Finding the Seder in the Bible

The traditional Passover Seder isn't detailed in the Bible, but it does fulfill numerous biblical commandments.

BY: Aaron Eby 4 May 2023 PUBLISHED IN: MESSIAH MAGAZINE 29View Magazine

The LORD spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to the children of Israel and tell them that they are to have a seder meal on the night of Passover.” From this, we learn that you are to begin the seder at a time when normal people are just going to bed and finish at a time when even bars are expelling the last few stubborn patrons.

At this seder, you are to drink four glasses of wine, but you must not sip it casually between bites of food as the Canaanites do. Rather, you must chug each glass in one gulp while balancing acrobatically on your left buttock.

You are to place on your table a sectioned plate containing the most disappointing hors d’oeuvres ever: a burnt egg, one plain piece of lettuce, mashed-up apples and nuts, tear-inducing horseradish root, a bone without any meat on it, and that stuff they use for a garnish at Denny’s.

But the children of Israel wailed and said, “Who will give us real food to eat at this meal? For it was better for us in Egypt.”

And the LORD relented and said,

“You may have a regular meal, but only after enduring an hour of the head of household mumbling awkwardly from a booklet while juggling a goblet and matzot. At that point, you will be so hungry that you would give anything just to eat that piece of lettuce on the sectioned plate. After the reading, you will eat matzah—not just one or two pieces, but until it comes out of your nostrils and becomes loathsome to you."

Hey, wait a second. That’s not in the Bible! Where does the Bible give any to-do list commanding all these traditions and customs and steps and rituals and procedures and ceremonies? There is no verse in the Bible that requires dipping parsley, drinking wine, or reciting the Hallel at a Passover seder meal.

Despite this, the Gospels do show our Master Yeshua observing many of these very customs at the Last Supper. And his meal lines up remarkably with the Passover Seder found in a modern-day Haggadah, which wasn’t written down until hundreds of years later. In fact, the New Testament may be the oldest attestation of several of these seder traditions.

The Set Order

The traditional seder follows an order of fifteen steps. These seder traditions are not arbitrary or random. Most seder traditions are a creative way of accomplishing a biblical goal, a method that’s been honed and optimized over thousands of years. On Passover night, several different mitzvot (“commandments”) converge.

Seder is a Hebrew word that means “order.” The seder takes all these commandments and arranges them in a specific order so we can be sure to do everything that needs to be done. Let’s find out what some of those mitzvot are and how the seder makes them happen.

The first place we’ll look is in Leviticus 23:

In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month at twilight, is the LORD’s Passover. And on the fifteenth day of the same month is the Feast of Unleavened Bread to the LORD; for seven days you shall eat unleavened bread. On the first day you shall have a holy convocation; you shall not do any ordinary work. But you shall present a food offering to the LORD for seven days. On the seventh day is a holy convocation; you shall not do any ordinary work. (Leviticus 23:4–8)

The word translated as “Passover” here is Pesach. Pesach in Biblical Hebrew is not a day but a lamb offering, a sacrifice that is roasted and eaten. If we want to be technical, then in all the places where translations tell us that the Israelites must “keep the Passover,” it’s not talking about celebrating a holiday. It talks about how they are to prepare, slaughter, offer, roast, and eat the Passover lamb. The actual holiday is called the Festival of Unleavened Bread, or in Hebrew, Chag HaMatzot.

The afternoon of the fourteenth of Nisan is when the Passover lamb is slaughtered, its blood is splashed on the altar, and its meat is roasted over a fire. That evening is the first night of Chag HaMatzot, a holy non-work day and the first of seven special days. Today Chag HaMatzot is called “Passover” or Pesach because it’s human nature to abbreviate.

Leviticus describes Passover in the list of “holy convocations.” In Hebrew that’s mikra’ei kodesh. The English word convocation implies assembly, which might make you think this is a commandment to gather for these holidays, but that’s not what mikra is. It’s something to the effect of a “proclamation” or “declaration.” It goes along with what comes next: “which you (Israel) are to proclaim.”

These are appointments that the children of Israel are instructed to declare as holy at the time appointed for them. So let’s begin to record a biblically based to-do list for the observance of the holiday: 1) Declare the holiness of the day.

In every single generation, a person is obligated to see himself as if he had gone out from Egypt.

Remembrance and Rejoicing

Leviticus 23 gives us the cycle of the moadim, God’s appointments, but Passover belongs to a particular subset of these holidays: the pilgrimage festivals. In the Bible, the Hebrew term chag is only used for the three pilgrimages: Passover, Shavu’ot, and Sukkot. Let’s look at Deuteronomy 16:1–2:

Observe the month of Abib and keep the Passover to the LORD your God, for in the month of Abib the LORD your God brought you out of Egypt by night. And you shall offer the Passover sacrifice to the LORD your God, from the flock or the herd, at the place that the LORD will choose, to make his name dwell there.

Here the Jewish people are instructed to cook and eat the Passover lamb in Jerusalem. Since it is a pilgrimage, adult Jewish males are required to be present at the Temple. Without the Temple, there cannot be a Passover lamb or a pilgrimage. Unfortunately, that will be missing from our seders until Messiah returns. However, we also find that this holiday serves as a remembrance of the exodus. So that will be another biblical item for our to-do list: 2) Remember the exodus from Egypt.

Deuteronomy 16:14 goes on to say,

You shall rejoice in your feast [chag], you and your son and your daughter, your male servant and your female servant, the Levite, the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow who are within your towns.

Even though this commandment is mentioned in the middle of the instructions for the holiday of Sukkot, it is worded generically: You shall rejoice in your chag. This suggests that the commandment to rejoice also applies to Passover and Shavu’ot, so lets add this to our to-do list: 3) Rejoice on the holiday.

The Lamb

Next we’ll turn to Exodus 12. This chapter can be confusing because it describes both the very first Passover lambs and the actual exodus from Egypt and how Israel will memorialize the exodus in subsequent years. The memorial observance will have both similarities to and differences from with the original observance.

This chapter has a new mitzvah: The Passover lamb is supposed to be roasted on fire and eaten with matzah and bitter herbs. Now we might wonder—are the bitter herbs only for the first year, just like the blood on the doorposts? This is clarified in Numbers 9, when the Israelites observed Passover as a memorial in the second year.

Our to-do list must now include: 4) Eat the lamb with matzah and bitter herbs. However, since we can’t eat the Passover lamb sacrifice, we must leave it at matzah and bitter herbs.

Still, we should acknowledge that a truly biblical seder should have the Passover sacrifice, so let’s add this task to our list: 5) Symbolically represent the Passover lamb.

The Redemption

Let’s skip down to the next chapter of Exodus, which has a new commandment to consider:

You shall tell your son on that day, “It is because of what the LORD did for me when I came out of Egypt.” (Exodus 13:8)

From this, we see there is a commandment to tell our children about the exodus from Egypt. The sages, reading this verse in Hebrew, noticed an odd phrase. Where the ESV translates “what,” the Hebrew word is zot, which means “this.” It is because of “this.”

The sages reasoned: Why would you say a word like “this” unless you were pointing at something? What else would you be pointing to other than the Passover lamb, the matzah, and the bitter herbs? This brings another item to our to-do list: 6) Tell our children the story of the redemption using the ritual foods as visual aids.

Ah, suddenly this is starting to look like a seder!

For our next goal, look at these verses:

When your son asks you in time to come, “What is the meaning of the testimonies and the statutes and the rules that the LORD our God has commanded you?” then you shall say to your son, “We were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt. And the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand.” (Deuteronomy 6:20–21)

Something is making these children extremely curious. Now this may not be only for Passover night, but we can clearly see that it is directly related to the exodus, so we can keep in mind this goal of our seder as we continue our to-do list: 7) Make our children curious.

Of course, this means that this night must be noticeably different from other nights. While we’re at it, we can see that the kids also have a job: 8) Ask questions. This applies to adults too. We’re all like children at the seder table, are we not?

Now let’s take a closer look at the commandment to speak of the time when “we were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt.” This means that in future generations—those after the exodus—Jewish parents should not overlook the command to tell their children, “I was a slave in Egypt.”

For the most part, the generation that went into the land, to whom Moses was speaking in Deuteronomy, was not even comprised of those who came out from Egypt. This tells us something very important about the purpose of Passover. As the Haggadah puts it: “In every single generation, a person is obligated to see himself as if he had gone out from Egypt.” So here is another task for our to-do list: 9) Relive and personally identify with the exodus from Egypt.

The Passover lamb is supposed to be roasted on fire and eaten with matzah and bitter herbs.

Songs of Praise

As we know, the centerpiece of the biblical seder would be the lamb sacrifice if we lived in the days of the Temple. Can our seder, even if it lacks the lamb, serve the same purpose?

The only kind of sacrifice that is eaten by the person bringing it is a peace offering, the korban shelamim (Leviticus 7). One type of peace offering is called a thanksgiving offering, a korban todah. This offering is sometimes mandatory, given certain circumstances. It can be eaten only within one day and must be eaten together with bread.

The thanksgiving offering sounds very much like the Passover sacrifice. The Passover sacrifice can be eaten only that night, must be eaten with bread (specifically, matzah), and is obligatory. From this, we know the Passover lamb is an offering of thanksgiving.

Let’s also look at another verse: “You shall have a song as in the night when a holy feast is kept” (Isaiah 30:29). A more literal translation of the Hebrew is this: “You will have the song like the night a chag [pilgrimage] is sanctified.”

Now which chag, which pilgrimage, might this be? It is Passover, of course, that commemorates the redemption that took place at midnight. Therefore, we thank God at our seder by singing songs of joy, so we should add to our list of biblical tasks: 10) Thank God with songs of praise.

A Final Mitzvah

We have drawn out many important commandments from the Bible about how to observe the night of Passover. All these mitzvot are accomplished during a traditional seder. The Jewish Passover Haggadah walks us through each one so we properly do them and don’t miss any.

However, there is one more biblical goal of the seder—one that exclusively belongs to us, the school of Yeshua’s disciples, the body of Messiah: 11) Eat the matzah and drink the wine as a remembrance of Messiah.

Our Master Yeshua held a seder on the night before he was crucified. At that seder, Yeshua used the customary elements of the meal to express profound thoughts about the redemption. The matzah represents his body, which was given for us. The wine of the Grace after Meals represents the blood of the new covenant. And Yeshua revealed a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven at his seder meal, which will one day be a worldwide reality when he returns.

As you partake of your Passover Seder this year, be careful not to neglect these important biblical commandments and guidelines. It’s not just the matzah and wine that represent Yeshua’s redemption. Every step of the traditional seder contains not only its face-value meaning but also numerous echoes and facets of the redemption yet to come.