הגדה ברורה

Haggadot and essays for Pesah and all year round

Ibn Ezra

‘Three days into the wilderness.’ Why lie?

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One of the most most difficult things to understand about the exodus story is why, over the entire course of his struggle with Pharaoh, Moshe maintains the fiction that the Hebrews want to go three days into the wilderness into order to celebrate a festival to HASHEM. Since we know from the beginning that the plan is to leave Egypt permanently in order to conquer the Land of Israel, Moshe would appear to be engaging in deception. The most immediately obvious way of reading this is that the …

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Parshat Bo: Why did they bake their dough into matzot?

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In the Geonic Haggadah that we use, we find the most well-known explanation for eating matzot on Pesah: the children of Israel brought dough with them from Egypt and baked it as matzot because there was not time for it to rise. This is based on reading Shemot 12:39 as a series of clauses each explaining the one before: and they baked the dough they had brought out from Egypt into matzot because it had not risen because they had been driven out from Egypt and were not able to tarry… This …

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Parshat Bo: Who were the firstborn?

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The Torah repeatedly emphasizes that all the Egyptian firstborn died, from the lowest to the highest rungs of society, as well as the animals. However, it leaves ambiguous exactly what a firstborn is. Generally, in the Torah, the term בכור refers only to the firstborn of a mother and usually only if the child is male. With regard to the mitzvah of pidyon haben, a בכור has to be the ‘opening of the womb’ and if the mother’s first baby is female there is no בכור. However, Tehillim 78:51, …

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Parshat Bo: Borrowing from the Egyptians

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On God’s instruction, the children of Israel ‘borrow’ valuable items from the Egyptians, thus leaving Egypt with great wealth. This presents an obvious moral difficulty because they never return what they borrowed. Ibn Ezra affirms that the children of Israel did indeed trick the Egyptians, but that this was entirely licit because all property belongs to G-d and he may transfer it from one person to another when He wishes. In addition, the Egyptians only lent their goods to the Hebrews …

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Parshat Bo: What was the plague of darkness?

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While all the plagues are supernatural and thus beyond human comprehension in terms of their cause, the plague of darkness is unique in that it is hard to understand what it actually was. Darkness is not a thing, so what can it mean that God ‘sent darkness and made it dark’ (Tehillim 105:28)? In addition, the Torah’s description of the plague is extremely brief and the phrase וימש חשך is ambiguous because it is not clear whether it comes from the root [מ ש ש] ‘to feel/grope’, [מ ו ש] …

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What are צפרדעים?

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In the entire Tanach, the term צפרדע appears only in this section of the Torah and Tehillim 105:30 where it also refers to the second plague. It is an unusual word and may not actually be Hebrew. The traditional view is that this creature is the frog, and this is its meaning in modern Hebrew. Onkelos translates the term as עורדעניא which likely means frogs. However, there is no source in Hazal that clearly identifies צפרדעים as frogs and a surprisingly large number of commentators believed that …

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