A Deadline for Leaven

It is easy to assume that the days just before Passover were already part of the feast. In many people’s minds the Passover season blurs into a single stretch of holy days, and a supper eaten the evening before the lamb seems to belong to it as a matter of course. But the Torah is not vague about its dates. It names them. So the fair way to settle the question is to search every passage in the Torah that deals with the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and to see which days are named.

The Search

The four main passages are Exodus 12, Leviticus 23, Numbers 28, and Deuteronomy 16. Read them through and gather the dates they give.

Exodus 12 names the tenth day, when each household was to take its lamb (Exodus 12:3); the fourteenth day, the Passover; and the days of unleavened bread, from the moment the daytime of the thirteenth passes into the evening of the fourteenth to the evening of the twenty-first (Exodus 12:18). Leviticus 23 names the fourteenth for the Passover and the fifteenth for the feast of unleavened bread (Leviticus 23:5-6). Numbers 28 names the same two days (Numbers 28:16-17). Deuteronomy 16 names the month, Abib, and speaks of seven days of unleavened bread.

That is the whole list: the tenth, the fourteenth, the fifteenth, the twenty-first. The shorter passages add no other day: Exodus 13, 23:15, and 34:18 name the month and the seven days, Numbers 9 names the fourteenth, and Numbers 33:3 names the fifteenth, “on the morrow after the Passover.” The thirteenth day does not appear anywhere. There is no command in the Torah to eat unleavened bread on the thirteenth, and none to remove leaven on that day.

A word about the name of the month. Deuteronomy calls it Abib, the month of the green ears of grain. After the exile it came to be called Nisan, the name used in Nehemiah and Esther, and the name most readers know today. The two names refer to the same first month.

When the Leaven Had to Go

The Torah does say when the leaven had to be gone, and it ties that command to the seven days themselves, not to a day before them.

Exodus 12:15 Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread; surely on the first day you shall remove leaven from your houses; for everyone eating leavened bread, from the first day until the seventh day — that soul (nephesh נֶפֶשׁ neh'-fesh) shall be cut off from Israel.

“Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread; surely on the first day you shall remove leaven from your houses.” The removal belongs to “the first day” of the seven. And the seven days, as Exodus 12:18 has already told us, begin with the evening of the fourteenth. When the first day begins, the house must already be clear; once the fourteenth has come, it is too late to start clearing it. A few verses later the same command is stated again, this time as a prohibition.

Exodus 12:19-20 Seven days leaven shall not be found in your houses; for everyone eating what is leavened — that soul (nephesh) shall be cut off from the congregation of Israel, whether sojourner or native of the land. You shall eat nothing leavened; in all your dwellings you shall eat unleavened bread."

“Seven days leaven shall not be found in your houses.” The command is a serious one: the soul that ate what was leavened during those days was to be cut off from the congregation of Israel. But again the time is the seven days. Deuteronomy says the same thing in its own words.

Deuteronomy 16:3-4 You shall not eat leavened bread with it; seven days you shall eat with it unleavened bread, the bread of affliction—for in haste you came forth out of the land of Egypt—so that you may remember the day of your coming forth out of the land of Egypt all the days of your life (chai חַי khah'-ee). And there shall not be seen with you leaven in all your border seven days; neither shall any of the flesh (basar בָּשָׂר baw-sawr') that you sacrifice in the evening on the first day remain overnight until the morning.

“You shall not eat leavened bread with it,” that is, with the Passover. And again: “there shall not be seen with you leaven in all your border seven days.” The Torah draws its line at the beginning of the seven days, and it says nothing at all about the day before.

A Deadline, Not a Feast Day

What the Torah gives, then, is a deadline. From the moment the daytime of the thirteenth passes into the evening of the fourteenth to the evening of the twenty-first, no leaven may be eaten and none may be found in the house. The thirteenth is not a holy day. It is not a day of unleavened bread. By the Torah’s calendar it is an ordinary day, the last ordinary day before the feast.

That does not mean the thirteenth was a quiet day in a Jewish house. Preparing for a deadline fills the day before it. Whatever leaven was still in the house had to be used up or taken out by the daytime of the thirteenth at the latest, since once the fourteenth had begun it was already too late. So that work fell on the thirteenth. But the work was the household’s preparation for the command. It was not itself a command for the thirteenth.

The Later Custom

In time the Jewish people developed careful customs to make sure the command was kept. The best known is bedikat chametz, the search for leaven: the house is searched by the light of a lamp, every corner and cupboard, so that no leavened crumb remains when the feast begins, and whatever is found is put away or burned. The Mishnah, the early collection of rabbinic rulings, opens its tractate on the Passover with this search.

This is a well-documented Jewish tradition, and it grew out of reverence for the command. But it is a preparation developed to fulfill the Torah’s command, not the command itself. The Torah names the deadline; the custom describes how a household makes sure it meets the deadline. Reading the custom back into the Torah, as though God had commanded unleavened bread from the thirteenth, would add a day that Scripture never names.

What This Means for the Supper

The importance of this for the Last Supper is plain. If there was no command to eat unleavened bread on the thirteenth, then a meal eaten as the thirteenth began, at evening, was under no command to be unleavened. Leavened bread could lawfully be eaten at it. In fact, as the next chapter will show, it is exactly the meal at which a household would expect to eat leavened bread, because it was one of the last times it could.

This is why the date of the supper and the bread on its table belong together. If the supper was the Passover meal, eaten as the fourteenth began, its bread had to be unleavened. If the supper was eaten as the thirteenth began, its bread could be ordinary bread, the bread that was about to be cleared from every house.

You can make the search yourself. Mark every numbered day in those four chapters, and the thirteenth will not be on your list.

So the Torah commands nothing for the thirteenth. The day is shaped only by the deadline that follows it. To see how that shaping worked in a real household, in a world without refrigerators, we have to think about what was left in the kitchen on the evening the thirteenth began.