Trutharchivist

Holiday SUs Supplementals: Pesach 1.2

The Shabbat during the Holiday and the seventh day

So, trying to make a pattern for future usage here, but don't expect it to last. It won't. Anyway, here I am to talk about a couple of other stuff I missed in the original Pesach SU!

Firstly, during the formation of the holiday SUs I've started talking about the portions of the Torah, Prophets and Writings (the three parts of the Hebrew Bible: the Torah is the Pentateuch, the Prophets include Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve Prophets, and the Writings include the rest of what you'd call the Old Testament, as long as you don't add any LDS or apocryphal books. And yes, Daniel, Ruth, Psalms and Chronicles aren't part of the Prophets). So, in Pesach, this includes... Umm... From the Torah, most anything that includes a commandment about Pesach. Sukkot is way easier in that regard - it only goes through the sacrifices of each day. Those are completely identical in Pesach, though, so they aren't enough to fill the quota.

From the Prophets - we read of Joshua's Pesach in the first day, during the Shabbat - the Dry Bones Vision of Ezekiel, and during the seventh day... You know what? I'll get to that later.

From the Writings, we read the first of the books called Scrolls in the Hebrew Bible: the Song of Songs. (By now I think I went over all others of the scrolls, which are this, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and Esther. The sharp eyed of you might notice I already said when each of the others was read.)

Why the Song of Songs? Well, as per usual when the actual reason is unclear, I can give two answers off the top of my hat. One is that the Song of Songs is a parable for the love between G-d and the people of Israel, and this story started with the Exodus - which we celebrate in this holiday. The other is that this is the one book in the Bible with descriptions of spring - the season during which the holiday is required to be in. The book itself is an interesting case, because it's easy to claim its contents aren't exactly fitting to be put in the Bible. It was canonized, though, and I'm really not qualified to explain why.

Right. The seventh day, then. What's the deal with it?

Like the first day of the holiday, it has more strict prohibitions on work - weaker than those of a Shabbat, but stronger than those of the mundane days of the holiday, in which we are now. During this day, we read the Song of the Sea (Exodus 14-15) and from the Prophets we read David's Song from Samuel. Why is that, you ask?

In theory, I could go over it the long way, but I'm not exactly in the right state of mind for that currently so I'll just say that according to Jewish tradition that's the day when the Red Sea got torn. It basically goes like this: the Israelites get out of Egypt - supposedly for three days - accompanied by spies for Pharaoh; three days pass and when the Israelites show no sign of returning the spies go back to report; they arrive after three additional days, during which the Israelites change course and end up somewhat closer to Egypt, on what is now known as the Gulf of Suez (probably); Pharaoh doesn't take too long to reach them, and the fun begins.

By which, of course, I mean the Israelite panic and ask Moshe (Moses) if he found Egypt lacking in graves and that's why he took them to doe in the desert. A nation of former slaves, you see, doesn't deal well with their former masters chasing them on chariots. So G-d tells Moshe to tell the Israelites to go forward - yes, into the sea, can you see any other direction? - and meanwhile to hold his staff over the sea, and it will be torn. For an entire night, the Egyptians chased the Israelites with the Pillar of Cloud protecting the latter from the former and a great wind blew to tear the sea open. The Israelites walked through it, the Egyptians followed, G-d told Moshe to hold his staff over the sea again and it will go back to how it was, and when morning broke - so it did.

I'm sure you've heard the story once, so you knew what was coming. And in case you were wondering - yes, the verses do specifically say it all happened during the night. Just saying, people seem to forget that.

Anyway, that's basically it. The seventh day of Pesach is this Monday. For our brethren outside of Israel it lasts another day, during which they read other stuff which I don't think I'll go over. We're still living on unleavened bread here, thank you for asking. And reading. Oh, and have a good day!