, we see his concern to leave the original wording of his sources in place where there is only limited room for confusion.

There has been a small debate about whether it is correct to include the end of the verse, ‘and now HASHEM your God has placed you like the stars of the heavens for multitude’, since this is not relevant to the fragment במתי מעט. In Sifrei, it is true, the end of the verse is not cited, and it is also omitted from a minority of Geonic and medieval versions. However, in the earlier haggadah that was probably the author’s intermediate source it is included. Further, it seems to me that if we understand the method of our Maggid, the question isn’t really relevant. The verse quoted itself is not supposed to be the focus of attention, what is important is the section of the story the Maggid points you to. In this case, as elsewhere, the author’s desire to retain the wording of earlier sources led to a potential for confusion, but it is a potential that can only be realized when one is not aware of what the Maggid is trying to do.

ויהי שם לגוי מלמד שהיו ישראל מצוינים שם

The comment on this fragment is taken word for word from Sifrei. It is hard to see how it fits into the author’s system, since there is nothing in the story in between the previous comment (directing us to Shemot 1:1-5) and the next one (directing us to Shemot 1:7), and no verse is quoted to help us. In my opinion, the most likely explanation is that shortly after the Maggid was compiled, someone observed that the previous two comments were taken from Sifrei and set out to fix the text by copying this one over too, in this case completely unaltered. There should only be a comment on the fragment ויהי שם לגוי גדול עצום. This is consistent with the reality that the proper way of understanding the Maggid was lost early in the process of its popularization.

גדול עצום
כמה שנאמר: ובני ישראל פרו וישרצו וירבו ויעצמו במאד מאד ותמלא הארץ אתם

This is the first comment that is entirely original to our Maggid’s author and a perfect example of the type (i) comment as we defined it above.³¹ The fragment is linked to a verse in Shemot through the phrase כמה שנאמר and the connection is easy to understand on both the semantic and linguistic level. Just as the fragment talks about Yisrael’s descendants becoming numerous, so does the verse it points to, and a further link is established by the presence of the root [ע צ מ] in both the fragment and the verse. The father is thereby directed to discuss the remarkable growth of the children of Israel after Ya’aqov’s death.

ורב
כמה שנאמר: רבבה כצמח השדה נתתיך ותרבי ותגדלי ותבאי בעדי עדיים שדים נכנו ושערך צמח ואת ערם ועריה

It is probably the case that no part of the Maggid has done as much as this one to make it appear strange and bewildering in the eyes of its readers. The first step to remedying this issue is to establish the proper text.

In modern Haggadot, we find quoted two verses from Yehezqel chapter 16. Despite being consecutive, they are quoted in the wrong order, so that the description of a female baby writhing in its placental blood appears after its description of her as a young woman with comely hair and full breasts. I do not believe that I am the only one who, as a teenager, glanced over at the translation and felt rather embarrassed contemplating this apparently obscene material being solemnly recited at the head of the table. In fact, the second verse cited, verse six, simply should not be there at all. It is a late addition, probably made by the qabbalist, Yitzhaq Luria, or one of his disciples, in order to tilt the text to a particular interpretation, one that we shall see is not totally off the mark.

While the comment is, like the one that precedes it, original to the author, it is much more complex in nature and draws on (at least) two midrashic sources, both of them found in Mechilta D’Rabi Yishmael. The first of them is as follows:

וחמושים עלו בני ישראל אחד מחמש ויש אומרים אחד מחמישים ויש אומרים אחד מחמש מאות עלו. רבי נהוראי אומר העבודה ולא אחד מחמש מאות עלו שנאמר רבבה כצמח נתתיך וכתיב ובני ישראל פרו וישרצו שהיתה אשה אחת יולדת ששה בנים בכרס אחת ואתה אומר אחד מאות עלו ואימתי מתו בשלושה ימי אפלה…

‘And the children of Israel went up hamushim’. One fifth. And some say one fiftieth. And some say one five-hundredth. Rabi Nehorai says: By gum, not even one five-hundredth went up, as it says ‘I made you increase like the plants of the field’ (Yehezqel 16:7). And it is written: ‘And the children of Israel were fruitful and swarmed’, one woman would give birth to six sons in one womb. You say that one five-hundredth went up, when did the rest die? During the three days of thick darkness.

This is the source for a famous aggadic trope according to which only a small fraction of the children of Israel were sufficiently meritorious to leave Egypt and the rest died during the ninth plague. From this source the author of our Maggid drew the idea of linking the fragment רב in parshat habikkurim to the verse in Yehezqel starting רבבה. This verse is part of a passage allegorically describing the early period of Israel’s history in terms of God raising an orphan girl. However, this source only describes in exaggerated terms the speedy growth of the children of Israel which is what was already referred to in the comment on the previous fragment גדול עצום. To understand what the author is getting at, we need to turn to our second source:

מפני מה הקדים לקיחתו של פסח לשחיטו ד’ ימים היה רבי מתיה בן חרש אומר ואעבור עליך ואראך ועתך עת דודים הגיע שבועתו שנשבע הקב”ה לאברהם שיגאל את בניו ולא היה בידם מצות שיעסקו בהם כדי שיגאלו שנאמר שדים נכונו ושערך צמח ואת ערום ועריה וגומר ערום מכל מצות נתן להם הקב”ה שתי מצות דם פסח ודם מילה שיתעסקו בם כדי שיגאלו שנאמר ואעבור עליך ואראך מתבוססת בדמיך

Why did the Pesah offering have to be taken four days before it was slaughtered? Rabi Mathya son of Harash would say: ‘And I passed over you and I saw you and behold you had grown breasts’ (Yehezqel 16:8). The time had come for the oath which the Holy One Blessed be He had sworn to Avraham that he would redeem his sons, and they did not have in their hands any mitzvot to occupy themselves with in order that they should [merit to be] redeemed. As it says ‘your breasts were formed and your hair grown, but you were still naked and bare etc.’ (Yehezqel 16:7). ‘Naked’ of mitzvot. The Holy One Blessed be He gave to them two mitzvot, the blood of the Pesah and the blood of circumcision to occupy themselves with in order that they could be redeemed, as it says: ‘I passed over you and I saw you wallowing in your blood.’ (Yehezqel 16:6)

The broader purpose of this passage is to explain the purpose of the first Pesah offering. It can’t have been commemorative since the event Pesah commemorates had not yet happened and if it were merely about making a sign on the house of every Hebrew, then there were presumably other ways of doing it. The answer given is that the purpose of the Pesah was to accumulate merit by fulfilling a divine command, which is why certain aspects had to be brought forward.

Many commentators correctly worked out that the Maggid’s comment was based on this passage and it was to make this allusion clearer that the extra verse from Yehezqel was added in the 16th century. However, they missed the point. This is absolutely not the right stage in the Maggid to start talking about the Pesah offering, which only happens at the end of the story. Instead, we should look not at the conclusion of the midrash, but at its supporting premise. In the earliest version of the Maggid, that found in the Seder of Rav Amram Gaon, only the first three or four words of each verse introduced by כמה שנאמר are quoted, but in the comment on ורב we also find the last two words, ‘naked and bare’. This strongly suggests that it is these two words, which in the midrash are taken to refer to the Israel’s lack of merit, to which we must pay attention.

The midrashic tradition affirms that the children of Israel in Egypt fell to a low spiritual and moral state, a claim which, though absent from Shemot, is found in chapter 20 of Yehezqel. This belief also has a strong, almost indisputable theological basis. True though it is that the period of slavery and oppression in Egypt was foreordained as part of a masterplan, it cannot be that generations of Jews had to endure this suffering unless they did something to deserve it. One could argue that telling the story of the exodus without including the apostacy of the children of Israel in Egypt would be to make an implied complaint against God’s justice in overseeing human affairs. This, at any rate, seems to have been the view of our author who permitted himself his first of two departures from mapping parshat habikkurim strictly to the story as it is told in Shemot and instead directs us to include, at the end of the first part of the story, a reference to our forefather’s moral decline.

וירעו אתנו המצרים
כמה שנאמר: הבה נתחכמה לו, פן ירבה והיה כי תקראנה מלחמה ונוסף גם הוא על שנאינו ונלחם בנו ועלה מן הארץ.

The Maggid’s treatment of the first verse of parshat habikkurim is the one that requires by far and away the most discussion. As we move into the main body of the story in Shemot, however, things become much clearer. The comment here is original to the author and follows his general formula throughout. The reference given is to the next part of the story, namely the enslavement of the children of Israel at Pharaoh’s order.
All that needs to be explained here is the link between the fragment and the verse cited since the root [ר ע] is not present in the verse and it does not describe the Egyptians actually doing anything bad to the children of Israel. The answer is that the phrase וירעו אתנו, translated as ‘they did bad to us’, strictly speaking (at least when taken out of context) means ‘and they caused us to be bad’ because of the absence of the ל prefix. The Maggid seizes upon this reading, but renders it as ‘and they considered us to be bad’ or perhaps, ‘and they caused us to be bad in their eyes’. This is the basis of the semantic link with the verse in which the new Pharaoh expresses his distrust of the children Israel on the grounds that they might be ‘be added on to our enemies’.

ויענונו
כמה שנאמר: וישימו עליו שרי מסים למען ענתו בסבלתם ויבן ערי מסכנות לפרעה את פתם ואת רעמסס

This section is even easier to understand. The link is established by both the content and the shared root [ע נ ה] ‘to oppress’.

ויתנו עלינו עבדה קשה
כמה שנאמר: ויעבדו מצרים את בני ישראל בפרך

Here the link is only semantic, with קשה being linked to a synonym from an unrelated root בפרך. The author of the Maggid is taking us sequentially through the story, from initial enslavement to the imposition of oppressive labour and then to the imposition of even harder work as a response to the failure to stem the Hebrew birth-rate.

ונצאק אל יי אלהינו
כמה שנאמר: ויהי בימים הרבים ההם וימת מלך מצרים ויאנחו בני ישראל מן העבדה ויזעקו ותעל שועתם אל האלהים מן העבדה.

Like the previous five comments this one is original to the author and characteristic of his style.³² The link between the fragment and the verse being pointed to is established by the shared content, namely the children of Israel crying out to God. It is further strengthened by the connection between the root [צ ע ק] in the fragment and [ז ע ק] in the verse, since these are nearly equivalent, both meaning ‘to cry out’.

The potential for confusion that arises here is that the Maggid, after closely following the order of verses in the opening chapter of Shemot jumps suddenly to the end of the second chapter. The reason for this becomes clear when we observe that the first three chapters of Shemot actually contain two separate storylines which join up at the burning bush. The first is the story of the children of Israel being enslaved, crying out to God, and their prayer being answered. The second is the story of Moshe being rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter from among the bulrushes, raised at Pharaoh’s court and fleeing to Midian. The author of our Maggid chose to tell the first story in its entirety before moving on the birth of Moshe. ³³ This has clear advantages from the perspective of oral storytelling.

וירא את ענינו
זו פרישות דרך ארץ. כמה שנאמר: וירא אלהים את בני ישראל וידע אלהים

The link between the fragment and the verse pointed to is established by the shared root [ר א ה] ‘to see’. Sticking with the normal formula, however, would create a redundancy, since there is no real difference, from a narrative perspective, in God ‘hearing’ the cry of the children of Israel and ‘seeing’ their suffering. The author of the Maggid therefore adds in an extra linking comment which we find in the Talmud Bavli (Yoma 74:b).

ונילף מענוי דמצרים דכתיב וירא את ענינו ואמרינן זו פרישות דרך ארץ

The Gemara cites an interpretation of the fragment from parshat habikkurim as referring specifically to the inability of the Hebrews in Egypt to maintain normal marital intimacy. It is clearly citing some earlier source, which the author of our Maggid might possibly have had access to.³⁴

The use of this d’rasha in the Maggid strengthens the link between the fragment and the verse cited. On the side of the fragment, the connection is formed by the root [ע נ ה]. In context, this verb has its most common meaning of affliction or suffering, but it is also used frequently to denote sexual activity, not necessarily of the unpleasant variety. In Rabbinic discourse the two roots are combined to connote the absence of conjugal activity, which is a form of affliction. The allusion to sexual activity found in the verse from Shemot comes from its closing words ‘and God knew’. On the literal level, this can be taken as implying knowing something that others cannot see, that is to say something behind closed doors. On the linguistic level, the ‘biblical sense’ of the verb ‘to know’ is so well known as to be proverbial.

However, we still have not got any closer to explaining the function this comment has in the scheme our Maggid, namely mapping out the story in Shemot in order to facilitate oral storytelling. I believe the answer is found by looking back to the previous part of the story. There, the Torah tells us that God heard the cry of the children of Israel and remembered the promise he had made to their forefathers. One might ask, however, what He was doing with this promise in the preceding decades? We are not, presumably, supposed to think that he literally forgot it. One answer is that it needed to activated by prayer, although this assumes that the children of Israel had hitherto remained silent. Another popular explanation is that the appointed time had been reached, though, if this were the case, God’s seeing the suffering of the children of Israel would be irrelevant. I believe that the author of our Maggid is suggesting a third explanation, and in so doing making a second insertion into the exodus story. God’s promise to bring the children of Israel out of Egypt could be activated at any time of his choosing so long as the children of Israel existed. However, if the oppression had started to achieve its goal of impeding reproductive activities, causing the Hebrews’ numbers to dwindle, then this would effectively force God into acting to fulfil his promise. If so, it would be necessary to include this detail in the story.

It is also possible that the author of our Maggid is alluding to the midrashic tradition according to which either Moshe’s father or the children of Israel in general chose to abstain from reproduction in response to Pharaoh’s decree against the male babies. In that case, the Maggid is providing a neat way to segue from the story of the Children of Israel to the story of Moshe in general, which begins with Pharaoh’s decree.³⁵

A further point to bear in mind is that this comment minus the words זו פרישות דרך ארץ is found in the short Babylonian Maggid we saw earlier. The author of our Maggid included that comment, the significance of which in its original context is not very clear, and adapted it to fit into his way of telling the exodus story. This comment must therefore be regarded, along with the three comments we have already specified, as part of the initial framework upon which the author built his structure. This explains the fact that, in a rather literal sense, it does not quite fit in with his usual method of telling the story as found in Shemot.

ואת עמלנו
אלו הבנים. כמה שנאמר: כל הבן הילוד היארה תשליכהו וכל הבת תחיון

For most readers of the Haggadah, this looks like another example of the Maggid randomly jumping around the exodus story. We have already, seen, however, that this is not the case. After finishing the story of enslavement, suffering and turning to God of the children of Israel, it now begins the story of Moshe with Pharaoh’s command to murder the firstborn Hebrew males.

However, there is an apparent problem at the technical level. There is no linguistic link between the fragment and the verse pointed. In very general terms, one can see the semantic relevance of עמל (‘travail’) to this episode, but no more so than for לחץ or ענוי. The reason for this is that this is not an original comment of the author, but lifted word for word from Sifrei.³⁶ Though it fits perfectly into the general system of our Maggid, it stands out from a formal perspective. The fact that the author did not add anything to create more of a link between fragment and verse is further evidence of his unwillingness to alter sources he incorporated unless absolutely necessary.³⁷

At this juncture, I wish to make a general point. Some readers may have decided by this stage that one or two of my explanations of how the Maggid works are somewhat forced. This is not wrong, but the forcing is inherent in the text itself, not my explanations. I hope that I have shown that our Maggid is not a randomly arranged list of obscure allusions punctuated by the odd lucid remark, but a sophisticated tool to expound parshat habikkurim, which testifies to the breadth of knowledge and intellectual powers of its author. However, identifying our Maggid as a project of great elegance and ingenuity is not to say it is one that was perfectly executed. Something like the opposite is the case. A corollary of recognizing the correct way to read to read our Maggid is acknowledging that it is an experiment that, in some respects, did not quite come off, since, had it done, there would be no need for anyone to explain how it works a millennium later.

ואת לחצנו
זה הדחק. כמה שנאמר: …וגם ראיתי את הלחץ אשר מצרים לחצים אתם

After introducing the story of Moshe’s life with Pharaoh’s decree against the male babies, the Haggadah directs us to the revelation at the burning bush, from which the verse quoted is taken. The linguistic link established by the shared root [ל ח צ] is easy to discern, but there is a minor question about the introductory comment. דחק is simply a translation of the biblical term לחץ into Rabbinic Hebrew.³⁸ It is common enough to find explanations of obscure words in biblical exegesis, but it is not clear why the author of the Maggid thought it necessary to bother here. I do not have a good answer to this question.

ויוציאנו יי ממצרים
לא על ידי מלאך ולא על ידי שרף ולא על ידי השליח אלא הקב”ה הוא בכבודו ובעצמו (שנאמר: ועברתי בארץ מצרים בלילה הזה והכיתי כל בכור בארץ מצרים מאדם ועד בהמה ובכל אלהי מצרים אעשה שפטים אני יי.) [“ועברתי בארץ מצרים בלילה הזה” – אני ולא מלאך. “והכיתי כל בכור בארץ מצרים” – אני ולא שרף. “ובכל אלהי מצרים אעשה שפטים” – אני ולא שליח. “אני יי” – אני הוא ולא אחר.]³⁹

As we saw earlier, this is one of three parts of the Maggid that the author inherited as part of a basic framework from earlier haggadot. Unlike the comment on ארמי אבד אבי, however, he works this one seamlessly as a crucial element into his new structure. The previous comment directed the reader to the revelation at the burning bush. If we continue reading, we find one of the most interesting and most commented upon passages in the entire Torah.

יֹּאמֶר מֹשֶׁה אֶל־הָאֱלֹהִים הִנֵּה אָנֹכִי בָא אֶל־בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל וְאָמַרְתִּי לָהֶם אֱלֹהֵי אֲבוֹתֵיכֶם שְׁלָחַנִי אֲלֵיכֶם וְאָמְרוּ־לִי מַה־שְּׁמוֹ מָה אֹמַר אֲלֵהֶם׃ … וַיֹּאמֶר עוֹד אֱלֹהִים אֶל־מֹשֶׁה כֹּה־תֹאמַר אֶל־בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵי אֲבֹתֵיכֶם אֱלֹהֵי אַבְרָהָם אֱלֹהֵי יִצְחָק וֵאלֹהֵי יַעֲקֹב שְׁלָחַנִי אֲלֵיכֶם זֶה־שְּׁמִי לְעֹלָם וְזֶה זִכְרִי לְדֹר דֹּר׃

There is a great deal to unpack in this exchange, but the first thing we might note is that at the typical Seder discussion of this part of the story it is omitted entirely. This alerts us to one of the most important defining features of our Maggid that emerges when it is correctly understood.

The story of the exodus as told in parshat habkkurim is essentially one about the people of Israel, their enslavement and their liberation. God certainly appears in this story, indeed, He is central, but He is an actor, not the subject. This is how the exodus story is most commonly told and conceptualized today, in particular at the Seder. If one reads Shemot in this frame of mind, however, questions start to build up. Why did God harden Pharaoh’s heart when he could just have brought the Israelites out after the sixth plague at the latest? Since God has control over Pharaoh’s heart why doesn’t he just make him release the Hebrews straight away? Why do Moshe and God spend so much time talking to each other, and Moshe to Pharaoh before they actually do anything? Why did God engineer a final showdown with Pharaoh at the Sea of Reeds when the children of Israel had already been released? The more one reads, the deeper the questions become. Why an exodus at all? Why send down the children of Israel to Egypt just to bring them up again?

The answer that becomes more and more inescapable the more one pays attention is that the story of the exodus is not about Israel at all, it is a story about God. He starts the story with even His name unknown, perhaps, at most, considered one deity among others and ends it firmly established as supreme lord of all the earth. This is done through the multiplication of unprecedented miracles and the public humiliation of what was then the world’s foremost imperial power led by a man who himself claimed divine status. Liberating Israel is an essential part of this process, for it is through designating for Himself a people, and through raising them out of the lowest possible social condition, that God establishes himself as the master of history. But it is a means to an end, not the end itself.

When the author of the Maggid maps parshat habikkurim on to the complete exodus narrative in Shemot he is doing much more than just creating a helpful aid. He is transforming the story from a liberation history into a deocentric epic, by directing you to tell the entire narrative as found in Shemot, not just the parts that might appeal to a secular Zionist.⁴⁰ In particular, he is finding a way to include chapters 3 through 6 which happen in between God hearing the cry of the children of Israel (related in verse 3 of parshat habikkurim) and His bringing them out (related in verse 4). It is to accommodate this extra material that the fourth verse of parshat habikkurim has to be mapped out by the Maggid twice. This is also the reason why all of the comments by the Maggid on this verse take the form of roundabout midrashic links: there exist no natural links between this section of Shemot and parshat habikkurim.

ביד חזקה ובזרע נטויה
זו הדבר. כמה שנאמר: הנה יד יי הויה במקנך אשר בשדה בסוסים בחמרים בגמלים בבקר ובצאן דבר כבד מאד
זו החרב. כמה שנאמר: וחרבו שלופה בידו נטויה על ירושלים

The key to understanding the Maggid here is to realize that the comments ‘this is the plague’ and ‘this is the sword’ are intended to be read as a pair. Once done, all one has to do is to continue reading. Sure enough, we find:

וַיֹּאמְרוּ אֱלֹהֵי הָעִבְרִים נִקְרָא עָלֵינוּ נֵלֲכָה נָּא דֶּרֶךְ שְׁלֹשֶׁת יָמִים בַּמִּדְבָּר וְנִזְבְּחָה לַיהוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ פֶּן־יִפְגָּעֵנוּ בַּדֶּבֶר אוֹ בֶחָרֶב׃

The reference here is unmistakable. In the entire Tanach there are only two occasions when the words דבר and חרב are paired together in that order (the other being Amos 4:10, where they are separated by four words). The Maggid is, therefore, directing us to the next part of the story in which Moshe and Aharon ask to be allowed to bring the children of Israel out on a temporary basis and Pharaoh responds by intensifying their burdens. Again, we may remark that this part of the story is typically left out of the garbled account of the exodus given at a Seder, which is a great loss, even from a purely narrative perspective.

אני יי אלהיכם עוד למה נאמר והלא כבר נאמר אני יי אלהיכם אשר הוצאתי אתכם מארץ מצרים ומה ת”ל אני יי אלהיכם עוד כדי שלא יהו ישראל אומרים מפני מה צונו המקום לא שנעשה וניטול שכר לא עושים ולא נוטלים שכר כענין שאמרו ליחזקאל שנאמר יצאו אלי זקני ישראל וישבו לפני אמרו לו ליחזקאל עבד שמכרו רבו לא יצא מרשותו אמר להם הין אמרו לו והואיל ומכרנו המקום לאומות העולם יצאנו מרשותו אמר להם הרי עבד שמכרו רבו על מנת לחזור שמא יצא חוץ לרשותו. והעולה על רוחכם היה לא תהיה אשר אתם אומרים נהיה כגוים אשר סביבותינן וכמשפחות האדמה לשרת עץ ואבן חי אני נאם יי אם לא ביד חזקה ובזרוע נטויב ובחימה שפוכה אמלוך עליכם ביד חזקה זו הדבר כמה שנאמר הנה יד יי הויה במקנך אשר בשדה ובזרוע נטויה זו החרב כמה שנאמר וחרבו שלופה בידו נטויה על ירושלם ובחימה שכופה זו הרעב אחר שאני מביא עליכם שלש פורעניות הללו זו אחר זו ואחר כך אמלוך עליכם על כרכחם לכן נאמר עוד אני יי אלהיכם.

This source is complex and seems to contain more than one historical layer edited together. It starts by attacking the view (quite popular in our own age) that the mitzvot are optional activities through which a Jew can accumulate merits. It then moves on, using a passage from Yehezqel, to condemning a different, if not unrelated, misconception, namely that in casting the people of Israel into exile, God had freed them from the obligation to continue keeping His laws. It is in giving concrete meaning to the metaphorical terms used by Yehezqel to describe God’s punishment that the midrash makes the statements incorporated into our Maggid.

Now, quite obviously, none of this has any more than the most tenuous connection to the exodus. Some commentators have come up with far-fetched claims that the Haggadah is alluding to something that they already believed, whereas others have concluded that the author stuck them in for no reason at all, bewitched by the discovery of a comment – any comment – on the words ביד חזקה ובזרע נטויה. If we understand how the Maggid works, however, then the whole puzzle doesn’t even arise. The author wanted to link this fragment to the passage in Shemot; since no natural link existed he needed to find a roundabout one, which he did by splicing in this piece of midrashic exegesis.⁴¹

We should, however, ponder this a bit more. The words דבר and חרב appear together with reasonable frequency, especially in the books of Yehezqel and Yirmiyahu, but almost always as part of a trio with רעב (famine). As we have said, to find them directly juxtaposed together, alone, and in that order is very rare. Indeed, Shemot 5:3 is the only place where they come one after the other with a definite article. And yet here, lying ready in a midrashic source talking about something else entirely is a link between ביד חזקה ובזרע נטויה and דבר וחרב already mapped out,⁴² even though no prooftext is used in the midrash to connect the third part (חימה שכופה and רעב) of the respective trios!

This is, at any rate, a remarkable coincidence, and finding it testifies to the author’s command of sources. I am inclined to believe, however, that he did not consider it a coincidence. It is well known that Sa’adya Gaon believed that the Ten Commandments are given special importance by the Torah and Jewish tradition, not so much for their explicit content but because they contain virtually all 613 mitzvot amongst them. It is my belief that the author believed a similar thing about parshat habikkurim. He was not, in his view, merely mapping a synopsis from Devarim onto a longer account in Shemot, he was revealing a connection that already existed. It is for this reason, I believe, that when a natural link between the fragment and the passage it is mapped to doesn’t present itself, he turned to existing midrashic sources to create one and quoted them, as much as possible, in their original wording. If Hazal instructed us to tell the exodus story by means of parshat habikkurim it must be that, somehow, all of the exodus story is already contained within it, the secret of how this is so being contained in the works of theתורה שבעל פה which they bequeathed to us.

ובמרא גדל
זה גלוי שכינה. כמה שנאמר: או הנסה אלהים לבוא לקחת לו גוי מקרב גוי במסת באתת ובמופתים ובמלחמה וביד חזקה ובזרוע נטויה ובמוראים גדלים ככל אשר עשה לכם יי אלהיכם במצרים לעיניך

There are many parts of the exodus story that could potentially be described under the term גלוי שכינה (revelation of the divine presence), and there are three separate options suggested by commentators on the Haggadah. Speculation, however, is quite unnecessary; the correct way to understand what the Maggid is getting at is, once again, to read on in Shemot:

וַיְדַבֵּר אֱלֹהִים אֶל־מֹשֶׁה וַיֹּאמֶר אֵלָיו אֲנִי יְהוָה׃ וָאֵרָא אֶל־אַבְרָהָם אֶל־יִצְחָק וְאֶל־יַעֲקֹב בְּאֵל שַׁדָּי וּשְׁמִי יְהוָה לֹא נוֹדַעְתִּי לָהֶם׃ … וְלָקַחְתִּי אֶתְכֶם לִי לְעָם וְהָיִיתִי לָכֶם לֵאלֹהִים וִידַעְתֶּם כִּי אֲנִי יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵיכֶם הַמּוֹצִיא אֶתְכֶם מִתַּחַת סִבְלוֹת מִצְרָיִם׃

And God spoke to Moshe, and He said to him ‘I am HASHEM. And I appeared to Avraham, to Yitzchak, and to Ya’aqov as El Shaddai and (by) My name HASHEM, I was not known to them… And I will take you for me for a people and I will be for you for a God and you shall know that I am HASHEM who brings you out from under the burdens of Egypt.’ (Shemot 6: 2-3, 7)

Without delving into the many explanations of what these verses exactly mean, it is clear that they entail God announcing that he is about to reveal Himself in a way not hitherto witnessed. As we have discussed, in the exodus narrative as told in Shemot, this is not just a theme of the story, it is the story.

On a technical level, however, this section looks initially difficult. How does מרא גדל relate to גלוי שכינה and what is the relevance of the verse cited from Devarim aside from it including the words מוראים גדלים? The most popular theory among Haggadah scholars runs as follows. If we look at Targum Onkelos and other early sources, they seem to have understood מרא גדל (‘great terror’) as a variant spelling of מראה גדל (‘a great vision’).גלוי שכינה therefore represents actually seeing a physical image of God and the significance of the verse cited from Devarim lies in its closing words, ‘before your eyes’. This is all very learned, but it is quite wrong. There is no reference to an actual vision of God in this section or anywhere else in the exodus story, it goes against the whole thrust of the book, which is about God manifesting himself through miraculous acts, and any such vision is denied in Devarim not very far from the verse quoted. The way of resolving this problem is much simpler. Let us look at the verse cited from Devarim, along with a few verses before and after.

כִּי שְׁאַל־נָא לְיָמִים רִאשֹׁנִים אֲשֶׁר־הָיוּ לְפָנֶיךָ לְמִן־הַיּוֹם אֲשֶׁר בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אָדָם עַל־הָאָרֶץ וּלְמִקְצֵה הַשָּׁמַיִם וְעַד־קְצֵה הַשָּׁמָיִם הֲנִהְיָה כַּדָּבָר הַגָּדוֹל הַזֶּה אוֹ הֲנִשְׁמַע כָּמֹהוּ׃ הֲשָׁמַע עָם קוֹל אֱלֹהִים מְדַבֵּר מִתּוֹךְ־הָאֵשׁ כַּאֲשֶׁר־שָׁמַעְתָּ אַתָּה וַיֶּחִי׃ אוֹ הֲנִסָּה אֱלֹהִים לָבוֹא לָקַחַת לוֹ גוֹי מִקֶּרֶב גּוֹי בְּמַסֹּת בְּאֹתֹת וּבְמוֹפְתִים וּבְמִלְחָמָה וּבְיָד חֲזָקָה וּבִזְרוֹעַ נְטוּיָה וּבְמוֹרָאִים גְּדֹלִים כְּכֹל אֲשֶׁר־עָשָׂה לָכֶם יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵיכֶם בְּמִצְרַיִם לְעֵינֶיךָ׃ אַתָּה הָרְאֵתָ לָדַעַת כִּי יְהוָה הוּא הָאֱלֹהִים אֵין עוֹד מִלְבַדּוֹ׃

For ask now of the former days which were before you from the day God created man upon the earth, and from the one end of heaven to the other: has there been anything like this great thing, or has there been heard like it? Has a people heard the voice of God speaking from a fire as you have heard, and lived? Or has God assayed to come, to take a nation from the midst of a nation with trials, with signs, and with wonders, and with war, and with a strong hand, and with an outstretched arm and with great terrors, like all that HASHEM your God has done for you in Egypt before your eyes. You have been shown this to know that HASHEM he is the God, there is none beside him. (Devarim 4: 32-5)

The subject of this passage is the unique and unprecedented revelations of God’s power the children of Israel had witnessed both in Egypt and at Sinai. In a certain respect, it is the passage we are being referred to in Shemot viewed from the past tense. The linguistic link from the fragment to this passage is established by the position of מוראים גדולים at the end of the list of metaphors describing God’s power. Since this passage is equivalent in meaning to the passage from the exodus story from Shemot, the author has done what he needs to do: map another part of parshat habikkurim on to the next section of Shemot. That’s it. Not the least benefit of understanding how our Maggid works is being able to dispense with elaborate answers to questions that turn out not to be questions at all.

ובאתות
זה המטה כמה שנאמר: ואת המטה הזה תקח בידך אשר תעשה בו את האתת

When read as a d’rasha, this section looks odd. The staff was an instrument used to perform signs, it was not the signs themselves. However, by this stage you will probably have got the gist. Read on in Shemot and you will find Moshe and Aharon turning the staff into a crocodile at Pharaoh’s court. The comment, like the previous one and the one after, appears not to be derived from a midrashic source – though that cannot be definitively proven – but is an original creation of the author.

ובמפתים
זה הדם כמה שנאמר: ונתתי מופתים בשמים ובארץ דם ואש ותימרות עשן

In the next part of the story, Aharon turns the waters of Egypt into blood. The author of our Maggid therefore required a text linking the word מפתים with blood and he found it in the book of Yoel. If one looks on this comment as a ‘proof’ then it must be said to be decidedly weak. After all, might not it equally be proved from this verse that מפתים refers to a fire? If I have done my job, then you will see why such a question is superfluous.

דבר אחר
“ביד חזקה” – שתים. “ובזרע נטויה” – שתים. “ובמרא גדל” – שתים. “ובאתות” – שתים. “ובמפתים” – שתים. אלו עשר מכות שהביא הקב”ה על המצרים במצרים. ואלו הן….

The author of our Maggid now proceeds to expound the last verse of parshat habikkurim a second time. The reason is obvious: he has finished the last verse, but he hasn’t got to the end of the story. He therefore maps this verse on to Shemot once more using a d’rasha that, as we have seen, he inherited from earlier haggadot. However, he does more than this.

Straight after the listing the plagues, he quotes a mnemonic, in the name of Rabi Yehuda. This mnemonic appears in the earlier Babylonian haggadah we quoted above and is also in Sifrei on this verse.⁴³ The inclusion of this in the Haggadah has puzzled many. Memory aids are a perfectly respectable tool of pedagogy, but it’s not clear why anyone would need one now given that the complete list of plagues is written on the exact same page. As pointed out by Hizquni and many subsequent commentators,⁴⁴ however, the noteworthy feature of Rabi Yehuda’s statement is not that he wrote down the first letter of each word, it is how he divided them up: דצ”ך עד”ש באח”ב rather than, say,דצכ”ע דש”ב אח”ב. This reflects a real feature of the text in Shemot that has been recognized by many biblical scholars, both traditional and academic, namely that the first nine plagues are divided into three banks of three. In each set, the first plague is preceded by Moshe confronting Pharaoh in the morning ‘at the waters’; the second ends with an observation about Pharaoh’s hardened heart and the third is imposed without Pharaoh receiving a prior warning. Each set of three has a theme: the first is the power of God to work miracles beyond those of Pharaoh’s necromancers; the second is His placing a distinction between Egypt and Goshen, the habitation of the children of Israel; the third is His sending ‘all my plagues … so you may know that there is none like Me on the earth’.

The author of our Maggid has, therefore, done a great service to the father at a Seder. If his audience are not flagging, he can give a proper account of the ten plagues, describing the process by which they progressively demonstrated God’s rulership of the world and love for the children of Israel. If time is scarce, he can simply list the plagues and get to the next part of the story, which may not be exactly what you may think.

פסח מצה ומרור

At this point in our Haggadah, we find an extended piece of midrashic exegesis, lifted from Mechilta D’Rabi Yishmael concerning the number of plagues at the sea. This passage is omitted from the Haggadah text of Rambam, as well a Geonic text sometimes attributed to Rav Natronai Gaon. In the Siddur of Rav Sa’adya Gaon it appears as an optional extra. It is clearly a sort of appendix to our Maggid and I believe that this was added for two reasons. The first is a general anxiety in the middle to late Geonic period to add as much midrashic material to the Haggadah liturgy as possible, motivated by the condemnation of existing haggadot as tainted by Qaraite influence.⁴⁵ The second is a more laudable concern that by ending the story before the parting of the Sea of Reeds, the Maggid has cut off the story before its climax.

By including this section, however, I believe that it is possible we may have missed one final ingenious feature of our Maggid. The obligation to talk about Pesah, Matzah, and Maror is found in Mishnah Pesahim, in the halacha immediately following the one with which we began.

רבן גמליאל אומר כל שלא אמר שלושה דברים הללו בפסח לא יצא ידי חובתו פסח מצה ומרורים. פסח על שם שפסח המקום על בתי אבותינו במצרים. מררורים על שם שמררו המצריים את חיי אבותינו במצרים. מצה על שם שנגאלו. ⁴⁶

Raban Gamliel says: Anyone who did not say these three things on Pesah has not fulfilled his obligation: Pesah, Matzah and Bitter herbs. Pesah because the Omnipresent passed over the houses of our fathers in Egypt. Bitter herbs because the Egyptians embittered the lives of our fathers in Egypt. Matzah because they were redeemed.

Usually, this halacha is read separately from the one before. One thing the father must do on Seder night is to expound parshat habikkurim; another thing he must do is talk about Pesah, Matzah, and Maror. That is not incorrect, but there is way of combining the two, which becomes apparent if we look at the book of Shemot with fresh eyes. The Maggid has already directed us to tell of the ten plagues, culminating in the slaughter of the firstborn. The structure of Shemot at this point is as follows:

As you can see, Pesah, Matzah, and Maror are not just commemorations of the exodus from Egypt, they are part of the exodus itself, indeed, especially in the first case, crucial parts of the story. By moving on from discussion of the ten plagues to discussing them, the father is, in the most literal sense, just continuing with the story.

One question remains. What about the final confrontation between Pharaoh and God at the Sea of Reeds? Apart from being one of the most exciting parts of the story, it is also the theological climax, the moment when all doubts about the supremacy of HASHEM are dispelled and the Torah declares of the children of Israel ויאמינו ביי ובמשה עבדו. If the sections of our Haggadah that deal with the splitting of the sea are insertions of a later hand, does that mean the author of the Maggid, after his labours to include so many neglected parts of the tale, simply ignored the dramatic final scene? Perhaps not. Let us look at the conclusion of the halacha we just quoted:

לפיכך אנחנו חייבים להודות להלל לשבח לפאר לרומם לגדל למי שעשה לנו ולאבותינו את כל הנסים האילו והוציאנו מעבדות לחירות ונאמר לפניו הללויה

Therefore [i.e. because our fathers were redeemed] we are obligated to thank, to praise, laud, glorify, exalt, and magnify the One who did for us and for all our fathers these miracles and brought us out from slavery to freedom and let us say before Him: Halleluyah!

After discussing Pesah, Matzah, and Maror, the final stage before the meal is singing the first two paragraphs of Hallel. Over the centuries, a tradition developed of seeing this Hallel not merely as an expression of thanks for an historical event, but as something more. Everyone is familiar with the dictum with which our Haggadah introduces the Hallel: ‘in every generation each man is obligated to see himself as if he went out from Egypt’. The Hallel, according to this view, is not a memorial, so much as a re-enactment of the song the children of Israel themselves sang when they left Egypt.

Except that is not quite right. In their haste, the house of Ya’aqov had no time to sing on the day they went out from among the people of strange tongue. For that, they would have to wait seven more days, for the moment when they turned around and saw Pharaoh’s horsemen, dead on the shore of the sea.⁴⁷

1. 1. Many readers will notice that the text of this halacha is substantially different from the one they are familiar with from standard editions of the Mishnah. In fact, the entire chapter as it appears in standard editions is one of the most corrupt in the entire Mishnah. While most of the time the standard editions are not inaccurate to this degree, this should serve as a wakeup call as to the necessity of providing accurate editions of all the basic texts of Torah she b’al peh, so as to ensure that time spent studying Torah is in fact spent studying Torah and not scribal errors or the anxieties of the papal censor.
2. 2. Later authorities, based on the practice of Rav Aha the son of Rava recorded in the Talmud Bavli (Pesahim 115a), rule that one should only use lettuce if no other vegetables are available, so as to avoid the question of whether to say the b’racha over maror at this stage or only later when it is again brought out for the main meal. While the Tosefta rules that a b’racha must be said over every mitzvah (B’rachot 6:9), the Mishna almost never refers to them and it seems quite possible that the principle only became generally accepted in the early Amoraic period when b’rachot on mitzvot were the occasion of many disputes (see Talmud Bavli Succah 45b-46a, Pesahim 7a-b). It may well be that the Mishnah does not envision any b’racha being said on the maror other than borei p’ri hadamah. In any case, the Mishnah is quite explicit that lettuce should be eaten during the appetizer as well as during the main course. This is the basis for the mah nishtanah statement about dipping twice, which refers not to two dipping courses (which would not have been uncommon), but two dipping courses consisting of lettuce. From early medieval haggadot used in the land of Israel it is clear that there were many components of the appetizer course, including fruit, rice, and pastries [!]. The Tosefta (Pesahim 10:5) refers to a course consisting of offal meats. The practice of eating less than an olive-sized portion of a vegetable arose as a way of avoiding uncertainty over whether to say a b’racha aharona on this course or to wait to fulfil one’s obligation at birkat hamazon (since one does not, in any case, have to say a b’racha aharona on an amount smaller than an olive). From early-medieval Land of Israel Haggadot it is clear that the original practice was to say a b’racha aharona after each section of the appetizer course. Rav Sa’adya Gaon, who knew of only one course consisting of a single vegetable, also ruled that a b’racha ahrona should be recited as does Rambam in one of his responsa.
3. 3. This is plainly the meaning of the Mishnah and is interpreted as such by Rambam (Hilchot Hametz uMatzah 8:2), though he rules that they should be said as a matter of course regardless of the intelligence of the son. However, the practice of having the son (and in some households, all the sons and even daughters) read a modified version as questions has become universal, despite the grammatical impossibility of construing them this way and the rather obvious fact that nowhere in the entire Haggadah is there anything resembling an answer.
4. 4. This practice was specific, apparently, to Mediterranean civilization and so the Talmud Bavli amends the text to the one used today.
5. 5. Generally, this is taken to refer to the time of the Temple when the Pesah sacrifice was eaten. However, the previous halacha(Pesahim 10:3) has already made clear that the chapter is referring, unless it specifies otherwise, to practice after the destruction of the Temple. As an earlier halacha(Pesahim 4:4) indicates, many Jewish communities had the practice of eating roast meat on Seder night as a commemoration of the Pesah. One notes that, according to the correct text of the Mishnah, there are three statements referring to maror, matzah, and Pesah respectively, the three things which Raban Gamliel specified must be discussed.
6. 6. This clause is the subject of a dispute in the Talmud Bavli Pesahim 116b. As recorded there, Rav holds that the ‘disgrace’ is that our forefathers were idolaters and Rava (according to accurate texts) holds that it refers to our later forefathers being slaves. Both of these views are included in the text of our Haggadah. I agree with the view of Mitchell First (First, 2012) that this clause is meant to be read with the next one, so that ‘disgrace’ is ‘My father was a wandering Aramean’ and I believe that the Mahloqet in the Bavli is to be interpreted in this light. I explain my views on this subject at length in the essay ‘What is disgrace? A new interpretation of Pesahim 116:a’.
7. 7. It should be observed that this is not, in fact, the end of the passage, which continues ‘And He brought us to this place and gave to us this good land…’. Some claim, based on the Mishnah, that the Maggid should continue until the end of the next verse and therefore include the entrance to the land of Israel as the conclusion of the story, but that this was dropped to reflect the needs of Jews living in exile who could not say ‘and He brought us to this place’. This is plausible enough, but there is no evidence of this in extant haggadot including those from the land of Israel. That still leaves a gap of around 600 years in which the change could have taken place, but we can say with reasonable certainty that our Maggid, composed in Bavel in the 8th or 9th century, never included the extra verse.
8. 8. The exact status of this obligation is a matter of dispute. Rambam, Sefer haHinuch , Sefer Mitzvot Katan, and Sefer Mitzvot Gadol, all include this obligation as one of the 613 mitzvot and this was accepted by subsequent authorities. However, the lists of the Ba’al Halachot Gedolot and Rav Sa’adya Gaon do not include such a mitzvah and it is also absent from a poem on the theme by Ibn Gabirol. Presumably, however, they would agree that the father is supposed to tell his son about the exodus on this night, since the Torah explicitly says so. The question is whether talking about the exodus is a mitzvah in itself or merely the intended result of other mitzvot of the evening, as it is, for example, at a pidyon hamor. The dispute is about the nature of the Torah’s legal system rather than what one should be doing on the eve of the 15th of Nissan.
9. There is a secondary question of why the passage Devarim 25:6-9 passage in particular was chosen. There are two other passages that could serve the same purpose: Bemidbar: 20:15-16 and Devarim 6:21-24 . First, when answering such a question, it is necessary to remember that one of the options had to be chosen; even if the choice was random parshat habikkurim would still have a 1/3 chance of winning. Secondly, one can observe that parshat habikkurim has features that the other two passages do not. Bemidbar 20:15-6 includes nothing about G-d’s punishment of the Egyptians and Devarim 6:21-24 picks up the story in the middle after the children of Israel are already enslaved. A further reason is that parshat habikkurim was the most well-known of the passages since it was used by those presenting their first fruits in the Temple. It is true that the Seder ritual as described in the Mishnah is probably of Post-Temple origin, but it is not unreasonable to suggest that the passage retained a certain prestige thereafter, especially as it one of only two examples of a liturgical text found in the Torah, the other being viduy hama’asrot which appears just afterwards. Finally, it can be seen simply by comparing the three passages that parshat habikkurim is the most elegant, with a sonorous repetition of near-synonyms that makes for easy memorisation.
10. 10. The most explicit statement to the effect that one must read the entire Maggid as written is found in Sefer Mitzvot Katan: ‘and he reads the whole Haggadah as it is written’ (Mitzvah 144), but a similar, if less emphatic, statement is found in the Tur and Shulhan Aruch (OH 473:[7]). The Artscroll Mahzor makes the rather astounding claim that all of the participants at the Seder are required to recite the Maggid!
11. 11. In part 1 of my essay ‘Occam’s Sword: A different way of reading the Maggid’, I discuss the various attempts made to identify ‘the sword’ within the traditional explanatory framework.
12. 12. For clarity’s sake, we should say that this is not exactly the view of contemporary academic scholarship, which sees our Maggid as the result of a process of many different writers injecting their own additions without any overall plan. That is to say, the Maggid we have is not the result of a bad author, it’s the result of there being no author.
13. 13. The haggadot of Rav Amram Gaon, an anonymous Geonic manuscript sometimes attributed to Rav Natronai Gaon, and Rambam use כמו שנאמר which is easier to construe. The version of Rav Sa’adya Gaon simply uses שנאמר. Whatever the correct term, the function is the same, and I shall use כמה שנאמר since that is what most readers will be familiar with and one can make a reasonable case that it the correct version.
14. 14. The manuscript from which it is copied was written around the beginning of the 11th century CE, long after the Maggid we use today had become standard. The actual text must be much earlier, but how much so is difficult to say.
15. 15. The assumption that this and similar maggids were intended to be read off the page, despite the absence of any positive evidence and its inherent implausibility, is, as far as I know, shared by all Haggadah scholars. Its origin is a disconcertingly blistering attack made by Rav Natronai Gaon towards the end of the 9th century C.E. on a haggdah with a similarly scanty commentary from the Land of Israel, subsequently quoted in the enormously influential Seder of Rav Amram Gaon at the beginning of his section on the Pesah liturgy. Rav Natronai attacked the haggadah as being the work of Qaraites determined to violate halacha and read the Torah unmediated by authoritative hermeneutic techniques or the guidance of Hazal. For centuries, his attack was taken at face value until the haggadah he was commenting on, or one very similar, was discovered in the Cairo Genizah. Since (with the greatest possible respect) we now know that every other assumption he made about this haggadah was wrong, it is high time we retired this one.
16. 16. The version of this d’rasha in many early haggadot includes an extra exclusion, לא על ידי דיבר, which would appear to be a reference to the belief in the logos (‘The Word’) a common belief among Jews under the influence of Hellenic concepts during the late Second-Temple period, Philo being only the most famous example. Many of those who held such conceptions found their way into the Christian community and their beliefs eventually crystallized into the doctrine that (Halilah) God is composed of three elements, each of which pre-existed the universe and one of which (‘the Word’) was incarnated as a human. Within the Jewish community, these views were effectively suppressed and strict monotheism became synonymous with Jewish identity. Works such as the Books of Jubilees or the Book of Enoch, which are full of mystical angelology, and had been regarded by many Jews as having the authority of scripture, were so successfully suppressed that Jews forgot what they said and we would have no idea were it not for some being rediscovered in the Dead Sea Scrolls and others being preserved by fringe branches of the Christian Church. Subsequently, a rather different challenge to Rabbinic orthodoxy arose in the form of Qaraism, which denied the legitimacy of halacha based on oral tradition and Rabbinic legal exegesis. Medieval commentators caught up in the battle against Qaraism conceptualized earlier sectarian groups, such as the Tzadokites, as being proto-Qaraites. For this reason, the meaning of early Rabbinic polemic against mystical and insufficiently monotheistic groups was substantially forgotten.
17. 17. Some of the more striking examples include: (i) Mishnah B’rachot 5:3 and Megillah 4:8 require that a Shliah Tzibur who says Modim twice must be silenced; (ii) Mishnah Megillah 4:10 forbids the use of the Mercava section of Yehezqel from being used as a haftarah (iii) The Talmud BavliShabbat 13b reports that the Rabbis considered suppressing Yehezqel in its entirety.
18. 18. See Shemot 12:23. Other examples include Bemidbar 20: 16 (‘And he heard our voice and he sent a malach’; Shemot 23:20-22 (‘Behold I am sending an malach before you…beware of him and listen to his voice…’); Tehillim 78:48 (‘He would send against them… bad malachim’).
19. 19. A minority view is ‘my father was a perishing (or starving!) Aramean. See (Gerald Janzen, 1994). What all these views have in common is that ‘ארמי’ is considered to be the same person as ‘אבי’ and the subject of the verb ‘אבד’. Mitchell First makes a strong case that the author/compiler of the Mishnah also understood the verse this way(First, 2012) , which I think is correct
20. 20. At this point, it is perhaps necessary to briefly describe the Midrash Halacha, since a rough working knowledge is essential to understanding the rest of this introduction and there are many Jews, even those who have mastered hundreds of pages of Gemara who have not much more than vague awareness of its existence. The term Midrash Halacha refers to the earliest written collections of Rabbinic exegesis which date from roughly the same era as the compilation of the Mishnah, that is around 200 CE. They are called halachic midrash because their primary purpose is legal exegesis, in contradistinction to later collections which are primarily homiletic, or perhaps even literary, in nature. This is a retrospective term created by academic scholars and does not mean that all the material they contain is halachic; rather exegesis of different types is liberally mixed together. However, it does mean that they completely ignore sections of the Torah with little or no halachic significance. For that reason, there is no collection on Bereishit and the only book which is covered in its entirety is Vayiqra. The four collections that survived are: on Shemot – Mechilta d’Rabi Yishmael; on Vayiqra – Sifra; on Bemidbar – Sifrei; on Devarim – Sifrei. However, these were not the only compilations that once existed. Some, such as Mechilta d’Rabi Shimon Ben Yohai and Sifra Zuta have been recovered, whole or in part, by researchers over the past century. It is not easy, and in some cases impossible, to buy a printed edition of these works, though one can find much of them in Midrash haGadol, a rediscovered 14th century anthology, which is more widely available. The basic purpose of Midrash Halacha is to demonstrate how legal rulings found in the Mishnah, Tosefta and elsewhere are derived from the biblical text. It is now generally believed that they were compiled after the Mishnah, perhaps by even more than a century, but the underlying oral process of exegesis and legal systemization to which both the Mishnah and midrashim testify would have occurred concurrently over many centuries
21. 21. What exactly it is trying to convey is a slightly different matter. It would seem odd to say that Ya’aqov went to Aram in order to be destroyed (or to destroy?), though that is how the verb is used in the second part of the comment. It is possible that parts of the d’rasha were compiled from separate sources, in which case it may be that the verb [א ב ד] in the second part is being used in a different sense to mean wander, that is, to stay temporarily.
22. 22. The phrase is elsewhere used to connote a message derived from a verse that is not in any respect its literal meaning. See Pirkei Avot 3:8.
    רבי דוסתאי ברבי ינאי משום רבי מאיר אומר, כל השוכח דבר אחד ממשנתו, מעלה עליו הכתוב כאלו מתחיב בנפשו, שנאמר (דברים ד) רק השמר לך ושמר נפשך מאד פן תשכח את הדברים אשר ראו עיניך.
23. 23. It is a dogma among Haggadah scholars that the intended understanding here is not ‘My father was a wandering Aramean’, but a third understanding according to which ארמי denotes a geographical location, rendering the phrase something like ‘My father went down to Aram’. This seems initially plausible when you compare the language of the Sifrei to Greek and Aramaic translations of the verse, but it falls apart on closer inspection. The י suffix is used countless times in biblical Hebrew to denote an individual’s membership of a tribe or ethnic group, his place of origin or residence, or to mark him out as having a particular characteristic. It can also be used in a genitive sense, particularly in archaic Hebrew and in names (גבריאל = mighty man of God). There are no examples of it being used in the sense of travelling to a place. Conversely, the ה suffix is used liberally throughout the Torah in exactly this sense, including two words later in the same verse. To claim that Hazal read the word ארמי as ‘to Aram’ is to claim that they struggled with basic Hebrew grammar. It is one thing to claim this of the contemporary common man, or even later Amoraim, for whom Hebrew had already become a liturgical language mediated through the prism of Aramaic translation (See Bavli B’rachot 38:1 and Succah 39:1 ), it is quite another in relation to the Tanaim for whom Hebrew was the language of study and instruction and who have bequeathed to us thousands of pages of text in cogent, lucid Hebrew. The correct explanation is as follows. If we identify the subject of the verse as Ya’aqov, then the question becomes how can he be described as an ‘Aramean’. One obvious answer is that he was an ‘Aramean’ in a borrowed sense because he lived there for two decades, analogous to the way we might describe a Jew as being ‘American’ or ‘French’. The ancient translations of the phrase as ‘My father went down to Aram’ are to be understood as part of the genre of explanatory translations, and the comment in Sifrei is based on this understanding, which is actually identical to that of Ibn Ezra, Sforno, and Hizquni. Rashbam, who understands the subject of the phrase to be Avraham, interprets the term in an ethnic sense (Ramban on Bereishit 12:1 provides justification for describing the avot as Arameans).
24. 24. In Hazal’s terminology, דרש was used to refer to any form of exegesis, from that which followed closely the plain meaning of a verse all the way to that which was quite fanciful. The formal division between פשט and דרש was made by later commentators and systematizers trying to make sense of the vast array of exegesis Hazal had left at their disposal.
25. 25. See Mishnah Megilla 4:9; Bavli B’rachot 8b; Bavli Pesahim 112b.
26. 26. Levi Finkelstein famously ascribed the comment on arami oved avi to the pro-Ptolemaic, anti-Seleucid politics of a pre-Hasmonean author. Every author of an academic Haggadah likes to take a shot at this famous, but quite impossible theory. However, in denying any political motivation behind this midrash, at least in its original context, I am inclined to think they have thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
27. 27. The version that made its way into the <em<haggadah tradition also contains an additional claim not found in any other extant source, namely that Lavan was worse than Pharaoh since he sought to wipe out both the males and females. It is not clear what the basis for this claim and it may simply have been borrowed from a source talking about something else (Kulp, pp. 222-3). The fact that our only sources for this idea are found in haggadot does not necessarily mean it was invented specifically for that purpose.
28. 28. See footnote 22.
29. 29. It is my belief that these should be vocalized the same.
30. 30. The best place to look for more information is chapter 5 of (Boyarin, 2004), though I am wary about recommending it since the author is a rather nasty kind of heretic and writes with the goal of advocating the Neo-Frankist synthesis of Satmar politics and Foucauldian theology [sic!] that he dubs ‘diasporic Judaism’. To give him his due credit, however, he is admirably frank about what he was doing and the discerning reader can separate the very important material he presents from the counter-intuitive spin he puts on it. For a summary of the more important material see, this article, though it requires wading through a quite remarkable degree of garbage (which in the book is largely barricaded into separate chapters) like the ‘discursive analogue of the psychic process known as splitting’. On first sight, this veil of words appears to be nothing more sinister than the kind of boring pompous babble that academics habitually use to signal their in-group status, but it actually has the purpose of obscuring the fundamental reality of the process the author describes describes, namely that the Rabbis were involved, not in a discursive project of hegemonic boundary reification (or whatever), but a task of Josian importance in which they painstakingly purged Judaism of some of the most inane theological concepts to have been conceived by anyone, ever.
31. 31. a href=”https://simania.co.il/bookdetails.php?item_id=8943″ target=”_blank”>Safrai and Safrai (p. 133) point out that the same comment is found in Midrash haGadol and suggest it may be from a Tannaitic midrash. However, this gets things completely the wrong way round. Midrash haGadol (a remarkable 14th century compilation of numerous sources, many of which are now lost) uses our Maggid as source-text and ‘improves’ it in various ways. There is no evidence for any prior source for this comment and no reason to think one exists, since in it its style and structure it exemplifies the unique style of our Maggid which is entirely atypical of midrash.
32. 32. Safrai and Safrai (pp. 135-6) observe that these comments appear in מדרש תנאים, a reconstructed source built up in some respects following a dubious methodology. I believe that it is not longer controversial to state that these comments are not tannaitic in origin.
33. 33. This leaves the question of how one should categorize Shemot 1:15-22, in which Pharaoh orders the murder of the male babies. On linguistic grounds it seems more correct to include it with the first narrative describing the travails of the children of Israel. However, this section is also an essential prologue to the Moshe story, explaining why he was placed among the bulrushes by his mother. Since only the second consideration is really relevant when telling the story orally, the author of our Maggid includes it with the Moshe narrative.
34. 34. Some claim that the Gemara is actually quoting the Haggadah. It is not impossible that it is quoting an earlier haggadah, though we have no record of it (nor do we know that written haggadot even existed this early). There seems to me no compelling reason to assume that the author of the Maggid took the phrase from anywhere other than the Gemara.
35. 35. Kulp (p.227) writes that the order of d’rashot is ‘artificial’: ‘where did the boys come from if there was already sexual separation?’. Looked at from the purely logical standpoint, this objection is moot: there is no contradiction between a declining birth-rate and the existence of baby boys. However, even if we take the author to be referring to the midrashic tradition implying a complete cessation of reproduction, the progression is clear enough: this happened because of the decree. Obviously, moving from the story of the children of Israel to the story of Moshe involves going back in time somewhat; this is a way to do it.
36. 36. The original source even includes the rare formula כמה שנאמר and is perhaps the original model for the formula used throughout the Maggid. Another possibility is that the version found in Sifrei was ‘corrected’ by scribes familiar with the Haggadah. In either case, it seems that our author’s immediate source for this formula was the earlier Babylonian haggada’s comment on וירא את ענינו, see above.
37. 37. There is a separate question of how to interpret the logic of the d’rasha in its original context in Sifrei. I have no good answer to this question and will not suggest one since it is not strictly relevant.
38. 38. Ironically, לחץ is a common word in modern Hebrew while דחק is not, so the Maggid when read today is effectively translating a well-known word into an obscure one.
39. 39. In the version of Rav Sa’adya Gaon, the comment stops before the round brackets. The version of Rambam and the one attributed to Natronai Gaon include the verse in the round brackets, while the version of Rav Amram Gaon includes the further elaboration in the square brackets. The shorter version seems the most appropriate to the Maggid’s purpose of directing the reader to Shemot 3:13-15.
40. 40. It should be said that an honest reading of the exodus story as presented in Shemot is a challenging experience for more than just secular Zionists, and renders untenable (to say the very least) a great deal of mainstream orthodox theodicy. A related question is whether, leaving aside the discomfort most moderns must feel about the true nature of the book of Shemot, it is really correct to tell the story of the exodus on Seder night specifically as a story about God rather than a story about Israel. Shemot 13:8, it seems to me, indicates the latter approach, as would Hazal’s choice of parshat habikkurim as the base text. On the other hand, the symbolism of the Pesah offering eaten on Seder night is tied specifically to מכת בכורות – that is to say the penultimate revelation of God’s power – while the seven-day festival of matzot is tied to redemption of Israel. More than that I do not wish to comment. The job of this explanation is to explain what the Maggid is, not what it should be.
41. 41. It is just possible to say that there might be a further thematic link because the source talks about Israel during a period of suffering and so does the passage in Shemot, but I don’t believe that is necessary.
42. 42. On the face of it, it is also remarkable that the source makes use of the rare formula כמה שנאמר. However, I do not want to make too much of this specific point, since it is not unlikely that the original text did not include this formula and that it was added in by a scribe familiar with the Haggadah. See also footnote 13.
43. 43. It’s presence in Sifrei has been regarded as anomalous. Some have suggested that it was back-inserted by a scribe working from the Haggadah on the grounds that it was attributed to a tana. I do not find this persuasive or necessary. As explained by Hizquni, Rabi Yehuda’s comment is not just a memory aid, but a legitimate piece of exegesis.
44. 44. See also Ritva on the Haggadah.
45. 45. The most striking example of this is the inclusion before the four sons of the halacha from Mishnah B’rachot 1:5 discussing the proof-text for mentioning yetziat mitzrayim in the b’racha after q’riat shem’a at night. Attempts to prove the contrary notwithstanding, this passage has absolutely no relevance to Seder night whatsoever.
46. 46. Many readers will again notice the numerous differences between the accurate text of this halacha and the one they are used to.
47. 47. In midrashic writings, the second verse of Hallel בצאת ישראל ממצרים is explained as referring specifically to the parting of the sea.