Passover (Hebrew: פֶּסַח Pesach) commemorates the story of the Exodus, in which the ancient Israelites were freed from slavery in Egypt. Passover begins on the 15th day of the month of Nisan in the Jewish calendar, which is in spring in the Northern Hemisphere, and is celebrated for seven or eight days. It is one of the most widely observed Jewish holidays.
As a gentile with an interest in the history of labor, the story behind Passover interests me. Some Jewish historians have come to the conclusion that Exodus was a dramatization of real events: there are certainly truths at the story’s core, but the story itself is probably best interpreted as largely symbolic:
“It’s not a historical event, but it’s also not totally invented by someone sitting behind a desk,” explains Thomas Romer, a renowned expert in the Hebrew Bible and professor at the College de France and the University of Lausanne. “These are different traditions that are brought together to construct a foundation myth, which can be, in a way, related to some historical events,” he says.
[…]
[I]f the Israelites were just a native offshoot of the local Canaanite population, how did they come up with the idea of being slaves in Egypt? One theory, proposed by Tel Aviv University historian Nadav Naʻaman, posits that the original Exodus tradition was set in Canaan, inspired by the hardships of Egypt’s occupation of the region and its subsequent liberation from the pharaoh’s yoke at the end of the Bronze Age.
A similar theory, supported by Romer, is that the early Israelites came in contact with a group that had been directly subjected to Egyptian domination and absorbed from them the early tale of their enslavement and liberation. The best candidate for this rôle would be the nomadic tribes that inhabited the deserts of the southern Levant and were collectively known to the Egyptians as the Shasu.
One of these tribes is listed in Egyptian documents from the Late Bronze Age as the “Shasu of YHWH” — possibly the first reference to the deity who that would later become the God of the Jews.
These Shasu nomads were often in conflict with the Egyptians and if captured, were pressed into service at locations like the copper mines in Timna — near today’s port town of Eilat, Romer says. The idea that a group of Shasu may have merged with the early Israelites is also considered one of the more plausible explanations for how the Hebrews adopted YHWH as their tutelary deity.
As its very name suggests, Israel initially worshipped El, the chief god of the Canaanite pantheon, and only later switched allegiance to the deity known only by the four letters YHWH.
“There may have been groups of Shasu who escaped somehow from Egyptian control and went north into the highlands to this group called Israel, bringing with them this god whom they considered had delivered them from the Egyptians,” Romer says.
This may be why, in the Bible, YHWH is constantly described as the god who brought his people out of Egypt — because the worship of this deity and the story of liberation from slavery came to the Israelites already fused into a theological package deal.
I hope that I don’t offend anybody by proposing a reinterpretation of Exodus as mostly symbolic. My intention is not iconoclasm — quite the contrary! Looking behind the scenes make me appreciate it all the more, and in any case it is absolutely true that some of your ancient ancestors endured slavery… repeatedly.
That leads me to my next point: the Bronze Age was not the last time that you endured slavery. You endured it again… and again… and again. Whether it was Rome:
when Titus sacked Jerusalem in 70 CE, he carried off 97,000 Jews into slavery
Per Catherine Hezser’s Jewish Slavery in Antiquity, pages 240, 253:
It is likely that the supply of Jewish slaves was much larger than that of gentile slaves in Roman Palestine of the late first and second century CE. […] After the Bar Kokhba revolt in the second century CE Jewish slaves are said to have been sold by the Romans at markets in Gaza and Hebron.^35^
A community of up to 1,000 Jewish slaves on the archipelago of Malta, east of Tunisia and north of Libya, established over the course of two centuries by the Knights of St. John, a Catholic order of pirates left over from the Crusades, was officially abolished on this date in 1800.
In September 1941, 24,000 employees were engaged in the ghetto’s own operations, working for the Wehrmacht, police, and SS, and later for the private companies with workshops there. Nine thousand were employed by Jewish institutions.
We can find cases of Jewish serfdom in, for byspel, Georgia, but this topic is not meant to be exhaustive. Nonetheless, I do want to touch on neoslavery today:
Passover can be a difficult time of year for Jewish inmates. First of all, the prisoners may particularly miss their families during the time of this family holiday celebration.^225^ Furthermore, the irony of the prisoners’ situation—celebrating a ritual of liberation inside prison—is not lost on them.^226^ Sid Kleiner, longtime director of Beth Tikvah Jewish Prisoner Outreach,^227^ explains:
Along with separation from family, there is a painful theme to the holiday—redemption, freedom from bondage and captivity. Jewish inmates gather around the Seder table and declare that, “this year we are free.” It isn’t easy to make this declaration with barbed wire, high walls, and correctional officers in view.^228^
And finally, your Palestinian kin:
Workers consistently and overwhelmingly claim that having no other choice is the reason behind them working in the [Zionist] settlements and putting up with the exploitative work conditions that are part and parcel of the settlement employment sector for West Bank Palestinian workers. The work, they say, is not a free choice but a necessity where no other options exist; a way to put food on the table, and scrape a living in the fragile, poverty‐stricken, and often dangerous environment of the occupied West Bank.
It’s not hyperbole. There is no free or genuine choice regarding employment for many workers who have been systematically streamlined into settlement work. Who are, due to circumstances forced on to them, unable to turn down the exploitative and politically damaging settlement work or find any alternative. This idea of no choice has come about due to a combination of several [Zionist] policies that have purposefully stifled Palestinian development and growth throughout the occupied West Bank, in particular in the rural (read: Area C) communities that have suffered substantially from land annexation.
Yet while the situation looks severe, the Palestinians have inherited much from you, and because of that I have no doubt that they’ll overcome their oppression, as you repeatedly have.
Have a wonderful Passover!
