מן הגורן ומן היקב: פסח1

•

TWO LITURGICAL TRADITIONS

Passover and Easter

Volume 6

The Symbolic Structuring of Sacred Seasons

Edited by

PAUL F. BRADSHAW

and

LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN

o~'¥n 't" ""AtJ· "~n'" n"" ''''D~

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, IN 46556

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataioging-in-Publication Data

Passover and Easter: the symbolic structuring of sacred seasons /

edited by Paul F. Bradshaw and Lawrence A Hoffman.

p. cm. -(Two liturgical traditions: v. 6)

Includes bibliographical references and mdex.

ISBN 0-268-03858-9 (cloth: alk paper). -ISBN 0-268-03860-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Easter. 2. Passover. 3. Judaism-Relations-Christianity.

4. Christianity and other religions-Judaism. I. Bradshaw, Paul F.

II. Hoffman, Lawrence A , 1942-. III. Series.

BV55.P2753 1999 263'.93-dc21

98-41341

The author and publisher thank the following for permission:

The Pastoral Press, for the use of Lawrence A Hoffman's

essay "The Great Sabbath and Lent: Jewish Origins?" which

appeared originally in somewhat different form as "The Jewish

Lectionary, the Great Sabbath, and the Lenten Calendar:

Liturgical Links between Christians and Jews in the First Three

Christian Centuries," in Time and Community: In Honor of

Thomas Julian Talley, ed. J. Neil Alexander (1990).

,~orship, for the use of Lawrence A Hoffman's essay

A Symbol of Salvation in the Passover Seder" which

appeared originally as "A Symbol of Salvatio~ in the

Passover Haggadah," Worship 53, no. 6 (1979).

ClOThe paper used in thO bl' .

• IS pu Icahon meets the minimum

requIrements of the A' .

S . mencan NatIonal Standard for Information

Clences_ Permanence of P &

•

aper Lor Pnnted Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Contents

Abbreviations vii

Introduction Passover and Easter: The Symbolic Shaping of Time and Meaning 1

• Paul F. Bradshaw and Lawrence A. Hoffman

PART 1

PREPARING FOR SACRED TIME: HISTORY AND

TYPOLOGY IN GREAT SABBATH AND LENT

The Great Sabbath and Lent: Jewish Origins? 15

• Lawrence A. Hoffman

Preparation for Pascha? Lent in Christian Antiquity 36

• Maxwell E. Johnson

Lent in Perspective: A Summary Dialogue 55

• Lawrence A. Hoffman and Maxwell E. Johnson

PART 2

THE AFTERMATH OF SACRED TIME: FROM

PASSOVER/EASTER TO SHAVUOT/PENTECOST

'" From Passover to Shavuot 71

• Efrat Zarren-Zohar

From Easter to Pentecost 94

• Martin F. Connell

PART 3

SYMBOLS AND THE ARTS IN

SACRED CELEBRATION

(jJ

A Symbol of Salvation in the Passover Seder

• Lawrence A. Hoffman

o Haggadah Art

• Joseph Gutmann

Passiontide Music

• Robin A. Leaver

PART 4 A SYMBOLIC MODERN DILEMMA

Should Christians Celebrate the Passover?

• Frank C Senn

Contributors

Index

CONTENTS

109 132 146

183

207 209

HUCA

IBL lIS IQR PAAIR

REI

Abbreviations

Hebrew Union College Annual Journal of Biblical Literature Journal of Jewish Studies Jewish Quarterly Review Proceedings of the American Academy ofJew

ish Research

Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina, ed. J. P. Migne Revue des Etudes Juives

vii

Introduction

Passover and Easter:

The Symbolic Shaping of

Time and Meaning

PAUL F. BRADSHAW AND LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN

Just prior to each January, millions of modern men and women buy appointment books for their pockets, pocketbooks, and desks. The empty pages of these date books, as they are sometimes known, reveal the modern concept of time as an empty vessel that wise executives learn to fill. Failure in business is betrayed by having "time on your hands," while success entails filling up each page with commitments, even to the point of complaining constantly that we have no time left. Time is valuable; it is a rare commodity. "Time is money," we say. On occasion, we can "buy some time," though more often than not, we run out of it. We take consolation only if we know we have spent it wisely, for time wasted cannot be made up again.

By extension, we think of our lives as governed by time, ticking down like clocks. As middle-aged adults, we may stop at birthdays to take stock of how much time we are likely to have left, or what we have accomplished with it, and what will hap

'1 .... pen if we reach the end of our time prematurely. Such is the modern-one might even say, the business or corporate-sense of time.

Most religions share something of this perspective, but differ in other regards. The religious outlook too knows that life is finite and the duration of a lifetime uncertain. But it rarely imagines that time is an empty container waiting only to be filled by enterprising human actors. The goal is usually not human productivity but goodness. Failure is moral, not economic.

F BRADSHAW AND LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN

PAUL.

atisfactorily be spent in nonproductive

Time may there ore s f . .

. l'k ditation prayer, acts of lovmg kmdness, and

enterpnses I e me , . d' . .

't Tasks are prescnbed by tra ItIOn, not m-

sacred commUnI y. .

te managers who measure their worth by the

vented by corpora . . .

. . t nd then to meet arbitrary deadlInes.

abilIty to se a . . The religious calendar therefore .comes pre~ackaged; It IS hardly the empty date book for anxIOUS exe.cutIves to fill productively. It is, rather, the patterned unfoldmg of sacr~d ~oments around which religious men and women plot their lIves, in accord with an inheritance of memories that matter and a cycle of rituals that revisit them. Volume 5 was devoted to the history of Easter and Passover; volume 6 considers the way in which liturgical celebration combines text, art, and symbol to shape the faithful's conceptualization of time. Before saying more about the contents of volume 6, a caveat is in order: It should be recognized that the division into two distinct volumes, one dealing with the evolution of our liturgical texts, and the other with the symbolic structuring of sacred time, is somewhat arbitrary. The arts, for instance, can appear in either category. In addition, as Paul Bradshaw illustrated in his introduction to volume 5, much of Christian lit~rgical scholarship has dealt precisely with the shaping of time. By contrast, Jewish research has centered on the development of a specific text for a single ritual event: the Haggadah for use at the Passover eve seder. But the fact that Jewish scholars have usually studied the growth of a text rather than the flow of sacred time may say more about the scholars than about the tradition they study. When Joanne Pierce for inst~nce, looks at medieval accretions in Christian lit~rgy (in vEo ume,,5), she f?cuses her attention on the stretching of the

aster season" Into . pIe triduum of f a? entIre holy week, rather than the simume 5 d an IqUlty; Israel Yuval's parallel essay in vol

emonstrates the sam f

Jews. The Jewish . e sort a concern among medieval commumty has cared d I b

!ewish time is structured . . e~p y a out the way Just overlooked that f . TraditIonal JeWish scholarship has acet of the Passover experience.

SYMBOLIC SHAPfNG OF TIME AND MEANING

We have not, however, asked this volume's contributors to apply theories of sacred time to their research on ritual. They were asked to concentrate on what we know about their topics from within Jewish and Christian tradition, not to survey the developing field of ritual studies in order to derive models that then could be applied to their Jewish or Christian evidence. Their data should be seen as a dual case study of how two religious traditions structured the way their adherents came to see the flow of their respective sacred seasons.

Behind our organizational scheme are some basic postulates regarding the way liturgy functions for communities who engage in it.

1. Stories that matter attract a ritual way ofbeing told. These sacred stories become reference points for the way people conceptualize their lives. As the ritual changes, so too does the story, and also the way people think about who they are.

Bedtime stories, memorable family moments, and master narratives of sacred origins all matter enough that they are graced with rites of reiterative retelling. Children practically memorize their favorite story books, which are recited at telltale times along with predictable ritualized pauses, hugs, and giggles. Likewise, at wedding anniversaries we repeat the tale of how Mom met Dad, or how Grandpa lost his way when picking up Grandma; here too, the story is told in conjunction with ritualized moments like the cutting of a cake, with the family in worshipful attendance.

The child's favorite story may be recalled also in exegetical passing at occasions other than bedtimes-as when parents remind a crying child that the hero in the bedtime book felt the same way the child now does but survived; and a family moment may get honorable mention at other times too ("Poor Grandpa, he always was somewhat absent-minded; remember when he forgot to pick up Grandma?"). Similarly, the story of Israel's Exodus and the recollection of Jesus' passion, death, and resurrection are specially reserved for the right moment of their telling; but they are not reserved exclusively to the Passover-Easter season. In one way or another, they are

F. BRADSHAW AND LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN

PAUL .

day and they play exegetical roles that

liturgical stap 1es everY , . h"

. . f e each religion's Ideal types, et Ical pnn

explam and rem orc . . les and brands of spiritualIty. ClP, d k ow more about how sacred tales become rit-

We nee to n . . d we should wonder also how they functIOn exe

ual events, an . . .

. 11 . the daily life of a worshlpmg commumty. In the

getJca y m . . .

th t follow the latter concern does not anse exphcltly,

essays a , . but the former one does, under the assumptIOn th~t how we allot the ritual retelling to specific parts of a specific season influences what tale gets told and what exegeses are available. Volume 6, then, is especially interested in the way a story gets spread out over time, how people prepare for it, and how they live in the aftermath of its getting told.

2. Stories can get told all at once, or can be seen as chapters in a larger master narrative that is spread over time. To the extent that the latter is the case, a particular season becomes an opportunity for us to live out the larger narrative. A tradition's calendar is thus an extension ofits story, and like the story, it too evolves continually.

In volume 5, Paul Bradshaw's introduction and the essays by Joanne Pierce and John Mel10h refer to Kenneth Stevenson's unitive model of the Easter celebration, which emphasizes the basic sense by which communities see moments of sacred time as different chapters in the same story. But as Bradshaw also notes, the liturgical celebration to which the word "Easter" refers "changes its form and function quite radically in the ~ourse ?f.history." It is easy to imagine that Lent was always

Just ~s It IS, or that Holy Week was always in place when in fact,Just the opposit . th '

e IS e case. Even the Easter vigil changed

from the focus of celeb t" '.

l't' . ra Ion 10 antIqUIty to a relatively minor

I urglcal event lD our 0 t' F

ume 6 h h . wn Ime. rom the perspective of vol

, suc c anges 10 em h .

nomena (th p aSls are not merely textual phe

e growth or decay fill' .

practices) 'They d'.ff 0 spec c hturglcal texts and

. are I erent w fl'

tive and the h ays 0 te hng the sacred narra

, y c ange the way th fl

ceived by those wh k . e ow of Easter time is con

. 0 eep It. To the t h .

dlgmatic for Chrl'St' h ex ent t at Easter IS para

lans, t e chan' . .

Own self-perception as II ges III emphasIs alter theIr

we .

SYMBOLIC SHAPING OF TIME AND MEANING

One proper approach to liturgical phenomena, therefore, is chronicling liturgical change as exemplifying (1) readjustments in a community's master narrative and (2) parallel readjustments in the way time is seen to cohere. What matters more, Good Friday or Easter Day, for instance? And why? If Easter Day is the focus for the entire period of time, such that Good Friday begins it and sunrise Sunday marks its culmination, Saturday's all-night vigil becomes tensely anticipatoryas indeed, it originally was. If, by contrast, popular imagination sees Easter Day as cut off theologically from Good Friday, and also if economic marketing forces have conspired to make Easter Day into a day of fashion on New York's Fifth Avenue,l then the vigil loses its point.

The same can be said of the Jewish view of the Passover season, although we know much less about it than we do about the Christian view of Easter. As we said above, Jewish scholarship has largely ignored issues of sacred time, preferring instead to study liturgy as if it were purely a text, and to analyze it only by asking such questions as how, when, and why particular prayers in the Haggadah came into being. Jewish sources are very clear, however, on the centrality of calendrical concerns. Already in the second century, Jews were preparing for Passover by a specially designed lectionary cycle. With historicist intent, scholars have studied that cycle to ascertain the pericopes that were read, but have insufficiently linked the lectionary choices to the way the Rabbis perceived the flow of time. They have therefore missed paying proper attention to how the lectionary prepared its rabbinic devisers for Passover, no less than a preparatory lectionary and fast prepared Christians for Easter.

Ideally, we would be able to chart the subjective view of time's passage in both traditions. We would be able to explain when and why views have changed. We would also know how those changing views reflect parallel changes in the master narrative and how they got to be accompanied by changes in liturgical celebration.

3. Ritualized time requires preparation and afterthought.

Only if liturgical celebration is entirely "non-unitive," that

PAUL F. BRADSHAW AND LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN

. ' . 0 particular story to be told, can celebration

IS, If there IS n . . f II blown with nothmg before and nothmg after. But

emerge u -. . 't Is that are relatively devOId of an accompanymg

~nnM . story tend to attract a period ~f buildmg up to the n~oment that matters and a similar penod of denouement. BIrthday parties, for instance, may occasion ~he advanc~ ordering o~ a chocolate ice-cream cake, and freezmg part of It for later dIStribution to relatives who cannot make the big day: both events may be more than practical matters, since the particular kind of cake may be related to Grandpa's tastes and family traditions, and the practice of family dropping over for an aftertaste may come replete with tales about Grandpa's idiosyncratic cousins who never show up on time. These may not be religiously "sacred" tales, in that they do not refer to ultimates in the same way that the stories of Passover and Easter do, but they rank as sacred within the family context. All the more sacred are the ultimate narratives of our traditions that demand large blocks of time in which to live out the various chapters that comprise them. It is not enough to show up at the seder. Already in antiquity, Jews were expected to attend synagogue some three weeks prior and listen to the Torah's ~nstructions to prepare for the day by wiping away impurity 10 home and heart. By the Middle Ages, if not earlier, Jews ~ad a pre~aratory Great Sabbath as well. On the Christian sIde ~f thI~gS, attending church only on Easter Day was inshufficI~nt, SInce the first two days of the triduum prepared for

t e thIrd one And by th t h .

th t 'd' e ourt century, If not earlier when

e n uum was taken f . '

't . or granted as a smgle event demanding

I s own preparatIon som f .

. . ,e orm of UnIversal Lent was becom-

Ing normative. Volume 6 I

ditions that prov'd exp ores the growth of liturgical tralow from the "m 1. e mhoments that build and moments that fol

aIn c apter" of th J .

It emphasizes more th h . e eWlsh and Christian story.

an t e sIngle m

that we call Passov oment or set of moments

er eve or East D .

COurse of their evolut' h er ay. It IS about how, in the

lon, t Ose mo

ackward and forward l"k ments were enlarged both through time' and h ,1he sacred elastic bands being stretched

I· 'owt e com . .

Ive through the ent' I '. mUOlhes that call them sacred

Ire e aShClzed periOd.

7SYMBOLIC SHAPING OF TIME AND MEANING

4. Ritual as story-telling is an artistic thing. All ritual involves artistry. Traditions like Zen, where ritual is everything, and where there may be no coherent story to recapitulate, have their own ways of training the adept to do the right ritual acts with proper care and finesse. The artistry of a story-telling tradition follows suit, with the additional caveat that its artistry reflects the story. As the story changes, the artistry will too; and as the chapters of the story are spaced out over time, the arts will be called on for the new blocks of time that were hitherto unimportant, but which begin to take on meaning as preparation or denouement for the main chapters that had been emphasized all along.

By ritual artistry, however, we have more in mind than the obvious recourse to painting or music.2 Consider food, for instance, the ritual presentation of which is an art in itself (witness the Japanese tea ceremony, or the care with which the eucharist is choreographed). Both Christians and Jews use foods for ritual purposes, bread and wine being the best examples here. These are ordinary foods, but they take on liturgical roles when they are eaten symbolically, that is, not for how they fill or satisfy but for what they mean. As in maror, Passover's bitter herbs that "mean" slavery, taste may matter; so too may color (red wine means blood better than white wine does). In such cases, symbols function iconically-they point beyond themselves the way smoke points to fire. Sometimes the iconic connections are not so evident, as when Edmund Leach considers the possibility that both red traffic lights and red ink mean "Stop, danger is near." Is that because red "means" blood which means "danger"?3 Real-life examples are Victor Turner's instances of red and white (from the sap of a "milk tree") as icons among the Ndembu of Africa for blood and breast feeding, respectively.4 On the other hand, Claude LeviStrauss knows that symbols are largely arbitrary; they mean what we want them to. Colors like red and white can mean exactly opposite things, even in neighboring cultures.5

The point is not to arrive at a theory of how symbols work, but to recognize that ritual is symbolic, and that we never know for sure what a symbol means until we do the necessary

F. BRADSHAW AND LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN

P.I\UL .

h· b rvation of a ritual in practice, or the neces

ethnograp lC 0 se . lysis of the texts that reveal the way our fore

sary hterary ana . Vi I

. d this or that ritual once upon a hme. 0 ume 5

bears practice . cerned with symbols. How could It be? But vol

was not uncon . . ume 6 turns specifically to studies m h~w.the sacred stones ~f and Easter are illustrated artistically, and how ordl-

Passover . .,. . nary foods take on symbolic meanmgs m our ntuahzed narratives. Volume 6, therefore, begins with sacred time, exploring the ways in which Easter and Passover attracted preparatory periods and sacred residues or aftermaths. The most celebrated case may be the lengthy preparation in Lent. Lent has received considerable attention, especially since 1986, when Thomas Talley published his influential Origins of the Liturgical Year. Talley demonstrated the abundant early Lenten traditions, many of which contradict each other.6 In 1990, Lawrence Hoffman published an account that traced the Christian Lent to Jewish practice, holding that Jews prepared for Passover by means of a lectionary cycle of readings going back some three weeks prior to the onset of Passover'? The three-week period coincided with a three-week preparation for catechumens that Talley had located in Rome and elsewhere. Maxwell Johnson now questions some of Hoffman's conclusions, drawing on Bradshaw and others who have indicated that the common three-week period is irrelevant, since t~e three-week catechumenate did not coincide everywhere wLIth Easter and could not, therefore, have anything to do with ent. Only later did bapf f .

. h h " Ism 0 converts ulllversally coincide

Wit t e ChnstIan Pascha.

d . , so Our example of sacred time is best

The issue is complex serve , III part 1 of this volu b ' .

cle and Joh' me, Yrepnntmg Hoffman's artidialogue bet::~n sthalternative. reconstruction, followed by a . n e two parties lay' h' .

hon and the diff mg out t e Issues m ques-

A siml'l . erent ways of understanding them.

ar lnstance of e t d

Sabbath a term t k f x en ed preparation is the Great

a in medi;val Jewish tent rom John 19:31 but commonplace

. ex s as the nam .

pnor to Passover. Zeitlin d' . e given to the Sabbath ld the pioneer work here, which

9SYMBOLIC SHAPING OF TIME AND MEANING

Hoffman summarizes as part of his essay on Lent. Zeitlin, thinking that Jews would never consciously emulate Christian practice, imagined an early Jewish custom that had gone underground until being resurrected as part of a medieval world where authorities no longer recalled just how the Great Sabbath had even begun. Yuval's bold reconstruction of JewishChristian relations is especially relevant here. In volume 5 ("Easter and Passover As Early Jewish-Christian Dialogue"), Yuval questions Zeitlin's assumptions. In his view, medieval Jews did indeed borrow from their Christian environment; the Great Sabbath was entirely a Christian matter, until Jews adopted it as part and parcel of their Jewish celebration.

Hoffman raises the question of the symbolic meaning of the

Great Sabbath. The term is taken purely historically by tradi

tional scholarship, which wants to know what day it was and

whether the same day was kept by Jews as well as by Chris

tians. The martyrologies of Polycarp and Pionius have there

fore attracted substantial literature as to the precise day on

which the two saints were killed, since they are both said to

have died on a Great Sabbath. Hoffman replaces historicity

with symbolism, suggesting that the Great Sabbath was a ty

pological consideration having nothing to do with a specific

day of the year on which the two men perished.

If sacred moments attract times of preparation, they also

develop follow-up periods whereby the sacred is allowed to ex

tend into the ordinary, rather than come to a sudden halt with

the official end of the day in question. Much more work has

to be done on this phenomenon, which is less well recognized

than the preparatory prologue to the holy day's onset. Jewish

tradition knows of such things as fast days following the three

pilgrim festivals, and the extension of the period of atonement

beyond Yom Kippur to the end of Sukkot, or even farther in

some traditions. The aftermath of sacred time is especially evi

dent, however, in the seven-week period from the onset of Pass

over to Shavuot, a period known to the Bible as the Orner.

The name is drawn from the sheaves of grain that are har

vested each spring and are designated by the Bible as an

"Orner" offering in the Temple. Later Jewish tradition builds

F. BRADSHAW AND LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN

Ri\UL .

'bl b adding to the period's sanctity through a

upon the BI e Y h . . .

t· es and beliefs that emp aSlze Its pemtential

melange 0f prac IC . . , I· It develops another name-not Just Orner but S'firah,

qua Ity. Z h ' .

f " unting " Efrat Zarren-0 ar s essay In part 2

the days 0 co . '. h· leI's a look at the customs assocIated wIth the

of t IS vo urn . . d s residue from Passover and preparatIOn for Shavuot.

peno ,a ,

The parallel piece by Martin Connell estabhsh~s the .way in

which Easter is part of a larger scheme that culmmates In Pen

Part 3 of this volume turns explicitly to the arts. In volume 5, Carole Balin explored the use of illustrations along with novel textual variants in the way that new Haggadah texts adapt the traditional Jewish narrative to modern Jewish life. In this volume,Joseph Gutmann explores what we know about the beginning of the Haggadah artistic tradition, and Robin Leaver turns to the role of music in explicating the Easter narrative in the sixteenth century and beyond. The other contri

bution to part 3 is Lawrence Hoffman's essay on bread as "A Symbol of Salvation in the Passover Seder." Some of the essays in volume 5 refer to this article, first published in Worship MagazineS and included here as a consideration of how shared symbols permeated Christian and Jewish ritual in the ~ra ~hen ~hristianity and rabbinic judaism were jointly com

mg mto bemg.

If ,:e assume that liturgy is essentially symbolic, and that worshIpers are therefore inevitably thrust into symbolic universes that structure t" d .

. Ime, provl e root narratives, and govern self-per~eptton, we can understand, finally, the way those

same worshIpers may find th I' .

. . emse ves In COnflICt over a particu

lar hturgical act that . .

th . IS an essenttal constituent not only in

~Ir own story, as they see it, but in someone else's symbolic

UllIverse as well In our t' h .

dent for Ch ' : Ime, t at dIlemma is particularly evi

nsttans Who want to d t h P

a Christian ev t " a op t e assover seder as

en remIniscent of J ' l'f '

conclUde this v I . esus I etIme as a Jew. We

o ume with Frank S ' . .

dilemma in which such C ' . enn s consideratIOn of the that is entirely symb r hnstIans find themselves, a dilemma Christian properly e ~ ~~; Wha~ would keeping a seder as a

n al . Can It be kept at all?

SYMBOLIC SHAPING OF TIME AND MEANING

We adopted Passover and Easter as our topic for volumes 5 and 6 of this series on the liturgical traditions of Jews and Christians because these sacred periods so prototypically intertwine in Jewish/Christian consciousness. The essays that we have collected explore the two traditions not only as they developed in isolation from each other, but also as the~ influenced each other, and thus exemplify the double helIX that binds Jews and Christians in their common path as they swirl about each other through time.

What is true of Passover and Easter is probably true of other periods as well. Sacred time has its own way of behaving: stretching its bounds to include build-ups and residues; and stretching the boundaries of the medium in which the sacred is presented, drawing on both text and art to constitute a sacred theater of ritual display, in which each participant is a sacred actor, provided with lines and gestures designed to evoke the sense that God is present.

Passover seders culminate in a door flung open to receive the messiah, that "Next year we might be in Jerusalem." Easter vigils end with the glorious shout that "Christ has risen." Nothing bespeaks the spirit of hope that is common to Jews and to Christians better than the sacred springtime seasons that we explore in these pages. We dedicate these pages to the realization of this fervent hope that we share.

NOTES

See Leigh Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites (Princeton, 1995), pp. 193-243.

See Lawrence A. Hoffman on liturgy as art form, in volume 2 of this series, Paul F. Bradshaw and Lawrence A. Hoffman, eds., The Changing Face ofJewish and Christian Worship (Notre Dame, 1991), pp.15-21.

Edmund Leach, CLaude Levi-Strauss (Middlesex and New York, 1970), pp. 17-21.

Victor Thrner, Forest ofSymbols (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966), pp. 20-25.

Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago, 1962), pp. 64-65.

PAUL F. BRADSHAW AND LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN

6. Thomas 1. Talley, The Origins ofthe Liturgical Year (New York,

1986), pp. 163-230.

Lawrence A. Hoffman, "The Jewish Lectionary, the Great Sabbath, and the Lenten Calendar," in 1. Neil Alexander, ed., Time and Community (Washington, D.C., 1990).

Lawrence A. Hoffman, ''A Symbol of Salvation in the Passover Haggadah," Worship 53, no. 6 (1979): 519-37.

PARTl

Preparing for Sacred Time:

History and Typology in

Great Sabbath and Lent

The Great Sabbath and Lent:

Jewish Origins?

LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN

The Great Sabbath

My primary topic, Lent and its Jewish origins, depends on a passing familiarity with the Jewish lectionary, so it is convenient to begin with some background on the Great Sabbath, as an illustration of the way the lectionary works; then to move on to a consideration of Lent; and finally, to return to the Great Sabbath and its typological usage in early Christianity.

The Jewish lectionary for Sabbaths and holy days contains a Pentateuchal (Torah) and a prophetic (Haftarah) reading. Scholars are undecided as to when either of them came fullblown into being.l We know, however, that some sort of Torah cycle was in effect by the first century, possibly in two systems. One is associated with Palestinian synagogues and is called (somewhat misleadingly) "triennial"-it was really variable, taking three to four years to complete; the other (the one we use today) became normative in Babylonia and was annual, beginning and ending at the same time every year. Both followed the system known as Lectio continua, that is, they began at the beginning of the Torah and continued seriatim until the end, whether one year or some three to four years later. Special calendrical occasions commanded their own readings, however, and these took priority over the normallection of a Sabbath on which they fell, with the result that the normal reading would be postponed.

A fixed Haftarah cycle developed later, possibly out of the eventual piecing together of several independent smaller lec

LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN

. . Pentateuchal reading, the Prophets were

tionary hsts. U~h~e the d t this day there are different tradi

never read serratlln, an 0 . . f h '"r. h

tions as to which naJtala readings. The question of whether by the fir~t century pro. d' 2

• lJ ,I' • h accompanIes some 0 t . e ~ora

phetlc rea mgs were already assigned to particular Sabbaths depends largely on one's reading of Luke 4:~7. In any ev~nt, the identity and order of the prophetic readmg for the tnennial cycle has generally eluded investigators. Of late, however, I· t of Hal'tarah readings has been reconstructed by Joseph

a IS J' I' 'f

Offer and it is now widely regarded as an aut 1entlc set, I . not n~cessarily the only set available in the immediate posttalmudic period.3 Our purposes require the recognition that both Torah and Haftarah readings were in effect by the second century, with the result that particular Sabbaths could be named after either of the readings found therein.

Rabbinic literature normally names individual Sabbaths according to their Torah portion: "The Sabbath of [the name of the Pentateuchal reading]." However, some Sabbaths are known by their prophetic readings. An example of a Pentateuch-derived name is "Sabbath Noah," that is, the Sabbath in which the story of Noah is read. Examples of a prophet

derived name are Sabbath "Comfort," the Sabbath following

the 9th of Av (the anniversary of the Temple's destruction)

when the Haftarah begins with Isaiah 40:1 ("Comfort [my

people1"); and "The Sabbath of 'Return,'" the Sabbath between

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which features Hosea's call

(Hosea 14: 2-10), "Return 0 Israel to the Eternal your God."

Sabbath ~ames are thus derived formulaically, by citing

the appr?p~late. Pentateuchal or prophetic reading. We can

further dlStmgulSh names as being derived either (aJ primarily

from the lectlOn. ary readings (Sabbath Noah I)

(b) . '1 , lor examp e , or

the pnmd·an (y fhr~m the calendar and only secondarily from

rea tng w Ich Was chosen to b' . its calen~rical relevance). The sabbaet~l~f~'~~t~~~,~;cause of

pie, may In the narrowest sense d' , or exam

lection but that read' raw Its name from the Hosea

' Illg Was selected ' h

cause the calendrical 0 . ( III t e first place beccaslOn the Sabbath between Rosh

GREAT SABBATH AND LENT

Hashanah and Yom Kippur) demands repentance. Calendrical determination is often the norm with Haftarah readings, which, following no continuous cycle, were easily selected with calendrical concerns in mind. It is also true of some Pentateuchderived names, namely, where special Torah readings replace or

augment the continuous lectionary. The two calendrically driven and Pentateuchally derived names that will concern us later are the Sabbath of the [red] Heifer (Parah) and the Sabbath of "This Month" (Hachodesh), which feature Numbers 19:1-22 and Exodus 12:1-20, respectively. These Sabbath names are not applied when the cycle arrives at Numbers 19 or Exodus 12 as part of the continuous lectionary, but only on the two occasions when they are read out of order. Exodus 12 is reread for calendrical purposes to announce the new month of Nisan, and Numbers 19 is selected the week before (for reasons that we will see). Since they are read out of order, they are calendrically driven; but since they are Torah, not Haftarah readings, they are Pentateuchally de

rived.

Another specially named Sabbath is Shabbat Hagadol, "the

Great Sabbath." But what kind of name is that? In some

places, in thirteenth-century Italy, for instance, the term re

ferred to the Sabbath preceding several holy days,4 but more

generally it meant (as it does today) only the Sabbath preced

ing Passover; it seems, therefore, to belong to the calendar

derived category. Following the formulaic pattern of naming,

we would expect to find the word "Great" in the prophetic or

Pentateuchal lections for the day, and in fact, we do, for the prophetic portion is Malachi 3:4-24, which promises "the great ... day of the Lord." However, the Mishnah and the Talmuds, which recognize other specially named Sabbaths, are absolutely and mysteriously silent about this one. Not until the Middle Ages do rabbis discuss the Great Sabbath, by which time, preferring homiletics to history, they offer a host of other explanations for the name.s The Tosafot, for example-a generic term encompassing Franco-German rabbis of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries-imagine it goes back to biblical

LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN

the Israelites took the lamb they times, because on that day, fter recalled it as the time of

I hter and forever a .

were to s aug , ] 6 Easily the most amusmg

th " eat" miracle [of Passover. ~ gr f Sh ·bbolei Haleket, a thirteenth-century

etIOlogy comes rom l Italian source: "On this Sabbath, people stay late ~It shynag~dgdule f the rabbi who preaches untl t e ml e

to hear the sermon 0 h [th d ]of the day, practically into the afternoon ... so t at e ay

d awn-out and long [gadol, here translated

appears to t hem as r . as 'great' in time, not stature].,,7 Others o~ine that It may be a mistake, Hagadol being erroneously derIved from the word Haggadah, since on this Sabbath it is customary to. read the Passover Haggadah in antiCipation of the seder; or It may be a transfer of terminology from Hallel Hagadol (The "Great Hallel"). Clearly, what we have are guesses that do not help us determine the actual origin of this important Sabbath in the Jewish year. The problem of the Great Sabbath's origin attracted the attention of the earliest generation of scientific scholars, who noted the oddity that even though Jews keep the Great Sabbath, early Jewish texts do not mention it; whereas Christianity, which did not continue the Great Sabbath, bequeathed us early texts (beginning with the Gospel of John) which do contain it.s Jellinek, for example, assumed that the Christian Iiterat~re in question was referring to extant Jewish practice at the time; he therefore dated the Great Sabbath in Judaism not later than the first or second century.9 In 1859, on the other ha.n~, the great Leopold Zunz concluded that it must have ongl~ated among Christians, ~hence it was borrowed by the Jews. Most scholars prefer Jellmek's reconstruction but if so how can we ex~la.in the Great Sabbath's Jewish origin? '

Solomon ZeitlIn turned to this task in 1948 11 d . an explanation that he found in Sefer Mateh ' rawmg o.n treatise largely on th h I·d . Moshe, a halakhlc in Cracow in 1591 Neot~ I ayhs, which was Originally published

. mg t at a "G S

both John (19:31) and the . reat abbath" occurs in Saturday before the resur~~~stoltc ~O~stitutions (5:18) as the must already have celebrated ~h~ ielthn c~ncluded that Jews

abbath 10 question by the

GREAT SABBATH AND LENT

second century. He explained its name by looking at the calendrical event and its associated Haftarah reading:

It was the prevalent opinion among a group of Jews, particularly the Apocalyptists, that God would redeem the Jews on the first day of Passover, and on the eve, God would send Elijah to herald the coming of the Messiah. Thus we may understand why the chapter on Malachi dealing with Elijah was assigned.... [Since the reading in question promises, "Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord," the Sabbath when Malachi was read] was therefore called the Great Sabbath.12

That Elijah's coming was also crucial to early Christians, Zeitlin learns from Matthew 27:47-49 (and Mark 15:35-36), where Jesus is misunderstood by those around him as calling on Elijah to save him; and from Justin Martyr, who avers, "For we all expect that Christ will be a man [born] of men, and that Elijah, when he comes, will anoint him.... Does not Scripture say that Elijah shall come before the great and terrible day of the Lord?,,13 Hence Zeitlin concludes that the church took over the idea of a Great Sabbath, but transferred it to the Saturday before the resurrection rather than the Sabbath before Passover. The Rabbis polemicized against the church's successful transformation of the Great Sabbath by omitting all discussion of the term from the Talmud. "However, the sages did not succeed in entirely eradicating the observance of the Sabbath before the Passover as the Great Sabbath. Hence the rabbis of the Middle Ages, not finding any reference to it in the Talmud, advanced different reasons for its name.,,14

Zeitlin's reconstruction is far from foolproof, but it has its attractions, not the least of which is its solution to two grammatical problems inherent in the troublesome term shabbat hagadol. (1) Shabbat is feminine and requires a feminine modifying adjective, and (2) hagadol contains the definite article, and requires that the noun it modifies does so too. Thus shabbat hagadol should read hashabbat hagedolah. Alternatively, we might follow the model of shabbat kodesh, a normal rabbinic

LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN 20

d "the holy Sabbath," but literally expression, usually rende~e " might then accept shabbat being "the Sabbath of holiness t; we ") as well. In either case,

gedulah ("the Sab~ath of rea nels of course gadol never

ess

shabbat hagadol wlllnot 0 b:r~ow;d from an~ther context

did modify shabbat, but was " h

. d·fi d was masculine-such as t e great

where the noun It mo Ie . ., I

d I ·n Malachi Moreover ZeItlin s sc Ierne

day " hayom haga 0, I ., . makes this Sabbath name fit the model .of the others. It.IS calendrically determined but prophet denved, named by virtue of the Haftarah lection chosen to express an annual calendrical theme. On the other hand, Sabbaths are named elsewhere after the first word or two of a lection, not after a lectionary verse near the end, and we have no independent evidence that Malachi was even read on the Saturday in question as early as the first or second century. The other possibility is that until the Middle Ages, Jews kept no Great Sabbath at all. It is lacking in rabbinic literature because it was a Christian invention to begin with. Only in the Middle Ages did Jews borrow it from the church, at which time they naturally looked for Jewish precedent, and finding none, derived the various exegetical interpretations that I have sum

marized above. That is Israel Yuval's conclusion, presented in his essay "Passover in the Middle Ages," in volume 5. I find it compelling.

Either way, however, a Great Sabbath was certainly known to. Jo~n, and (as we shall see) it figured prominently in the thmkmg of Polycarp and Pion ius. Whether a Jewish term to start with or a Christian invention that Jews eventually borrowed, it demonstrates the way Sabbaths are sometimes named: ~ccording to lections (secondarily), but determined in the first mstance by calendrical considerations. Later, I will return. to Shabbat Hagadol, but for now, let us turn to two other ~~~cC~~1 S~bbath~ named after their lections but actually calen

. y.etermmed: Shabbat Parah and Shabbat R h d h

whIch I CIted earlier Th ac 0 es , over and in that reg· dey are related to preparation for Pass

, ar , serve as mod I f

became Lent. e s or what eventually

GREAT SABBATH AND LENT

Shabbat Parah and Shabbat Hachodesh: Their Impact

on Lent

Thomas Talley has summarized Lenten traditions known from antiquity.1s Egeria's fourth-century account from Jerusalem describes eight weeks of five days per week for the stipulated number of forty days. But the forty-day requirement is probably a late imposition on earlier systems that numbered something other than forty originally. Even in Jerusalem, Egeria's system could not have been universal, or else it was short-lived, since her account is not in agreement with that city's Armenian lectionaries from less than half a century later. It is therefore hard to know what Egeria's experience reflects; at the very least, it is not necessarily a measure of what people in the fourth century were doing all over Jerusalem, let alone in other centers and other times.

Earlier than Egeria, we have Hippolytus's Apostolic Tradition from Rome (c. 200), where the number of days of the catechumenate was not fixed at all; one's status as a catechumen might last as long as three years. True, an unspecified period at the end was kept more severely, but what weeks or even months were they? Did it occur any time in the year, or was it planned to coincide with the period preceding Pascha? Though the text does not stipulate the latter, I have assumed it here as the hypothesis most in keeping with the facts. On that hypothesis, it follows that Hippolytus knew of a lengthy catechumenate culminating in an intensive Lent-like period for an unspecified time before Easter. Still, precisely because it is unspecified, this helps us as little as Egeria for our purposes of narrowing down specific pre-Easter time periods in which the nascent church practiced its Lent. Likewise, from that early period-in fact, about a hundred years before Hippolytusthe Didache's early chapters, which may be a catechesis, tell us nothing about the length of time allotted to the process.

Talley also cites Socrates' fifth-century Ecclesiastical History, which confirms the existence of several time periods. In Greece and Alexandria, people fasted for six weeks, while

LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN

Both groups called their fast

·ft d" thers" faste d seven.

unspeci eo " b k where we started with Egeria: a "the forty day~. We atre sac(six seven or in Egeria's case, eight

time when varIOUS cus am " . h

theologically harmonized to arrIve at t e

weeks) have been ( h

S· ·1 1 Athanasius writes from Rome were

number forty. Iml ar y, . . . ·1)· 340 back to his friend Sera pIOn, saymg that

he was In eXI e In . days (of some sort) are common everywhere except m

f t

or y d· · d th

Egypt. The process of theoretical standar IzatlOn aroun e number forty seems to have been concluded, t~erefore, somewhere between the fourth and the fifth centUrIes.

There is one glaring exception to the rule: a Roman custom of fasting for only three successive weeks and not calling it forty days at all. Chavasse concludes that this custom must have existed prior to the end of the third century but disappeared between 354 and 384,16 for a letter by Jerome written in 384 confirms the fact that the six-week fast that replaced it was then already in effe<;t.17 But even in the later system, we have the otherwise inexplicable application of the term Dominica

mediana to the fifth Sunday of Lent, and hebdomada mediana to the week preceding it, thus signaling again an original core of three weeks to which other days were added later on in order to round out their number to forty. All of this merely accords with the assumption that as time went on, every effort was made by all parties to call their fasts-whatever their original length-"Forty Days," and that still in the middle of t~e fourth ~entury, earlier customs prevailed to which the arbitrary deSignation "forty-day" had not yet been applied.

Th~s, a three-week Lent was an early custom known before the middle of the fourth century, at least in Rome, and possibly elsew?ere as well. It eventually got swallowed up by other cus

~~::;t~: effort to larrive at the total of forty, patently imposre .are o~ y three weeks with which to work

he question anses· why th .

vored by Chavasse· ree weeks? The explanation fa-inherent ambiguit; ~~~~e~ated thereafter elsewhere,18 is the it retained the pre-Chr· e. oman .calendar. On the one hand,

IStIan empire's d t f M

new year; but on the othe h d a e 0 arch 1 as its Cur until the spring that ~ : , Easter Sunday could not oc, IS, arch 22 at the earliest, so that

GREAT SABBATH AND LENT

the new year from a Christian perspective would not occur until then. People must have dedicated to the preparation for Easter the minimum amount of time separating the beginning of the chronological Roman year (March 1) from the earliest date that Easter could fall. 19 This certainly seems reasonable enough for Rome, but others may have celebrated a threeweek Lent as well. The Armenian Lectionary, composed some time between 417 and 439, indicates the possibility that there had once been a three-week fast in Jerusalem.2o One can surely grant that the three-week structure posed a solution to the Roman calendrical anomaly, without assuming that the idea of three weeks was created ex nihilo, as it were, solely with that end in mind. The question remains: why three weeks to start with?

Given its possible existence in Jerusalem, I want to ask whether a three-week preparation for Easter may be traced to Jewish precedent. Not that it must be, or even that it logically should be, especially if the three-week Lent was Roman in origin and then spread elsewhere, to Jerusalem, for example. On the other hand, a good deal of give-and-take characterized the late empire, so that a custom known in Rome need not have originated there; and in any case, the Jewish population of Rome, even in the first century, was considerable. Jewish influence was hardly limited to Palestine. It was, for example, a regular concern of Chrysostom in Antioch as late as the fourth century, which Robert Wilken calls "Not Yet the Christian Era."21 At the very least, we shall see that the specially designated Sabbaths prior to Passover provide us with an interesting three-week parallel to the three-week Lent.

We saw above that Sabbaths are often known by designations borrowed from the lections they carry. Even the Great Sabbath, Shabbat Hagadol, follows that rule, if it is related to the lectionary's Haftarah still read on that day, Malachi's prophecy of the "great . .. day [hayom hagadofj of the Lord." Whether Zeitlin is right in antedating the day and its reading to antiquity, or whether Yuval is correct in seeing both as medieval innovations, the linkage of name and lection remains. But even if there were no linkage, even if, that is, the Great

f om the others, the fact remains Sabbath is ~omehowcd~~~re~:t: other named Sabbaths which ) f the first two centuries, and

. h 1

their name from their Pentateuc a The two which interest us have already been men. Shabbat Parah (The Sabbath of the [red] heifer) f "Th' th ")

IS mon ... .

If the first day of the month Adar falls on the Sabbath, they read

"Shekels" (Exod. 30:11-16); if it falls in the middle of the week, they read it ["Shekels"] on the prior Sabbath' and on the next Sabbath they take a break [reading no

. special portion at all then, but instead, reading the regularly scheduled lesson and waiting until the week after for the next special reading]. On the second [special Sabbath, which invariably falls also on the second Sabbath of the month of Adar] they read the Pentateuchal section, "Remember what Amalek did .. . " (Deut. 25:17-19). On the third [Sabbath of the month] they read "The [red] heifer" (Num. 19: 1-22). On the fourth, they read, "This month shall be for you ... " (Exod. 12:1-20).22

The Mishnah is phrased as if it counts the Sabbaths from the beginning of Adar, the last month of the year. But suppose we count backward from the month that follows Adar, Nisan. It would then become evident that the fourth of the special lections, "~his month ... ," is reserved precisely for the Sab

warns, "This month shall be for you the beginning of months .. . the first of the months of the year .... On the tenth of this month ... each

P !:~~~t~:~e ~~ht 0: the 14th, there ca~ b~ ~ ~a~::ma~~~;~ ehfore i~. If, that is, Passover Day (the 15th) ay, t en Nlsan 14 and Nisan 7 1

wou d be Sab-Sunday before that. In that IS month " Id

ear . " wou occur on sy , the very day before the ree abbaths (') .

. . pnor to Passover.

o If Passover fell on Monday

GREAT SABBATH AND LENT

through Friday. There would always be (1) two Sabbaths of Nisan before it, then (2) still counting back, Nisan 1, falling sometime during the prior week, and (3) the announcement of the new month via the lection from Exodus on the Saturday before that. That Saturday would also be three Saturdaysthough not exactly three weeks-before Passover itself. The only way a difference might occur would be if Nisan 15 fell on Saturday. In such a case, Nisan 1 would also fall on Saturday, and the reading announcing it could occur that very day, rather than being moved up one week so as to anticipate the new month falling some time within the week following. In such an instance, the Jewish calendar would feature Shabbat Hachodesh only two rather than the usual three weeks prior to Passover, and Shabbat Parah would be read three weeks before.

Let us look also, then, at Shabbat Parah, the Sabbath of the [red] Heifer, normally found four weeks before Passover, but sometimes (when Passover falls on Saturday) three weeks before. On the face of it, the Mishnah seems to be counting its special lections from the viewpoint of Adar. But in actuality, the text conflates two traditions, the first being the initial two readings which are Adar-based, and the second being our two readings here, which happen to be read next, but are actually dependent not on Adar but on Passover, just as Lent is dependent on Easter. Numbers 19:1-22 describes the biblical practice of slaughtering and burning a red heifer, the ashes of which are then reserved for the purpose of washing away the ritual impurity of those who have come in contact with a corpse. Corpse-uncleanness is directly related to Passover, since Numbers 9:9 explicitly prohibits the offering of the Passover sacrifice to "any of you who are defiled by a corpse." Continuing biblical precedent, the Mishnah aptly worries about people who "mourn their near kindred [and who would normally be presumed to have contacted impurity while guarding and preparing the corpse], or who relocated the bones of their dead [from their temporary burial place to the permanent ossuary]."23 The Mishnah returns to the theme of uncleanness at the time of the Passover offering in 9:4, without,

LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN

.' or se-uncleanness is intended; but

however stlpulatlOg that c Phd'"Wh the Tose'fta glosses the Mishnah to correct t e recor ' . en ' . eaten in a state of uncleanness. [that

the Passover 0 ffenng IS "24 To b . ] ho has contracted corpse-uncleanness. . .10 e sure,

IS one w f II . .

t· of the red heifer as a means o · a evtatmg

the actua I prac Ice . 25 corpse-uncleanness may have long fallen IOto de~uetude, .but taking its place were the rabbinic enactments of ntual bathmg, which appropriately are given as the proper rem~dy.for people suspected of being impure.26 Obviously, the punfymg regulations read on Shabbat Parah, and Shabbat Hachodesh's summons (he very next week to prepare for the Passover, are intimately connected, as the Palestinian Talmud itself maintains:

Rabbi Levi said in the name of Rabbi Chama bar Chanina: you may not interrupt the lectionary between Parah and Hachodesh. [If, that is, the first of the four special readings had been read early27-thus necessitating an extra, fifth Sabbath, on which one would have to return to the regular lectionary-the interruption must occur between two of the other special readings, but on no account between these two.] Rabbi Levi said: The cups of Passover wine provide an analogy to help us remember this, for the Mishnah teaches us that people may drink all they like between one cup and another, but not between the third and the fourth cup. There, no extra drinking may Occur. Rabbi Levi said in the name of Rabbi Chama bar Chanina: Logic might lead you to argue that we should first read Hachodesh and only then [on the S.abbath thereafter, where there is no special reading] read Parah smce the Tabernacle was completed on the first of Nisan and th~

red heifer was burned on the second Why th . h '

th h 'f . en IS t e account of e el er read first? Because it details the cleansing of Israe1.28

Rashi, looking back on the Mishnah' . tage point at the end f th 1 s order from hiS van-

o e e eventh centu b

connection assumed h b ry, corro orates the

read the account of th:rh 'fY the Palestinian Talmud: "[Weel er first] to ad . h II

t? purify themselves, so that the m mon~s a of Israel nfices in a state of purity."29 y ay offer theIr Passover sac-

Even from the plain meanin that these two Pentate h I g of the biblical texts we see

uc a reading h '

s, eac a possible option

GREAT SABBATH AND LENT

for the Sabbath three weeks before Passover, are ideal prototypes for Lenten themes: preparation for the sacrifice (Exodus 12) and cleansing from impurity (Numbers 19). Let us return briefly to the calendar, to see where Easter Sunday would fall relative to the Sabbaths in question.

Martimort, Dalmais, and Jounel summarize the matter well:

It was not until the early years of the second century that there was any thought of celebrating a specifically Christian feast of Easter, and even then, the Church of Rome waited until the second half of the century before accepting it.

Until Pope Victor intervened (189-198), two ways of calculating the date for Easter were in use. The Churches of Asia Minor were bent on Christianizing the day of the Jewish Passover, the 14th of Nisan, so they stopped their fast on that day. The other Churches celebrated their paschal feast on the following Sunday, the "first day of the week." The Roman Church, in particular, followed this second way, and it became the rule for all from the beginning of the third century.30

In other words, the Jewish calendar was critical to the preNicean Church, especially in Asia Minor, where for a while there was no Easter Sunday at all, but instead, a Christianized Passover held on the date of the Jewish celebration itself. Alternatively, Christians outside Asia Minor, and especially at Rome, kept Easter on the Sunday after Passover. In no case, however, was there a third possibility. Easter always corresponded with Passover or took place at most one week after it.

What matters even more than the actual calendrical overlap between Passover and Easter, however, is the theory behind it. For the churches in Palestine and Asia Minor, Passover was Easter. But even for churches outside Asia Minor, those which moved Easter to the Sunday after Passover, Easter was still seen as the Pascha, with Jesus the newly sacrificed lamb whose blood saved the new Israel, just as the blood of the lamb in Exodus saved the old. "For the Pascha was Christ afterward sacrificed," says Justin Martyr. "As the blood of the Passover saved us who were in Egypt, so also the blood of Christ will deliver those who have believed from death."31 As the new

. r se-uncleanness is intended; but however, stiPulatmghthaMt .~~:ah to correct the record: "When the Tosefta glosses tel I'[th

fC' • eaten in a state of unc eanness. atthe Passover 0 lenng IS ,,24 11 b . h h contracted corpse-uncleanness. 0 e sure, IS] one w 0 as f II . t' . f the red heifer as a means 0 a eVla 109the actual practIce 0 . 25 may have long fallen mto desuetude, but

corpse-unc eannes I S .' taking its place were the rabbinic enactments of rItual bathmg, which appropriately are given as the proper rem~dy. for people suspected of being impure.26 Obviously, the pUrIfylOg regulations read on Shabbat Parah, and Shabbat Hachodesh 's summons the very next week to prepare for the Passover, are intimately connected, as the Palestinian Talmud itself maintains:

Rabbi Levi said in the name of Rabbi Chama bar Chanina: you may not interrupt the lectionary between Parah and Hachodesh. (If, that is, the first of the four special readings had been read early27-thus necessitating an extra, fifth Sabbath, on which one would have to return to the regular lectionary-the interruption must occur between two of the other special readings, but on no account between these two.] Rabbi Levi said: The cups of Passover wine provide an analogy to help us remember this, for the Mishnah teaches us that people may drink all they like between one cup and another, but not between the third and the fourth

cup. There, no extra drinking may occur. Rabbi Levi said in the name of Rabbi Chama bar Chanina: Logic might lead you to argue that we should first read Hachodesh and only then [on the ~abbath thereafter, where there is no special reading] read Parah, SlOce t~e Tabernacle was completed on the first of Nisan, and the red he~fer was burned on the second. Why then is the account of the heifer read first? Because it details the cleansing of Israel.28

Rashi, looking back on the Mishnah' . tage point at the end f th I s order from hIS van-connection assumed ~ e~ eventh century, corroborates the

read the account of th erhe ./ the Palestinian Talmud: "[We e eher first] to ad . h

to purify themselves so th t th moms all of Israel rifices in a state of ~urity.'~29 ey may offer their Passover sac-

Even from the plain meanin that these two Pentateu h I g .of the biblical texts, we see

c a readlOgs h .

,eac a PossIble option

GREAT SABBATH AND LENT

Martimort, Dalmais, and Jounel summarize the matter well:

LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN

h Exodus 12's announcement to month of Nisan dawned, t en'l ant to Christians as to Jews;

p over was as re ev .

prepare for ass 20' demand for pre-paschal punty,

was Numbers s . 'bl

and so t00 .. ' the sacrifice was Impossl e .

. h t h'ch particlpatlOn 10

Wit ou w I 'd nce for Jewish influence on the

Of course the best eVI e . h 1

' Id b a direct connectlOn between t e ec-

Lenten calendar wou e . f ..

. ' R bb' d the early church, and m act, It IS

tlOnanes of the a IS an d' f

I· t Exodus 12'1-14 as an early rea mg or

there Chavasse IS s . . Good Friday, albeit balanced by the prophetic ~ext of Hosea 6:1-6, "which illustrates exceptionally ,:ell t~e Idea of a new 'fi ,,32 The case with Numbers 19 IS a bit more complex.

sacn ceo . I I am not aware of its existence as a Lenten readmg, but et us look at the prophetic accompaniment to it in the early synagogue. The Mishnah records only the Pentateuchal readings for the special Sabbaths in question, but the Tosefta supplements the Mishnah's data by giving the prophetic reading also.

For the prophetic lection [that accompanies "the red Heifer"] they read [the passage beginning], "I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleanness, and from all your idols I will cleanse you" (Ezek. 36:25).33

The early church readings from the Hebrew Bible would have preferred prophetic readings in any case, and one need not look very far before discovering this one as part of the Lenten lectionary. In his comparison of the Georgian and the Armenian lectionaries, Lages lists Ezekiel 36:25-36 as the reading for the Wednesday of the fifth week of Lent.34 The Wurzburg Epistolary prescribes Ezekiel 36:23-28 for the Wednesday of the fourth week, which would put it roughly about two and onehalf weeks prior to Easter, not very far from its placement in Je~ish tradition.35 The common usage of Ezekiel 36 dovetails With what we know of its centrality in the Jewish-Christian d;bat~.36 For Jews there was but one covenant the saving blood ~er:hgl~hn;a~ visibl~ .in two commandments:' the Passover of-

CircumCIsion. Within its ho '1

the earliest midrash to E d ml y on Hachodesh(!) , tian claims that a new xo us.e~en ~olemicizes against Chrishere.37 Apparently, the ~ndk~Plrttua~lzed covenant is intended

ze leI readmg may already have been

GREAT SABBATH AND LENT

common in the second century in both Jewish and Chris

tian preparation for their respective feasts, so that Jewish

exegetes took pains to explain the Jewish understanding of its

message.

Of course, there can be no certainty here. But we do have the common themes, the probability of common lections, and above all, a three-week Lent which here takes on specific meaning as a Christian application of Judaism's insistence that one count back three weeks from Passover in order to cleanse oneself and prepare for the sacrifice of the paschal lamb.

Great Sabbath: From Chronology to Typology

We can now return to the Great Sabbath and in particular, the way Christian sources use the term. As we saw, John 19:31 understands the Sabbath prior to the resurrection to be a Great Sabbath. If the term was indeed Jewish, then John is using the Jewish term but transforming it for Christians from the Sabbath prior to the Passover to the Sabbath afterward-since for John, the Passover sacrifice had taken place on Friday, the day before. If, on the other hand (following Yuval), he was inventing it himself, he was still using it in a non-calendrical but typological way. In either case, John's Great Sabbath is not a calendrical designation; it is a concept, by which he means the Saturday connected with the day of salvation. He may be borrowing the term already used by Jews for the equivalent Saturday prior to their own day of salvation (the Passover), and announcing that the resurrection now takes the place of that Passover. Alternatively, following Yuval's claim that Jews borrowed the Great Sabbath later on from Christians rather than Christians borrowing it early from Jews, he is inventing a new term for the Saturday in question. But either way, he is speaking not in calendrical but in theological terms.

Seeing John's use of the term "Great Sabbath" as theological, not chronological, goes a long way toward solving the puzzle of its use in the Acts ofthe Martyrs. We find it twice, once in the Martyrdom of Polycarp, and then again in the Martyrdom of Pionius. Both are said to have been martyred in Smyrna on

LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN

. 15538 and the latter in 250. Can a Great Sabbath, the f~r;~r ~myrna on exactly the same day? both men really have die. 10. n the fact that the martyrdoms And if so, what day was ~~'l gl;:e Great Sabbath of which John occurred in February, w I end cannot possibly have occurred

speaks is tied to Passover a

that early in the year?

Solve the problem has been made by

A recent attemp t t0 .. Robin Lane Fox, who bases his reconstructlOn on the pnor f W·I1 Rordorf 39 which in turn goes back all the way

studyo I y , . .b.l.

to Lightfoot'S claim in 1889.40 Recognizing the Impo~sl I Ity of the Great Sabbath of Passover faIling in February, Llg~tfoot posited the theory that the same term can be used genencal~y for any Sabbath on which "a festival or other marked day m the Jewish calendar" falls. Thus, says Rordorf, the Sabbaton mega of the martyrs "does not designate the first day of Passover but simply a special Sabbath." But which one? Rordorf draws our attention to the account of Pionius, where we discover that the pagan population was celebrating a feast, and suggests that the author, himself a Christian, used the term Sabbaton not in its Jewish sense of the Sabbath but merely as a weekday name, Saturday. Hence no particular Jewish holy day is intended. Rather we have February 23, which is the end of the civil calendar in the Roman empire. Jews, Rordorf says, were not working because it was a Sabbath for them, and pagans too were mischievously idle because they were celebr~ting ~ ~oliday. In a festive mood, the two groups conspired tWIce wlth~n a :entury to kill the two Christians. Fox accepts mo~t of thIS, wIth e~belli~hments and alterations. The pagan ~estlval. was the ancient DlOnysia, but it must have been a JewIsh hohday too, h~ thinks. He dismisses the special Sabbaths

of Adar on. the mistaken notion that they were probabl not around yet 10 the third century 41 Actuall y

. t db· y, as we saw they ex-

IS e, ut the term Great Sabbath '

them. Fox is ri ht in . . was never used of any of beit for the wrogn reJectmg them as a possible solution, al-

g reason. So Fox · I .

The Pagans were celebr f D. ISO ates Punm as the culprit. the very day of bloody a ~ng lOnysia, and the Jews, PurimHcal Haman. What bettand vengeful deliverance from the biber ay than that for Christian-bashing?

GREAT SABBATH AND LENT

But Fox still has the incontrovertible problem that except for some isolated exceptions late in the Middle Ages,42 the term Great Sabbath is never used for any Sabbath but the one known to John, the Sabbath prior to Passover.

I suggest a different type of solution, one that does not depend on fitting a term to an actual calendar day. We have seen that John was speaking theologically, not calendrically. A direct line reaches from John through both Polycarp to Pionius. Eusebius quotes Irenaeus, himself a disciple of Polycarp, as testifying that the latter knew "those who had seen the Lord," but especially John, who is singled out by name. Tertullian also says he was a disciple of John, who even appointed him to his bishopric.43 As for Pionius, none other than he is credited with preparing the final copy of the account of Polycarp's martyrdom.44 Musurillo notes that the accounts of the two martyrdoms are composed in similar style, highly dependent on gospel paradigms, full of rhetorical devices, and dedicated to the moral Of "stress[ing] above all the poignant lack of sympathy which the Christians experienced as aliens in a hostile world . . . attributed to the malevolence of the Demon, whose aim is to conspire with Pagans and Jews to destroy the saints."45 He doubts much of the historical veracity of the Pion ius narrative, finds "undisguised anti-Semitism" in both accounts, and finds an overall theme according to which the martyrs are portrayed as imitating Jesus's own death. 46

This theme is the key. The martyrs imitated Jesus' own death, according to their master, John. How much of the accounts we should therefore credit as history and how much as typology is indeed questionable. Arguing strenuously for the historicity of Pion ius, Fox is left with the need to believe that both martyrs died on the same "Great Sabbath" ninety-five years apart. He must then explain that remarkable circumstance by locating something unique about the date; and thus, he is led to identify the "Great Sabbath" as a Jewish feast in February. It is far more likely, following Musurillo, that both accounts are highly skewed pictures. From (1) Polycarp's arrest by the police chief conveniently named Herod (to whom "destiny had given the same name, that Polycarp might fulfill the

LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN

b coming a sharer with Christ,

lot that was appomted to ~I.m, :ight receive the punishment ~"mob of pagans and Jews" who of Judas" [para. 6]), to (2) tile ble rage" (para. 12), to (3) they

d in uncontro a . . .

d I

"shoute a ou db shwood [to burn him ahve] , with "swiftly collected logs an ru I I helping " we have no

's their custom-zea ous y ,

t~e Je~s-as I . b t a literary masterpiece in which theo

hlstoncal narrative, u . ' 10 ical characterizations replace hlstoncal fact. . g S bb th could not possibly have occurred In Feb-

The Great a a . " B t 'f the designation of the date IS a typological desld

ruary. u I "d h

. d ot have It cannot be mere comCI ence t at

eratum, It nee n . .

(1) John is the only gospel to make the typological bre~kthrough of seeing the Great Sabbath as the day precedmg God's deliverance; (2) John is also mentor par excellence of Polycarp, who himself is the model for Pionius; and (3) the deaths of these and only these two martyrs are associated with the Great Sabbath. I suggest that the Great Sabbath for the authors of these martyrologies is not an objective date in February but simply an extension of John's typology. It is the Sabbath associated with the deaths of martyrs who want in every way to come as close as they can to Jesus' death, and who therefore are killed, by definition, on a Great Sabbath-the

authors having decided that any Sabbath in which they died should be so named.

NOTES

?riginally published in somewhat different form as "The Jewish L~ctlOnary, the Great Sabbath, and the Lenten Calendar: Liturgical Ll~ks,?~tween ~hristians and Jews in the First Three Christian Cen

tunes, lD 1. Neil Alexander d .,.,.

Th' ,e ., ~ lme and Community: In Honor of omas JulLan Talley (Washington, D.C. 1990) 3-20

1 Cf I . , ,pp. .

. . c aSSlC studies by Adolph Buchler "Th .

Law and Prophets . 11 ' . ,eReadmg of the

lD a nenmal Cycle " JQR

(1894), reprinted in Jakob J B ." 0.s., 5 (1893) and 6 ti{tc Study ofJewish Liturg' (~::hOWSkl' Contributions to the ScienBible as Read and Preach~ in th York, 1970), Pp·181-302; and The Mann (1940), and vol. 2, b Jac : Old Synagogue, vol. 1, by Jacob y 0 Mann and Isaiah Sonne (1966),

GREAT SABBATH AND LENT

reprinted with "Prolegomenon" by Ben Zion Wacholder (New York, 1971). In addition, see modern studies by Wacholder (abovementioned "Prolegomenon"), Joseph Heinemann, "The Triennial Lectionary Cycle," ffS 19 (1968): 41-48, and M. D. Goulder, The Evangelists' Calendar: A Lectionary Explanation of the Development of Scripture (London, 1978).

See Buchler, "Reading of the Law and Prophets," p. 240.

Joseph Offer, "Seder Nevi'im Ukh'tuvim," Tarbiz 58 (1988): 155-89.

See Solomon ben Hayatom's testimony, "The Great Sabbath before Passover, Shavuot, Rosh Hashanah and Sukkot," in Ismar Elbogen, Der fiidische Gottesdienst in seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung (1913; reprint, Hildesheim, 1962), pp. 550-51, note d.

See Issachar Jacobson, Chazon Hamikra (Tel Aviv, n.d.), p. 232, for synopsis.

Tos. Shabo 87b, d.h. v'oto yom.

Shibbolei Haleket, section 205.

Translations of the Greek mega vary, but it is "literally: 'great.' " Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel according to fohn: Introduction, Translation and Notes (Garden City, N.Y., 1970), p. 934.

A. Jellinek, "Literarische Analekten: Sabbat Ha-gadol," Der Orient 18 (1851): 287-88.

10. Leopold Zunz, Der Ritus des synagogaLen Gottesdienstes, (Berlin, 1919), p.1O.

11.

Solomon Zeitlin, "The Liturgy of the First Night of Passover," fQR, n.s., 38 (1948): 431-60; see esp. pp. 457-60. Reprinted in Solomon Zeitlin's Studies in the Early History ofJudaism, vol. 1 (New York, 1973), pp. 62-91.

12.

Ibid., pp. 458-59 (=89-90).

13. D ialogue with Trypho, 49; cited by Zeitlin, in his Studies, p.90,

n.320.

14. Zeitlin, "Liturgy of the First Night," p. 459.

15. Thomas 1. Talley, The Origins ofthe Liturgical Year (New York, 1986).

16.

Antoine Chavasse, "La structure du Careme et les lectures des messes quadragesimales dans la liturgie romaine," La Maison-Dieu 31 (1952): 84. ,

17.

Cf. Chavasse, ibid., p. 84, and M. Ferreira Lages, "Etapes de l'evolution du Careme a Jerusalem avant Ie Ve siecle," Revue des Etudes Armeniennes, n.s.,6 (1969): 69.

18. See, e.g., Cyrille Vogel, Medieval Liturgy: An Introduction to

LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN

34 I t d by William G. Storey and Niels

. d nd trans a e

the Sources, revise a . D C 1986) pp. 309-10. Krogh Rasmussen (Washmgton,c . Am"e" p. '84. "Structure du are ,

19.

Chavasse, I' du Careme aJerusalem," p. 98.

s "L'evo utlOn Rh .

20. Lage, . r I Chrysostom and the Jews: etonc 21 Robert L. Wilken, JO 111 ) 29 3 .

. . . I L t Fourth Century (Berkeley, 1983 , pp. -3.

and Rea/tty III tIe a e

quotation from Bickerman, p. 33.

22.

M. Meg. 3:4.

23.

Pes. 8:8.

24.

T. Pes. 8:9. . . d P

25 A h d the biblical practice of provldmg a secon assover one ~on~h ~ater for those who were unclean on Nisan 14 (Num.

9:11).

26.

M. Pes. 8:8.

27.

See M. Meg. 3:4, cited above.

28.

P. T Meg. 3:5.

29.

Rashi to M. Meg. 3:4.

30.

A. O. Martimort, l. H. Dalmais, and P. Jounel, The Church at Prayer, vol. 4 (Collegeville, 1983), pp. 33-34.

31.

Apology I, 66:3. Cf. Israel Yuval, "Passover in the Middle Ages," in volume 5 of this series; Lawrence A. Hoffman, "A Symbol of Salvation in the Passover Seder" in this volume; and I. H. Danielou, Sacramentum Futuri (Paris, 1950).

32.

Chavasse, "Structure du Careme," p. 95.

33.

T Meg. 3:3.

34.

Lages, "L'evolution du Careme aJerusalem," p. 99 . . 35. See Adrian Nocent, The Liturgical Year, vol. 2, Lent (College

vl~le, 1977), p. 248. On the Wurzburg Epistolary, see Vogel, Medieval Liturgy.

36. ~f., for ~xample, Bernhard Blumenkrantz, Die Judenpredigt Altgltsll~S (Pans, 1973), and Marcel Simon, Vents Israel: Etudes sur les relatIOns entre Chrl!tiel1S et luiFs dans l'Emp ' . (P .

1948), pp. 135-425. J' Ire romame ans,

37.

Mekhilta Pascha, chap. 5.

38.

The exact date is d b t d S ..

Ma t' R . e a e . ee BoudewlJn Dehandschutter ;/1~IHumb olycarpl: ~en literair-kritische studie (Louvain 1979)'

P. , er ert Musunllo, com Th .. "

(Oxford 1972) I'ntrod t' P:'.. e Acts of the ChnstLan Martyrs

, , uc Ion p XIU' and R b' L

Christians (New York 1987)' B d: 0 111 ane Fox, Pagans and sion of the year for pion' : dOX Ispenses also with Eusebius's ver39 Cf t:' iUS S eath; see p. 468.

. . cox, Pagans and Ch . .

nstlans, pp. 468-73, 485-87; and Willy

GREAT SABBATH AND LENT

Rordorf, "Zum Problem des 'Grossen Sabbats' im Polykarp-und Pioniusmartyrium," in Pietas: Festschrift fur Bernhard Kotting (Munich, 1980), pp. 245-49.

40.

1. B. Lightfoot, Apostolic Fathers 2:1, pp. 709ff; cited in Rordorf, "Zum Problem," p. 246, n. 11.

41.

This mistaken notion is attributed (Fox, Pagans and Christians, p. 758, n. 71) to Elbogen, Der ludische Gottesdienst, pp.155-59. In fact, Elbogen says no such thing, but cites instead the Mishnah noted above. I mention it here not because I think the Great Sabbath was one of these special Sabbaths, but because I want to retain the historicity of the special Sabbaths for the Tannaitic period, for the purposes of my thesis regarding their relationship to the origin of Lent.

42.

See above, n. 5.

43.

Cf. Eusebius, History 5:20, Tertullian's testimony in De Praescr. 32:2, and other similar accounts, all cited in E. C. E. Owen, Some Authentic Acts of the Early Martyrs (Oxford, 1927), p. 31, and in Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs p. xiii.

44.

Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs, pp.19-20.

45.

Ibid., pp. xiv-xv, xxviii-xxix.

46.

Ibid., pp. xii, xiv, xxviii.

Preparati~n ~or Pas~ha~

Lent in ChnstIan AntIquIty

MAXWELL E. JOHNSON

It was once commonly assumed that the forty-day period of

re-paschal preparation for baptismal candidates, penitents,

p ., I k "L t"

and the Christian commumty In genera nown as en

(Quadragesima or Tessarakoste) had its origin as a gradual

backwards development of the short preparatory and purifica

tory fast held before the annual celebration of Pascha.1 Ac

cording to this standard theory, the one-or two-day fast before

Pascha (as witnessed to by Tertullian in De ieiunio 13-14) be

came extended to include:

the entire week, later called "Great" or "Holy Week," beginning on the preceding Monday,

a three-week period (at least in Rome) including this "Holy Week," and finally,

a six-week, forty-day preparation period assimilating those preparing for Easter baptism to the forty-day temptation of Jesus in the desert.

Tha~ this pre-paschal period finally became forty days in length III the fourth ~e~tury has been traditionally explained by an ap~~al to a ~h~ft In world view on the part of the postC~nstantmlan Chnstlan community. That is, instead of a church Wlt~ an ~schatological orientation to the imminent parousia of ~hnst htUe concerned with historical events, sites, and time, t e fou~th .century reveals a church whose Iiturg has be

c~me prmclpally a historical remembrance and co y

tlOn of the past· rt . mmemoracommemoratio~: ~f~~gi l~creasingly .splintered into separate IS oncal events III the life. of Christ. As

LENT IN CHRISTIAN ANTIQUIIT

the primary and most influential proponent of this theory of fourth-century "historicism," Gregory Dix, explained it:

The step of identifying the six weeks' fast with the 40 days' fast of our Lord in the wilderness was obviously in keeping with the new historical interest of the liturgy. The actual number of '40 days' of fasting was made up by extending Lent behind the sixth Sunday before Easter in various ways. But the association with our Lord's fast in the wilderness was an idea attached to the season of Lent only after it had come into existence in connection with the preparation of candidates for baptism.2

Recent scholarship, however, most notably that of Thomas Talley,3 has necessitated revising previous theories. We can no longer speak of a single origin for Lent. Rather, there are multiple origins for this period which, in the fourth-century postNicene context, become universally standardized and fixed as the "forty days" that have characterized pre-paschal preparation ever since.

The Primitive Pre-Paschal Fast

Third-century sources indicate that the two-day fast on the Friday and Saturday before the celebration of Pasch a was becoming a six-day pre-paschal fast in Alexandria and Syria.4 Although this extension has often been interpreted as the initial stage in the development of the forty-day Lent (since this week is included in the overall calculation of Lent in later liturgical sources), this six-day preparatory fast is better interpreted as the origin of what would come to be called "Holy" or "Great Week" throughout the churches of the ancient world. Thomas Talley observes that within the later Byzantine tradition, Lazarus Saturday and Palm Sunday divide Lent, which precedes them, from the six-day pre-paschal fast of Great Week which follows, and these days were known already in fourth-century Jerusalem.5 Rather than being related specifically to the origins of Lent, therefore, the two-day (or oneweek) fast in these third-century sources (with the possible exception of Apostolic Tradition 20)6 seems to have been-an

MAXWELL E. JOHNSON

. f the faithful for the imminent celeindependent preparatIOn. a If Already in the third-century

. f the Pascha Itse . .

bratJOn 0 thO fast I·S related chronologIcally to

/. A tolO/·um IS

Didasca ta pos 1 f J ' rte In other words, the Holy

. the last week a esus I .

events m I k·ng is not Lent but a pre-paschal fast Week fast, proper Yspea. I b' h Id not be confused with

alone which overlaps wIth, ut s au , , . t ry period that comes to be known as Lent.

an earher pre para 0 . . Thanks to the "historicism theory" of Gregory DIX III par. I th development of Holy Week has often been ex

hcu ar, e . . h T plained as the result .of post-~icene ~reoc~upatl.on WIt Jerusalem, whose "liturgIcally mmded bls~op, .Cynl, was fixated on the liturgical commemoration of hlstoncal holy events at the very holy places where they once occurred.7 From Jerusalem as a pilgrimage center, then, these commemorations spread to the rest of the church and tended to shape the way this week was celebrated elsewhere. In fact, however, as early as the pre-Nicene Didascalia Apostolorum, this week had already been assimilated to events in Jesus' last week. As Robert Taft and John Baldovin have demonstrated for Jerusalem,8 the situation cannot be explained adequately as a simple interpretive shift from a pre-Nicene eschatological orientation to a fourth-century historical one. "Eschatology" and "history" are not mutually exclusive. As we shall see, even prior to Nicea, the date of Easter the assimilation of the six-day pre-paschal fast to a chronology of Jesus' final week, an.d an assimilation of a forty-day fast to the fortyday post-baptIsmal temptation of Jesus in the desert-although

n~t to a pre-paschal "Lent"-were already accomplished. PostNl:ene Lenten trends were liturgically evolutionary not revolutIOnary trends and . .'

. '. ' were not suddenly IllstItuted by individ-U.~I m~uentIal figures (like Cyril) in response to the changed SI uatIOn of the Church in the post-Constantinian world.9

A Three Week Pre-Paschal Preparation

The fifth-century Byzantine h. . his understanding of the. Istonan, Socrates, describes out the Christian chur :anety ~fLenten observances through

c es 0 f hIS day:

LENT IN CHRlSTlAN ANTIQUITY

The fasts before Easter will be found to be differently observed among different people. Those at Rome fast three successive weeks before Easter, excepting Saturdays and Sundays. Those in IIIyrica and all over Greece and Alexandria observe a fast of six weeks, which they term "the forty days' fast." Others commencing their fast from the seventh week before Easter, and fasting three to five days only, and that at intervals, yet call that time "the forty days' fast." It is indeed surprising to me that thus differing in the number of days, they should both give it one common appellation; but some assign one reason for it, and others another, according to their several fancies.lO

What is most intriguing about Socrates' statement is his reference to a three-week Lenten fast at Rome. Since he corrects himself about Saturdays as non-fasting days in Rome later in this work, and since Athanasius (in his Festal Letter of 340),11 Jerome (in a letter to Marcella in 384),12 and Pope Siricius (in a letter to Himerius of Tarragona in 385)13 refer to an established pattern of a forty-day Lent there too, his statement is inaccurate as a fifth-century description. Nevertheless, his reference to "three successive weeks" of fasting appears to be corroborated by later sources of the Roman liturgy. Such evidence includes:

the provision of three missae pro scrutiniis (masses for the scrutinies of baptismal candidates) assigned to the third, fourth, and fifth Sundays of Lent in the Gelasian Sacramentary (seventh century);

the course reading of the Gospel of John during the last three weeks of Lent (beginning in the Wiirzburg Capitulary, the earliest Roman lectionary [c. 700], on the Friday before the third Sunday in Lent and reaching its conclusion on Good Friday); and

the titles Hebdomada in mediana (week in the middle) and Dominica in mediana (Sunday in the middle), applied, respectively, to the fourth week and fifth Sunday of Lent in various ordines Romani and Roman lectionaries.

MAXWELL E. JOHNSON

40 . S tes' inaccurate fifth-century de-

l· ht of all thIs ocra

In Ig . d'. te the remnant of a well-ingrained

. t· may well III Ica . S

scnp IOn . d·n Rome some time earlIer. uch, at

ek Lenten peno I .

tree-we I. f Antoine Chavassel4 from hIS analy-

I ast was the conc usIOn 0

e , h. eadings of the last three weeks on Lent,

sis of the Jo annme r .

. bl t reconstruct as an mdependent set of lec

whIch he was a eo..

. h t ce have constituted an ongmal three-week

tlOns t at mus on .. . . d ·ncluding Holy Week. 15 Along sImIlar hnes,

Lenten peno , I , 'n lley has also concluded that Socrates reference may

Thomas 1a . 16 reflect an earlier, if not fifth-century, Roman practIce. The possibility of an original three-we~k Lent, however, is not limited to Rome. On the basis of a detaIled structural analysis of the contents of the fifth-century Armenian Lectionary, a lectionary generally understood to reflect fourth-century Jerusalem practice, Mario F. Lages has argued that early Jerusalem practice knew an original three-week Lenten preparation period of catechumens for paschal baptismY Along with these contents-including a canon of Lenten readings with concluding psalmody assigned to Wednesday and Friday gatherings at Zion and a list of nineteen catechetical biblical readings assigned to Lenten catechesis (which parallel the pre-baptismal catecheses of Cyril of Jerusalem)-Lages also pointed to the introductory rubric in the ninth-or tenth-century Armenian

rite of. baptism. and to a pertinent rubric in the fifth-century ?eorglan LectIOnary. The Armenian baptismal rubric reads m part:

The Can'on of Baptism when they make a Christian. Before which it is not right to admit him into the church. But he shall have ~a~ds laid on. beforehand, three weeks or more before the baptism, In time su~clent for him to learn from the Wardapet [Instructor]

both the faith and the baptism of the church. IS

The Georgian Lectionary wh·1 r .

catechetical read· c'. 1 e Istmg the same nineteen

mgs as ynl and the A . L . specifically directs that catechesi . t b r~em~n echonary, ings on the Monday of th fif h s IS o. egm WIth these readnine~een days (or approxi~at:1 week m Lent, that is, exactly . baphsm.19 y three weeks) before paschal

LENT IN CHRISTIAN ANTIQUITY

The early three-week Lenten period in Rome and Jerusalem was customary in other liturgical traditions as well. I have suggested elsewhere20 that a similar three-week period of final preparation for baptismal candidates is discernible from an analysis of the last three weeks of the forty-day Lent in North Africa, Naples, Constantinople, and Spain. For Spain, in particular, this three-week period appears to be confirmed by the first canon of the Second Council of Braga (572), which directs that bishops

shall teach that catechumens (as the ancient canons command) shall come for the cleansing of exorcism twenty days before baptism, in which twenty days they shall especially be taught the Creed, which is: I believe in God the Father Almighty ... . 21

What Socrates says about the "three successive weeks" of prepaschal fasting at Rome, therefore, should be seen as the memory of an early Christian practice which was much more universal than Roman in its scope.

On the basis of this discernable pattern in Christian liturgical sources, Lawrence Hoffman has suggested that this practice has its ultimate roots in Judaism.22 Hoffman notes that, according to rabbinic sources, the feast of Passover itself is preceded by lectionary readings (Exodus 12 or Numbers 19) on the third Sabbath prior to its arrival that stress either preparation. for the passover sacrifice or the necessity of being cleansed from impurity. The Exodus 12 reading, he notes further, was cited by Chavasse as an early reading for Good Friday at Rome, and the prophetic reading of Ezekiel 36:25-36 (accompanying Numbers 19, according to the Tosefta) appears on the Wednesday of Lent IV (the fourth week of Lent) in early Roman lectionaries, that is, two and one-half weeks before Easter. According to Hoffman, therefore, the early threeweek Lent-at least in Jerusalem and Rome-was "a Christian application of Judaism's insistence that one counr back three weeks from Passover in order to cleanse oneself and prepare for the sacrifice of the paschallamb.,,23 IfHoffman is correct, then, as Talley writes, "this could well suggest that the

MAXWELL E. JOHNSON 42

. for Pascba antedates its employment three-week prepar;t!O: tismal preparation.,,24 as the framework or a:al of Hoffman's theory are that it ap

The streDg~h andfi apPrationale for the Christian choice of a pears to provIde a rm bl h .. h three-week period of preparation. The pro e~, l'o,:"etVh~l, ISht at

hatever evidence there IS 101 IS t ree

when we first see w , " ( ·th the exception of Socrates general refer

week "Lent WI

ence to fasting), it is

already closely associated with the final preparation of catechumens for baptism, and

not always clearly associated with Easter baptism.

The Armenian baptismal rubric, for example, stresses three weeks of preparation for baptism without specifying when that baptism is to take place. But the early Syrian and Armenian traditions favored baptism on Epiphany, not Easter, since they understood Christian initiation as the mimesis of the

Jordan event interpreted in light of the rebirth imagery of John 3 rather than the paschal imagery of Romans 6. The three-week period of preparation was therefore more probably associated with catechumenal preparation for baptism without having anything to do with Easter.25 Similarly, thanks again to the work of Talley, it is now common knowledge that prior to the post-Nicene context of the fourth century, the Alexan

drian tradition knew neither Easter baptism nor a pre-paschal

"Lent" longer than the one week of the paschal fast. And, it

~ust b~ noted, the reference to "three weeks" in the Constan

tmopohtan liturgy.is actually a reference in the typica to the

enrollment ~f baptismal candidates exactly three weeks before

:he c;lebratlOn of baptism on Lazarus Saturday (the day be. ore aIm Sunday and a full week before Easter) a day which

m current Byzantine us ·11 '

tismallitu . . age Stl contains the vestige of a bap

rgy 10 Its entrance antiphon.26 Because of the primary a .. . riod with baptismal s.soclatlOn of this three-week peis whether or not thPI·srepa~atdlon, the real question, therefore,

peno mUst ne ·1

to Easter and consequent) to cessan y be connected stated that "Pascha w bY . a pre-paschal Lent. Talley has

as ecommg the

preLerred time for bap-

LENT IN CHRISTIAN ANTIQUITY

tism in many parts of the Church" in the third century,27 but Paul Bradshaw has recently surveyed the evidence for this assertion and comes to a much different conclusion.28 According to Bradshaw, the most that can be said about Easter baptism before the fourth century is that there is a preference expressed for this practice, a preference limited to third-century North Africa (Tertullian) and Rome (Hippolytus), with its possible celebration on other days by no means excluded. Only in the post-Nicene context of the fourth century does paschal baptism, along with a Romans 6 reinterpretation of baptism as incorporation into the death and resurrection of Christ, become a nearly universal Christian ideal. Even then, however, it does not appear to become the only or dominant custom outside of Rome or north Italy. The letter of Pope Siricius to Himerius of Tarragona (385), one of the earliest Roman references to a forty-day Lent, reveals a variety of baptismal occasions in Spain (i.e., Christmas, Epiphany, and the feasts of apostl.es and martyrs). Evidence from Leo I demonstrates that Epiphany was also a baptismal day in Sicily and that the feasts of martyrs were baptismal occasions elsewhere in Italy. A sermon of Gregory Nazianzus shows, similarly, that Epiphany baptism was a common practice in Cappadocia. These examples, along with those of Alexandria and Constantinople referred to above, lead Bradshaw to say that "baptism at Easter was never the normative practice in Christian antiquity that many have assumed. The most that can be said is that it was an experiment that survived for less than fifty years."

What, then, may be concluded about Socrates' three wee~s and the origins of Lent? As we have seen, references to thiS three-week period are discerned primarily ~ithin the. c?ntext of final baptismal preparation. But what IS most stnkmg is that not all of these sources refer to Easter baptism. We seem therefore to have a three-week period of (final) catechetical preparation for baptism that only later gets associated with Easter. It becomes "Lent" simply because Easter gradually becomes the preferred day for Christian initiati~n. Whe~ever baptism occurred, it was preceded, as the Armen~an baptismal rubric says, by "three weeks or more" of preparation. For those

MAxWELL E. JOHNSON

. d Rome) which "preferred" to celechurches (North Afncaanwe may speak of this three-week pe

. '(ation at Pasc ha, . .

b t

ra e 101 1 . '(ve "Lent " For those WhICh dId not

riod as a kind of pnml l' . d

ference this three-week peno was not

I , .

have such an ear Y pre .

final catechetical baptismal preparation.

"Lent" but mere Y a . .

h I baptism becomes the normatIve ldeal-as

Only w en pasc Bradshaw says, in the second half of the fo~rth century-do these variations become blurred, harmoDlzed, and thus brought into universal conformity as part of the newlydeveloped pre-paschal Quadragesima or Tessarakoste.

h a

The Forty Days as a Pre-Paschal Season

As already noted, the pre-paschal Lent of forty days, like the universal ideal of paschal baptism, appears to be a fourthcentury post-Nicene development. Talley writes:

the Council of Nicea is something of a watershed for the fast of forty days. Prior to Nicea,no record exists of such a forty-day fast before Easter. Only a few years after the council, however, we encounter it in most of the church as either a well-established custom or one that has become so nearly universal as to impinge on th~se churches that have not yet adopted it.29

From ~here, t.hen, does this forty-day fast as a pre-paschal preparatlOn penod emerge? Following the initial work of Anto? Ba~mstark and R.-G. Coquin,30 Talley has provided wha~IS r~pldly becoming the standard answer to this question by dlrectmg ~ch?larly attention to Alexandria. I have alread noted that wlthm this tradition, neither Easter baptism no~

a pre-paschal fast of more th known. Nevertheless there a an one w~ek was customarily tradition to a forty d fi re references 10 the sources of this

paschal fast. Such ;e::re:~::e:arate ~rom ~his one-week preLeViticus, in the context f ppear 10 Ongen's Homilies on

. a remarks con .

hon of penitent apostaste . B Cern10g the reconcilia-Epistle (c. 305), and in th: ~neter of A!exandria's Canonical the earliest document de ' d fons of HlppolytllS (c. 336-340)

nve rom th A' '

e postollc Tradition:

LENT IN CHRISTIAN ANTIQUITY

(Origen, Hom. in Lev., X.2): They fast, therefore, who have lost the bridegroom; we having him with us cannot fast. Nor do we say that we relax the restraints of Christian abstinence; for we have the forty days consecrated to fasting, we have the fourth and sixth days of the week, on which we fast solemnly.31

(Peter of Alexandria, Canon 1): for they did not come to this of their own will, but were betrayed by the frailty of the flesh; for they show in their bodies the marks of Jesus, and some are now, for the third year, bewailing their fault: it is sufficient, I say, that from the time of their submissive approach, other forty days should be enjoined upon them, to keep them in remembrance of these things; those forty days during which, though our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ had fasted, He was yet, after He had been baptized, tempted by the devil. And when they shall have, during these days, exercised themselves much, and constantly fasted, then let them watch in prayer, meditating upon what was spoken by the Lord to him who tempted Him to fall down and worship him: 'Get behind me, Satan; for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve.>32

(Canons of Hippolytus 20): The fast days which have been fixed are Wednesday, Friday, and the Forty. He who adds to this list will receive a reward, and whoever diverges from it, except for illness, constraint, or necessity, transgresses the rule and disobeys God

who fasted on our behalp3

While in two of these sources the forty days of fasting are explicitly related to Jesus' own post-baptismal temptation in the desert, none of them speak of this period in relationship to either Pascha or to baptism. It would be very difficult, therefore, to interpret these "forty days" as clearly referring to a period connected to a pre-paschal forty-day Lent in Egypt. Might they, however, be references to a unique and early Alexandrian custom and season? Talley certainly believes so, and after a detailed analysis of admittedly later Egyptian liturgical Sources, concludes that this unique and early Alexandrian forty-day fast soon became a forty-day pre-baptismal fast for

MAXWELL E. JOHNSON 46 th day after Epiphany (January 6), catechumens begun onthe baptism of Jesus. Following the

h' h celebrate d e . .

a feast w IC I f Mark-the Gospel tradlhonally

i Y of the Gospe 0 . "

c rono og Ch h of Alexandria-this fastmg penod

. d 'th the urc

associate WI d I t r with the solemn celebration of bap

concluded forty ays a e . h

. . I' ht f Canon 1 of Peter of Alexandna, per aps

tlsm and, 10 Ig 0 with the reconciliation of penitents. . t' wl'th baptism a passage was read from a now

In conJunc Ion .

f Mark (the Mar Saba Clementme Frag-

Iost secret G0 spel O

0 0 •

ment),34 which describes an initiation nte admlDlstered by

Jesus himself to an unnamed Lazarus-like figure whom J~sus

had raised from the dead six days earlier in Bethany. And, It is

important to note, the next chapter in Markan sequence (Mark

11) describes Jesus' "Palm Sunday" entrance into Jerusalem.

IfTaIIey is correct, the "forty days" of Lent ultimately have an

Alexandrian origin. At the same time, this post-Epiphany

practice at Alexandria would also explain the Constanti

nopolitan custom of baptism on Lazarus Saturday as well as

the use of Lazarus Saturday and Palm Sunday to distinguish

and separate Lent from Great Week.35

The question remains, however: How does this Alexandrian forty-day post-Epiphany baptismal-preparation fast become the pre-paschal Lent? For this there is no clear or easy answer. Coquin thinks that Lent became a universal forty-day pre-paschal period as the result of the Council of Nicea's determination of the calculation to be employed for the annual celebration of Easter throughout the church.36 The sudden post-Nicene un~versal emergence of the forty days of pre-paschal preparatIOn for Easter and for baptism at Easter does suggest that the Nicene settlement included this prefer;~~e for Easter baptism. This preference was now seemingly

o. o~edo everywhere except at Alexandria which althou h shlftmg Its traditional forty-day period t' , gtion in order to co f 0 a pre-paschalloca

continued to celeb:a~r~ ge~era~ly to the rest of the church, forty-day period, first on ci~:: It.self at the very end of this the addition of another k Fnday, and second, because of beginning of Lent on th w;eod of fasting later attached to the , e n ay before Holy Week. A vestige

LENT IN CHRISTIAN ANTIQUITY

of this tradition continues in the Coptic Church today, where baptisms are not allowed between Palm Sunday and Pente

37 COSt.

When, after Nicea, the forty days of Lent became attached to pre-paschal preparation throughout the churches of the ancient world, different manners of calculating the actual duration of this season were employed. This resulted in both the differing lengths of Lent and the different fasting practices during Lent within the various churches, which caused Socrates to express his surprise that all of them, nonetheless, used the terminology of "forty days" to refer to this period. In Rome, for example, the forty days began on the sixth Sunday before Easter (called Quadragesima) and thus, including the traditional pre-paschal two-day fast on Good Friday and Holy Saturday, lasted for a total of forty-two days. Since Roman practice did not know fasting on Sundays, the total number of fast days was actually thirty-six. Only much later, with the addition of four fast days beginning on the Wednesday before Quadragesima (later called Ash Wednesday because of the penitential practices which came to be associated with it), does Roman practice come to know an actual forty-day Lenten fast before Easter.38

Like Rome, Alexandria (as witnessed to by Athanasius's Festal Letters of 330 and 340)39 also originally adopted a sixweek Lenten period before Easter (including Holy Week). However, with no fasting on either Saturdays or Sundays in this tradition, there was a total of only thirty fast days before the fast of Holy Saturday. As indicated above, a week was added to the beginning of this period, bringing the total to thirty-five days of fasting. Ultimately, even another week was added so that an actual forty-day fast, an eight-week inclusive Lent before Easter, resulted.4o

While other liturgical sources for Jerusalem, Antioch, and

Constantinople suggest a six-week Lent with five fast days in

each week, concluding on the Friday before Lazarus Satur

day and Palm Sunday, the Spanish pilgrim Egeria claims that

Jerusalem knew a total eight-week pattern-a seven-week

Lent and the six-day fast of Great Week-in the late fourth

MAXWELL E. JOHNSON

t tement has often been dismissed as

century.41 AI.tho~gh ,~r s :xperiment that did not last,"43 or as

an . . T

fan ascetical commumty m Jerusalem

. ten fast one or two weeks before others

which began teen . 'd d b

tl've evidence has been PlOVI e y Frans

did 44 some compara , d ho argues in his recent study of John Chrysos

van de Paver ,w . u ./. the Statues that fourth-century AntIOch also

tom's nonu les on 45 knew a similar eight-week Lenten pattern. " However Lent came to be calculated and orgamzed m these various Christian traditions after Nicea, it is clear that this "forty days" was understood eventually as ~ time for the final preparation of catechumens for Easter baptism, for the preparation of those undergoing public penance for reconciliation on or before Easter (on the morning of Holy Thursday in Roman practice), and for the pre-paschal preparation of the whole Christian community in general. Basing his com

ments primarily upon the mid-fifth-century Lenten sermons of Leo I, Patrick Regan summarizes this focus in the following manner:

The purpose and character of Lent are entirely derived from the great festival for which it prepares. The Pasch is not only an annual celebration of the passion and passage of Christ, but it is for Christians of the fourth and fifth centuries the yearly reminder ~f their own incorporation into the paschal event through baptism. Consequently the approach of the Pasch renews in the memory of all the faithful their commitment to live the new life of him who for their sake was crucified, buried, and raised. But it also

accuses them of their failure to do so.... 46

Only in the late fifth century and b '..

tiation comes to I h eyond, When IOfant Im

rep ace t at of adult th ff' "

about the extinction f th ' us e ectIvely bnngmg tern of public pena 0 . e catechumenate, and When the sys

. " nce IS replaced by th f

mdlvldual confession a d b e arm of repeatable

n a solution d h

take on the sale character of ' .0 t e forty days then the events of Holy 11.1 k preparatIOn of the faithful for

~ vvee and the cel b .

Locus-extremely p ·t. e ration of Easter. Such a

ell! entiaI, and' .

onented m character and

LENT IN CHRISTIAN ANTIQUITY

iety toward the "passion of Jesus," with little attention given fa the period's baptismal and catechumenal origins-has tended to shape the interpretation and practice of the "forty days" of Lent until the present day.47

Conclusion: The Origins of Lent

The season of Lent as it developed into a pre-paschal preparation period of "forty days" for catechumens, pentitents, and Christian faithful within the fourth-century post-Nicene context has multiple and complicated origins. While the development of the six-day pre-paschal fast may have played some role in its initial formation, what evidence there is suggests that this particular fast, although important for the origins of Holy Week, is separate and distinct from that which came to be understood, properly speaking, as Lent. In other words, the traditional theory that the forty days of Lent merely reflect the historically-oriented backwards extension of the six-day prepaschal fast in an attempt to closely assimilate those preparing for Easter baptism to Jesus' post-baptismal forty-day desert fast is highly questionable, if not clearly wrong. As we have seen, current scholarship argues that such historical assimilation of the forty days to the fast of Jesus was already present before Nicea within, at least, the Alexandrian liturgical tradition, although originally it had no relationship either to Pascha or to baptism at all. But as a fasting period already in place in this tradition, it suitably became pre-baptismal in orientation because baptismal preparation necessarily included fasting as one of its major components.48 Then when paschal baptism, interpreted in the light of a Romans 6 baptismal theology, became the normative ideal after Nicea, this Alexandrian postEpiphany pattern could become the pre-paschal Lenten pattern. It may be said, therefore, that the sudden emergence of the forty-day Lenten season after Nicea represents a harmonizing and standardizing combination of different, primarily initiatory practices in early, pre-Nicene Christianity. These practices consisted of:

MAXWELL E. JOHNSON 50 . . rt -da post-Epiphany fast in the Alexan_

1. an ongmal ~o Yl Yassociated with Jesus' own post

d ' traditiOn a rea .

na~ f '. the desert which, as a fastmg period

baptismal ast m ' . f

. I became the suitable time or the pre-

already m pace, . baptismal preparation of catechumens, k Preparation of catechumens for Easter

2 h .

the tree-wee ., . . ' the Roman and North Afncan traditIOns; and

baptism m .

3. the three-week preparation of c~tech~mens for baptism

elsewhere either on a different hturglcal feast or on no specified occasion whatsoever.

After Nicea-and probably as the result of Nicea-these

practices all became "paschalized" as the pre-Easter Lenten

Quadragesima, although in Alexandria itself this paschaliza

tion process, as we have seen, was only partially successful and

left the celebration of baptism itself separate from the cele

bration of Easter.

The conjectural nature of scholarship on Lent must be kept

in mind and so received with due caution. However, if cur

rent scholarship, represented primarily by Talley, is correct, the

origins of what becomes "Lent" have very little to do with

Eas~er at all..Rat?er, those origins have to do both with early

fastJ?g practlce.s m general and with the final preparation of

baptismal candidates, whenever their baptisms might be cele

brated. Greater awareness of these origins may serve today

as a necessary corrective to the "passion" orientation noted

abo:e, .that still tends to characterize and shape contem~orary

Chnstlan Lenten observance.

NOTES

1. See Adolf Adam, The Litur ical . . after the Reform o~the L 't (g Year. Its HlStory and Meaning

D' ~ I urgy New Yo k 198 )

IX, The Shape of the Litur (L r , 1 , pp. 91 ff.; Gregory Reg~n, "Th~ Three Days a;I theo~:on, 1945),', pp. 34~-60; Patrick 2-18, and PIerre Jounel, "The Year" ~ty Days, WorshIp 54 (1980): Church at Prayer vol. 4 (Colle . ' In A.-G. Martimort, ed., The

2. Dix, The Shape o~th Lg~vdle, 1986), pp. 65-72.

~ e llurgy, p. 354.

LENT IN CHRISTIAN ANTIQUITY

Thomas Talley, The Origins ofthe Liturgical Year, 2d ed. (Collegeville, 1986); and "Th~.Origin Of. Lent at Alexandria," in idem, Worship: Reforming TraditIOn (Washmgton, D.C., 1990), pp. 87-112.

See Talley, Origins ofthe Liturgical Year, and Paul F. Bradshaw, "The Origins of Easter," in volume 5 of this series.

Talley, Origins of the Liturgical Year, pp. 176-214. See also idem, "The Origin of Lent at Alexandria," pp. 97-108.

Although Apostolic Tradition 20 refers to a Friday and Saturday (?) fast for those who are to be baptized at the close of a Saturday night vigil, it does not specifically relate either the pre-baptismal fast, baptism, or the vigil to Pascha. Hippolytus of Rome himself certainly knew paschal baptism but there is no evidence that the compilers of Apostolic Tradition, whoever they may have been, did. On this, see Paul F. Bradshaw, The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship (New York, 1992), pp. 90, 174-78, and idem, "Re-dating the Apostolic Tradition: Some Preliminary Steps," in Nathan Mitchell and John Baldovin, eds., Rule ofPrayer, Rule ofFaith: Essays in Honor ofA idan Kavanagh, 0. S. B. (Collegeville, 1996), pp. 3-17.

7. Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, pp.348-53.

8. Robert Taft, "Historicism Revisited," in idem, Beyond East and West: Problems in Liturgical Understanding (Washington, D.C., 1984), pp. 15-30; John Baldovin, The Urban Character of Christian Worship (Rome, 1987), pp. 90-93.

See Bradshaw, Search for the Origins of Christian Worship, pp. 65-67.

10.

Historia Ecclesiastica 5.22.

11.

The Festal Letters of S. Athanasius (Oxford, 1854), p. 100.

12.

Ep. 24.4 (PL 22:428).

13.

PL 13.1131-1147.

14. See Antoine Chavasse, "La structure du Careme et les lectures des messes quadragesimales dans la liturgie romaine," La Maison-Dieu 31 (1952): 76-120; "La preparation de la Pllque,a Rome, avant Ie Ve siecle. JeOne et organisation liturgique," in Memorial 1 Chaine (Lyon, 1950), pp. 61-80; and "Temps de preparation a la Paque, d'apres quelques livres liturgiques romains," Recherches de Science religieuse 37 (1950), pp. 125-45. For a more detailed summary and discussion of Chavasse's work, see M. E. Johnson, "From Three Weeks to Forty Days: Baptismal Preparation and the Origins .of Lent," Studia Liturgica 20 (1990): 185-200; reprinted in idem,ed.,Llving Water, Sealing Spirit: Readings on Christian Initiation (Collegeville, 1995), pp. 118-36.

MAXWELL E. JOHNSON

h t the series of Johannine readings dur

15. Chavasse note~sto:Lent in early Roman lectionaries and in ing the last three wee R nl began with John 4:5-32 on the Fri

. . M'ssale omantl

the Tndentme I ason however it placed John 9:1-38

f L t II I For some re , ,

day 0 en . IV) d John 11:1-45 (Friday of Lent IV) be

(Wednesday of Lent an 0.22 38 (UT

d Yof Lent V), and John 1 . -vvednes

fore John 8:46-59 (Sun a . . ).

·th the contlDuatlOn of John 11 (47-54 on the Fn

day of Lent V), WI •

th·s basis he attempted to reconstruct an earher

day of Lent V. 0 n I . h· .J hannl·ne series which he beheved would have corre

shape for t IS 0 '... . . sponded to the three missae pro sc~utmlls m t~e Gelaslan ~acramentary. According to his reconstruction, John 4.5-32, John ~.1-38, and John 11:1-54 would have been read, respectively, on the thud, fourth, and fifth Sundays in Lent in the time of Leo the Great. Even so, at an earlier stage of development this would have constituted a short lectionary series for the Sundays of an original three-week Lenten period, including Holy Week. The reason that this series of readings appears in a different sequence in later Roman sources, according to Chavasse, is due to the fact that the baptismal scrutinies along with their readings became shifted to weekdays (ultimately, seven in number) in the later Roman tradition. Thanks to the work of Chavasse, this is precisely the sequence of Sunday gospel readings assigned to the third, fourth, and fifth Sundays in Lent in Series A of the current Roman Lectionary. To these Sundays have been attached the three scrutinies of adult catechumens in the current Roman Rite of Christian Initiation ofAdults.

16. Talley, Origins ?fthe Liturgical YeQ/; p. 167.

17. M. F. Lages, "Etapes de I'evolution du Careme a Jerusalem avan: I~ Ve siecle. Essai d'analyse structurale," Revue des Etudes Armenzennes 6 (1969): 67-102· and I·dem "The H· l ·t· O ·

. f ' ,leroso yml am n rn1~6;~e Catechetical Rites in the Armenian Liturgy," D idaskalia ( ).233-50. See also M E Johnson "Reco ·1· C ·1 d

. .., nCI mg yn an

Egena on the Catechetical P .

. P I rocess 10 Fourth-Century Jerusalem "

In au F. Bradshaw ed Essa . E ' Notts 1988) pp 24' 26·' t' ys In arly Eastern Initiation (Bramcote,

., ,. -ror the A . L .

Renoux Le Codex . . rmeDIan ectlOnary see Athanase

, armenzen J,' I

18. E. C. Whitaker D erusa em 121, vol. 2 (Turnhout, 1971).

, ocuments ofthe B t· I·

1970), p. ~O [emphasis added]. ap (sma Liturgy (London,

, 19. Michel Tarschnischvili Le . , Jerusalem vol 1 (Lo . ' grand lectlonnaire de I' Eglise de

,. uvalO,1959),. 68

20.

See Johnson, "From Three p .

21.

Whitaker, Docume Weeks to Forty Days," pp. 191-93. nts of the Baptismal Liturgy, p. 227.

LENT IN CHRISTlAN ANTlQUITY

53 \

22.

Lawrence A. Hoffman, "The Great Sabbath and Lent: Jewish Origins?" in this volume. \

23.

Ibid., p. 29.

24. Talley, Origins ofthe Liturgical Year, p. 167.

25.

See Gabriele Winkler, Das armenische Initiationsrituale (Rome, 1982), pp. 437-38; and idem, "The Original Meaning of the Prebaptismal Anointing and its Implications," Worship 52 (1978): 24-45.

26.

See Talley, Origins of the Liturgical Year, pp. 189, 203-14.

27.

Ibid., p. 167.

28.

Paul F. Bradshaw, "'Diem baptismo sollemniorem': Initiation and Easter in Christian Antiquity," in E. Carr, S. Parenti, and A. A. Thiermeyer, eds., Eulogema: Studies in Honor of Robert Taft, S. 1 (Rome, 1993), pp. 41-51; reprinted in Johnson, Living Water, Sealing Spirit, pp. 137-47.

29. Talley, Origins of the Liturgical Year, p.168.

30.

A. Baumstark, Comparative Liturgy (London, 1958), p. 194; R.-G. Coquin, "Une Reforme liturgique du concile de Nicee (325)?" in Comptes Rendus, Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-lettres (Paris, 1967), pp. 178-92.

31.

English translation from Talley, Origins ofthe Liturgical Year,

p. 192 [emphasis added].

32.

English translation from Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 6 (New York, 1925), p. 269 [emphasis added].

33.

English translation from Paul Bradshaw, ed., The Canons of

Hippolytus (Bramcote, Notts., 1987), p. 25 [emphasis added].

34.

See Morton Smith, Clement ofAlexandria and a Secret Gospel

of Mark (Cambridge, 1973). The passage is between the canonical

Mark 10:34 and 10:35.

35.

In all fairness, it must be noted that Talley's theory is based

less on available early Alexandrian evidence and more on a hypo

thetical reconstruction of early Alexandrian practice discerned from

the Markan sequence of gospel readings for the Saturdays and Sun

days of Lent in the later Byzantine Lenten lectionary. In the Byzan

tine lectionary this Markan sequence is followed until Lazarus Sat

urday, when the reading given is John 11, the "canonical" version, in Talley's opinion, of the account narrated between Mark 10:34 and

10:35 in the Mar Saba Clementine Fragment. See Talley, Origins ofthe Liturgical Year, pp. 194 ff ..

36. Coquin, "Une Reforme liturgique du concile de Nicee (325)?" Pp. 178-92.

MAXWELL E. JOHNSON

"Baptismal Practice in the Alexandrian

37. See Paul F. Br~~~haw, ? " in idem, Essays in Early Eastern lnid· ' .Eastern or vvestern. S r S ··

Tra ItlOn. . ted in Johnson, Living Water, ea mg pmt, pp.

tiarion, pp.5-10; repnn

82-100. "The Three Days and the Forty Days," PP·11-15.

38. See Regan, s. Athanasius pp. 21, 100; as cited by Talley

39.

Festal Letters 0 1· ' , Origins of the Liturgical Year, pp. ~69-~O. .

40.

See Talley, Origins ofthe Liturgical Yem, p.219.

41.

Peregrinatio Egeriae 46:1-4. .

42. A. A. Stephenson, "The Lenten Cat.echetlcal Syllabus in Fourth-Century Jerusalem," Theological Studies 15 (1954): 11.6.

43.

Baldovin, Urban Character of Christian Worship, p. 92, n. 37.

44.

See Talley, Origins of the Liturgical Yem; p. 174.

45.

F. Van De Paverd, St. John Chrysostoln, The Homilies on the Statues (Rome, 1991), pp. xxiii, 210-16, 250-54, 358,361.

46.

Regan, "The Three Days and the Forty Days," pp. 6-7.

47.

Among contemporary Roman Catholics and some Episcopalians,for example, the devotional exercise of the Stations of the Cross is frequently held on the Fridays during Lent. And among Lutherans, in my experience, the Lenten tradition of midweek worship often focuses on the medieval devotion of the so-called Seven Last Words of Jesus from the Cross or includes each week a partial reading of the Passion narrative, often from sources which harmonize the four Gospel ~ccounts. Both practices can tend to turn Lent into a forty

day PassIOn Sunday or Good Friday.

48. That those preparing for baptism, as well as the whole community, were expected to fast as part of the immediate preparation for baptism is documented as early as Didache 7.4 (probably late

first-or early second-century Syria).

This essay will app . .

Ch " l'" ear 10 somewhat different form in The Rites of

rLSt/an mtlat/on' Their E I .

Johnson (forthco: Th v~ ult~n and Interpretation by Maxwell

mmg, e LIturgical Press).

----------------------.,

Lent in Perspective: A Summary Dialogue

LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN AND MAXWELL E. JOHNSON

Lawrence A. Hoffman:

Against my claim that Lent derives from the Jewish practice of pre-paschal preparation, Maxwell Johnson argues that only in the fourth century was Lent customarily associated with the Christian Pascha. Specifically, his claim is that: (1) With the exception of the practice remarked on by Socrates (fifth century), the three-week "Lent" is associated with baptism but not necessarily at Easter. (2) Prior to Nicea, baptism at Easter was at most a "preference" (to cite Bradshaw) generally limited to North Africa and Rome. (3) The three-week fast mentioned by Socrates was therefore likely not preparatory to Easter at all. Hence, (4) the Jewish model of preparing for Passover by cleaning oneself of leaven (that is, sin) is an improbable source for the Christian event called Lent, which had originally nothing to do with the Christian parallel to Passover (Easter).

On the other hand, Johnson notes several instances of a three-week fast beyond the ones of which I was aware, adding to the probability that the three-week Lenten system (which I claim to have been Jewish in origin) was central, not marginal, to early Christian custom. And as I have pointed out, the three-week fast was practiced (according to Lages) in Jerusalem, where we might anticipate the greatest degree of influence from the Palestinian rabbinic system.

Johnson observes, however, that Jerusalem aside (about which we have no certain evidence, after all, other than Lages' reconstruction of what was probable), the three-week period

A HOFFMAN AND MAXWELL E. JOHNSON

LAWRENCE .

. d North Africa is connected to Easter_

find In Rome an .

that we . ld anticipate. Still, other lenten tradItions

hypotheSIs wou . '

as my f Easter so that the eVIdence agamst a di

. ndependent 0 ,

were I . . lly from the Jewish pre-Passover system

rect takeover umvelsa .

fute It does seem more lIkely that the wide-

seems hard to re . . '

· n of the three-week penod leadmg up to Eas

scale conneet\0 . ter and its assignment of forty days occurred m the wake of the Nicean calendar. That would explain why only aft~r Nicea we find a pre-paschal Lent that has become normatIve; and also why Socrates and others question the number forty with regard to the alternative counting traditions that the various churches observed. They were all fitting their accepted and inherited customs into a procrustean bed of "forty " mandated by ... well, mandated by what? Mandated by Nicea, presumably. But again, why forty? Let us summarize the situation. There were churches (as in Egypt) that had a forty-day period before Nicea, and there were churches elsewhere that had a three-week period but did not name it "forty days." After Nicea everybody had a forty-day period and called it that, but the nature of the forty-day period varied. At first it included ~ays that were not allowed to be fasts-in some places (chiefly m the West) Sundays only, in others (chiefly in the East) Saturdays and Sundays. Only later was the period extended to produce forty days of actual fasting In add't' .

lace . . 1 lon, 10 some

p . s (the East, mamly) the period preceded "Great Week" and III others (th~ ~est, mainly), where this week did not exist

~::e~~a;~~a~~otnltY'hlt ranLright up to Holy Thursday. This pro-were ent appea d t b f' .

ration But th 'd re 0 e 0 dIffenng du

. e I ea of forty d 1

should ask where that'd lays oomed as the ideal, and we

. I ea came from

The Idea of forty da s wa . the forty days of tern;r s related to Jesus' baptism and

collected by Johnson asptah 10fin that followed. So say the texts

d· . e nal state

ltion going back thr h 11 ment of the scholarly tra-

Th aug alley to C .

~t does indeed explain th f oqum and Baumstark. Epiphany fast in Alexand . e arty-day pre-baptismal but postplain how or why the na and elseWhere. But it does not ex

same figu

re was attached to the post-

LENT IN PERSPECTIVE

Nicean fasts of various durations that preceded Easter, nor why forty days ought to be applied at all to the pre-paschal

period . In sum, I accept Johnson's point that at least some three-week catechumenate practices were associated not with Easter (as I mistakenly assumed) but with baptism at some other time. Still, he leaves unanswered two very important questions:

(1) Why the three-week period to begin with? Why come up arbitrarily with three weeks out of nowhere? And (2) why then apply the number forty to it? As much as the number forty fits a post-baptismal fast that is patterned after the forty days of Jesus' own temptation, it has nothing whatever to do with a pre-baptismal period.

It is Talley who originally discusses the forty-day period in question, and he answers my second question implicitly by arguing that the scriptural model of Jesus' fast following his own baptism at Epiphany was already a liturgical norm; forty days were already in place anyway. Only the rearrangement of baptism at its end rather than its beginning was novel. So far so good, at least in Alexandria, where Talley's primary data emerge. Now Alexandrian Judaism had little impact upon Palestinian Judaism, as we see from the vast gulf separating PhiIonic Judaism from the rabbinic system that eventually prevailed. Alexandrian Christianity, on the other hand, was a dominant influence upon the mother-country of Palestine. We should assume, therefore, a two-fold and contradictory stream of influence: from Egypt and from Palestine. From Egypt, we get a forty-day Alexandrian pre-baptismal fast that spread elsewhere, including to Palestine. It influenced all church practice eventually, in that the idea of a forty-day fast to precede baptism would be applied everywhere and (after Nicea) would actually be moved to the period prior to Easter. But we should admit the other direction of influence also: customs that began in Palestine, and then spread elsewhere, sometimes to Alexandria, sometimes not.

Among these, I argue, is an elemental three-week preparatory period to Pascha-Passover. My original assumption was that the Christian community took this over immediately as

A HOFFMAN AND MAXWELL E . JOHNSON LAWRENCE .

58 . Pascha. The process now seems more

. l'ntroductlOn to h .

Its own B t doing away with te necessary Imme.

lex than that. u '.

comp J 'sh pre-paschal preparatlOn penod to

d· t nsfer of a eWI . .

late .ra. re-aschal parallel is not eqUIvalent to solving a Chnstlan P p.. of Lent for we still have to explain the

the issue of the ongm , . h

. . . f a three-week penod, even a tree-week

Chnstlan adoptIOn 0 . .

. . , lly unassociated calendncally With the oe·

fast that IS ongma .

. 11 d Pascha but that did precede baptIsm.

caslOn ca e . k' d f h' k'

· 'th a reconsideratIOn of the 10 0 t 10 109 en·

I begm WI . "

tailed by the application of the n~mber forty. What IS stnkmg

is the way in which it is so readIly. tra~s~osed upon customs

that did not number forty days. It IS biblical, so the ke~ may

lie in the scriptural usage that church and synagogue mher

ited. On the face of it, forty is just a round number, perhaps

a standard scriptural designation for the number of days or

years entailed in a given paradigmatic experience. The spies

take forty days to scout the land of Canaan, for instance (Num.

13:25); similarly, "the land had rest for forty years" between

the time that Othniel conquered the Arameans and "the chil

dren of Israel again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord"

(Judg. 3:11). The flood lasts forty days and forty nights as well

(Gen. 7:17; 8:6). These may well just mean "a long time."

But elsewhere, forty measures the coming of age of a gen

eration, in that it describes the time entailed in the forma

tive event that makes the generation what it is. Most frequently

cited in this regard is the generation of wandering precipitated

by the desert rebellion against Moses; it lasts forty years (Num.

14:33; 32:13; Deut. 2:7, 8:2,4; Deut. 29:4; Josh. 5:6).

Forty is also the number of days Moses ascends the moun

tain (Exod. 24:18; 34:28) and the time he takes to entreat God

to pardon the sin of the Golden Calf (Deut. 9:25). And it is the

age ?f maturity, the time to grow up and take responsibility

for l,.fe. Esau gets married when he turns forty (Gen. 26:34),

as dId Isaac (Gen 25'20) d J h . , an as ua was forty years old when

Moses appointed him to spy out the Land (Josh 14'10) Even

after death occu 't t k . . .

. . rs, 1 a es forty days to be embalmed and pass, as It were, IOta the land of the dead (Ge 50'3) There are other exampl t b n. . .

es 00, ut they all have this in corn-

T n..T PERSPECTIVE

LEN ll' 59

They are liminal events, betwixt and between periods of

man. f .

. g from stage to stage or 0 prepanng for a task or of tak

passm ".

. time out of life to go mto secluslOn. The mid rash (Lev. Rab.

1~~12) even associates forty days with the length of time it takes

: . the embryo to take on specific personality. We can say that J~~s and Christians of the first century inherited a tradition in which the round number of forty functioned to signify a period of growth, decay, change, change-over, or preparation, for . dividuals and for entire peoples or even humankind at large. 10 That Jesus would be tempted forty days after his baptism is altogether appropriate, t~erefore: it ~s his lix,ninal instance par excellence, his own commg of age, If you hke. He passes the trials common to liminal events described in anthropological literature the world over. That preparation for baptism would

be called forty days is likewise to be expected-regardless of how many days people actually spent in fast and catechesis: naming something forty and expecting the actual count to be forty were two different things. Much ink has been spilled wondering how diverse Lenten traditions that were not forty days long could have been so labeled-as indeed, Socrates himself wonders as early as the fifth century. We must imagine that by Socrates' time, literalism had overcome the earlier symbolic use of language, at least in Socrates' circle. We can pardon him, however. It is a little harder to pardon us for ex

pecting the same sort of literal tally between a term "forty" and the actual number of days that made it up. It is fruitless to search out an original period of forty days; and equally foolish to imagine that if we can find one fast of actually forty days (or even named forty days), that fast must be the Urfast so to speak, the original fast whence the others came into being. Far more likely, any fast could be named a forty-day event; only later, by the fifth century, and in Hellenistic circles where literalism of numerical computation ruled, did people insist on coming up with an actual count that added to forty.

More important than the details of the forty-day Lent is the principle of applying a numerical model to an actual event ~n~ calling something forty when it is clearly more or less: thiS IS a kind of typology. We are accustomed to theological typology,

A HOFFMAN AND MAXWELL E. JOHNSON

LAWRENCE .

theological models drawn from the Hefor example, the wayI t events in the Christian narrative

b Bible frame a er b ·

rew . lode of thinking extends eyond theo-But the typolOglica mbe numerical. Forty is thus a numerical logical bounds. t can , " . h

th t means "getting ready ' or passmg trough

type anumber a . . . .

. ' b plI·ed to any event that IS a preparatIon or a

tnal." It can e ap

trial. d k t I .

I argued in my original article that ~tes can wor ypo OgIcally. I see no way to avoid the conclUSIOn that t?e Gre~t Sa?bath was such a date. According to John, Jesus dIed on It, so In Johannine tradition, it became the "date" on which martyrs ought to die. The martyrs Polycarp and Pionius die on the Great Sabbath, a hundred years apart and in the dead of winter,nowhere near the Passover season when the Jewish Great Sabbath occurs (if indeed there even was such a Sabbath in the first few Christian centuries-Israel Yuval argues that there was not). Dates like the Great Sabbath are like tallies of years (forty, in our case); they provide associational frames of reference in which to conceptualize experience. They do not necessarily record historical or numerical fact.

Johnson's detailed review of the fact that the pre-baptismal fast of three weeks occurred after Epiphany, not before Easter implies that there is no connection between it and the three~ week preparation for Passover only if one insists on a perfect agreemen~ of dates, as numerical realism would demand. The re~1 questIon ought to be whether any typoLogical equivalence eXIsted between baptism (whenever it occurred) and Pass~ver-:-an.d of course there is. Christ is the Passover for which

aptIsm IS the entry It culm· t· ..' .

th t f . .. lOa es 10 euchanstic commumon

a UnctIOns 10 the same way th t P

that the sede I· h a a assover seder does, in

r re Ives t e saving t f h . .

lamb Rabbinic t d·· even 0 t e ongmal paschal

. ra Ihon demands p

the latter ChrI·stI·a t d·. reparatory cleansing for

, n ra Ihon de d ·

both cases we have a th m~n s It for the former. In

ree-week penod fl· · ..

preparing. 0 Immal waIting and

. .1 suggest, therefore, that the . IS mdeed partly answered b solutIOn ~o the origin of Lent forty-day COunt only after ~.Johnson: hIS data do indicate a Icea, and an earlier tradition in

LENT IN PERSPECfIVE

h· h baptismal preparation was not necessarily connected to

W IC .. f h "h

t r at all. But the ongm 0 t e tree weeks" remains elu-

Eas e , h· ·d d d

. even with Johnson s t eSls sal an one. Where did it

SIve, .

e from? We know too httle to say for sure, but we do know ~~~ similar period in rabbinic tradition, .alive and well in Jerusalem where the nascent church was takmg root. Thus, at this stage of our knowledge, th~ m~st prob~bl~ s?lution is still a direct borrowing from JudaIsm mto ChnstIamty, but along ty

ologicallines. Preparation for the Passover emerges as prepa~ation for entry into the church and participation in Christ, the Passover for Christians.

We reconstruct events in the following way:

The scriptural tradition of a fast by Jesus after his own baptism developed into a liturgical fast prior to baptism. The number forty was borrowed from the scriptural model. In actual fact, however, two kinds of borrowing should be differentiated: chronoLogicaL and typoLogicaL. Since the liturgical fast occurred when the original one had taken place (both after Epiphany), it is a case of chronoLogicaL borrowing-in this case, from the life of Jesus to the life of the church.

Altogether separately, in Palestine, Jews had adopted a custom of preparing for Passover by a lectionary cycle that emphasized approximately three weeks as a time of washing oneself clean of the leaven of sin. A second borrowing now occurred, first in Palestine and then elsewhere (albeit not, apparently, in Alexandria). Christians adopted the three-week period from Judaism, but they applied it typoLogicaLLy, not chronologically. As three weeks of preparation prepared the Jew for participation in the paschal meal, so three weeks of preparation prepared the Christian for baptism into the church and subsequent participation in the eucharistic meal of the faithful. Chronological borrowing was prohibited by the fact that baptism was already calendrically fixed according to criteria other than its having to occur at Passover time. But typology was still possible: a three-week cleansing period prior to the Christian ideational equivalent of Passover: baptism and eucharistic communion. It was simply celebrated at a time other than the original springtime period that Jews observed.

A HOFFMAN AND MAXWELL E. JOHNSON LAWRENCE •

62 t was therefore moved to whatever time a

The three-wee k fas . ' .

. h h ustomarily used for Its catechettcal culmi

particular c urc c

nation. . J h

es retains the three weeks, Just as 0 nson says, ast

Socra . S' d h G

the Second Council of Braga m pam, an t e eorgian

does . ' f

and Armenian lectionaries. But then respectIve asts have been moved to the appropriate baptismal occasion of the church in question. The idea of three weeks is Jewish; the theology of their preparing the catechumen for entry into the mysteries of Christ is a Christianization of the Jewish idea that preparation is needed for the mysteries of Passover. Only the placement of the preparatory period is novel. The new calendration was necessitated by the prior fixing of baptism at other times; but what made it possible was the mode of thinking called typology.

3. A second level of typological interpretation was also occurring. If the adaptation of the Jewish preparatory threeweek period to a Christian one is the first typological consideration, the second was the imposition of a forty-day schema upon a period that was not really forty days at all. No matter ho~ long the period of catechesis really lasted, it was seen as t~k~ng forty ?~ys, because of the association of forty with the hmm,al tranSItion to new status, especially given the model of

Jesus own forty-day fast.

4. Finally, we have the post-Nice a chronological culmination :0 t~e wh.ole ~rocess. Chronology eventually matches typo

~dgy· baptism. IS moved to Easter, and what is now Lent coin-CI es calendflcally with th J . .

The original three-wee e . ew~sh preparatIOn for Passover. it had begun alth h bk peflo.d IS thus moved back to where The number' fort~~oUl~ ~~:It had ceased being three weeks. but literally so that Le t be taken not only typologically

, n was now fig d

one way or anothe ure out to last forty days,

Maxwell E. Johnson:

I a . d

m, In eed, most grateful to careful and critical res Lawrence Hoffman for his

ponse to my essay and for this opportu-

LENT IN PERSPECTIVE

nity to clarify some 'details and to pursue some of these questions further. As he seems to indicate toward the end of his response, it may be that .both of us are basically correct in our approaches to .the matenal, ~r that the truth lies more in a synthesis of our VIews. Alternatively, of course, it may be that both of us are completely wrong. Nevertheless, there are four point I wish to make by way of brief response in the hope that other: might find from my essay, Hoffman's response, and this response, some kind of starting point for further research on the

origins and evolution of Lent.

1. As I noted in my essay, since Rome (Hippolytus, but not ApostoLic Tradition) and North Africa (Tertullian) did have a preference for Easter baptism from early on, the three-week period of preparation for baptism, witnessed to in the later liturgical sources from those traditions, certainly may be understood as a kind of primitive pre-paschal "Lent." And, if Mario F. Lages is correct in his analysis, three weeks of catechesis prior to Easter baptism may have been the practice also in Jerusalem. In this case, at least, Hoffman's claim that the three-week period of "washing oneself clean of the leaven of sin" prior to Passover in Palestinian Judaism may, indeed, be functioning as a source for Christian practice. I shall leave it up to Hoffman, however, to demonstrate just how formative and widespread these three weeks of preparation actually were within Palestinian Judaism itself. In other words, are these

three weeks a well-known and documented ritual practice in early Judaism or a conjecture based on one textual reference in a lectionary coming from a much later time period?

2. As much as I think Hoffman is correct to point to typology in the calculation of Lent, I have a problem with his particular application of Passover typology in this context. It is well known that when Socrates refers to "three weeks" of preparation in the Roman tradition as the "forty days," he is ~rong for his own fifth-century context. By that time Rome Itself was keeping a Lent of six weeks. If Chavasse and Talley are correct, however, Socrates' three-week reference is important because it may reflect the remnant of an earlier Roman pattern of preparation. Similarly, it should be noted that, apart

A HOFFMAN AND MAXWELL E. JOHNSO~

LAWRENCE .

. h e is no evidence to support the notion that fro~ t~IS tex~, ~v:;re referred to this three-week period typo. Ch~lstIans ay "f rty days." And, nowhere is it stated that the

logically as teO d f E·

. 1ft of three weeks occurre a ter Plphany"

"re-baptlsma as . . . Phi I·turgical traditIOn that seems to have known

Rather t e on y I . h·' I·k a forty-day period for baptismal preparation be.

anyt 109 Ie . . N· as I·n Egypt or Alexandna, and there It was can.

fore Icea w "

nected not to Easter but to Epiphany! These forty days," of

urse were understood typologically, but the typological ref.

:~ent \~as not Pascha. In the Egyptian tradition this forty-day

pre-baptismal fast was related not to Jesus'. death and resur.

rection but rather to the forty-day temptation he underwent

after the declaration of his identity at his baptism in the

Jordan by John. As far as we can tell, the association of this

"forty-day" period (already assimilated typologically in Egypt

with Jesus' temptation) with pre-paschal preparation comes

about only in the context of Nicea, after which we see through

out the East both "Lent" as a season before Easter and a

marked preference for Easter baptism. At that point, Hoffman

is absolutely correct in pointing to the typological use of

"forty" in biblical texts and elsewhere as a way of explaining

the divergent calculations of this "forty days" throughout the

churches.

3. Closely related to my second point, it is important to unders~ore the theological diversity within the early Christian liturgical traditions. Hoffman says that "the real question ought

to be whether any t I . L· .

. ypo oglca eqUivalence eXisted between

baptism (whenever ·t d)

. I occurre and Passover-and of course therfe IS. Chri.st is the Passover, f.or which baptism is the entry."

As ar as this goes H ff .

. ,oman IS correct. But I should like torespond by saym th .

1 . g at pnor to Nicea, PaUl's "Passover" the-

o ogy of baptism as arf· . .

tion of Jesus (R P6IClpatlOn 10 the death and resurrec

omans :3-12) .

minor role As co t seems to have played a relatively

. n emporary sch I (

Gabriele Winkler and K T 0 ars e.g., Georg Kretschmar, the dominant the~lo . II ~an McDonnell) have demonstrated,

glca mterpretat· f .. .

t roughout the Ch · . Ion 0 Chnstlan baptism

nstIan East

the synoptic aCCOunts of J came not from Paul but from

esus' ow b .

n aptlsm by John and from the imagery of John 3:5 (i.e., baptism as "new birth" in water

nd the Holy Spirit). Christian baptism, therefore, was not a a aschal "death ritual" but a ritual of "new birth" and "adopfion," a spiritual assimilation to the one who was declared the messianic "son" and "servant" at the Jordan and upon whom the Spirit descended. Such is clearly the theological interpretation of baptism within Egypt (ct. both Clement and Origen of Alexandria, who see Christian baptism as "crossing the Jordan") and among the early Semitic-speaking Christians of (East) Syria, and it is discernible within the later liturgical documents of the non-Roman western liturgical traditions of Gaul and Spain. Without a Passover or Easter interpretation of Christian baptism as we find in Romans 6, it is only logical to expect that Easter itself would not be the preferred occasion for baptism in these traditions. In other words, it is no surprise that if any annual feast were chosen as the prime occasion for baptism, it would be related to Epiphany, that is, the feast of Jesus' own baptism. For that matter, in spite of Lages, we simply do not know when the church at Jerusalem began to celebrate baptism at Easter. Prior to the catecheses of Cyril (or John) of Jerusalem in the mid-to late fourth century, we have absolutely no evidence upon which to build such a case. Nevertheless, these traditions, with the exception

of Egypt, also seem to know of an early practice of a threeweek period of preparation. But without a standing of baptism operating even within a Semitic group like the early Syrian Christians, why would a Jewish practice of three weeks of preparation for Passover even suggest itself as an option for a celebration unrelated to Passover? Again, the burden of proof for such an early Jewish connection or dependency would seem to depend on demonstrating that threeweek preparation periods for feasts in general within Judai~m were widely known and highly influential. While I would eaSily concede that three weeks of preparation for a feast in Judaism might lie somewhere behind Christian practice, I do not find the Passover argument theologically or typologically compelling.

4. Hoffman also wants to draw a

LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN AND MAXWELL E. JOHNSON

Christian eucharistic celebration and the Passover seder. lie writes: "It [baptism] culminates in eucharistic communion that functions in the same way that a Passover seder does, in that the seder relives the saving event of the original paschal lamb. Rabbinic tradition demands preparatory cleansing for the latter; Christian tradition demands it for the former. In both cases we have a three-week period of liminal waiting and preparing." Again, I find this to be a logical argument and conclusion in general. It should be noted, however, that Christian eucharistic celebration draws on much more than the important Passover connotations. In fact, interpreting the eucharist in a Passover context reflects the increasing paschalization of the meaning of Jesus within the early Christian communities, a paschalization best reflected, again, in Paul (i.e., "For Our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed"; 1 Cor. 5:7). But other elements need to be taken into account. For one example, eucharist early on comes to be celebrated weekly; it is not a once-a-year meal. Eucharist, then, is not the Christian equivalent to Passover; Easter is. For another example, the Passover context of the Last Supper of Jesus and the twelve in the synoptic Gospels needs to be balanced by the whole range of narratives describing Jesus' meal-companionship with "tax collectors and sinners" during his ministry and within the New Testament meal-context descriptions of his resurrection ap

pearances. Hoffman's argument for direct dependency on Jewish liturgical tradition works best only if baptism is related-even if

only typologically-to an annual Easter context from the very beginning. Ifthe diversity of occasions for baptism throughout e~rly Ch~istianity rests on an original typological connection with JeWish preparation for the Passover, this makes Passover the .U~type, an~ hence, the preferred interpretative model for Chnstlan baptism. Hoffman calls it in fact "the Christian ideational equivalent of Passover." B~t if the 'Jewish Passover and i~s prepa~ation are the dominant typologies for unders~an~lllg baptismal preparation, baptism, and its culmination III eucharistic communion, then it would be only logical to expect a marked preference for Easter baptism in the early

LENT IN PERSPECTIVE

churches from the very beginning as this "ideational equivalent" of Passover. The problem, however, is that there was no such early preference outside of third-century North Africa and Rome in the West and the late fourth century in the East (e.g., Cyril, John Chrysostom, and Theodore of Mopsuestia). Other early liturgical evidence we have from elsewhere seems to be based on a different baptismal typology, a different "ideational" focus altogether. Unless it can be demonstrated that this different baptismal typology is a corruption or aberration of an "original" Passover-Easter interpretative context, I simply cannot accept early Christian dependency upon a Jewish three-week period of preparation for Passover as the single answer to explain the diversity of baptismal prac

tice and theology which is encountered.

This does not mean, however, that I am in complete disagreement with the overall developmental model of Lent that Hoffman offers at the conclusion of his response. He is certainly correct in pointing out that what becomes Lent after Nicea reflects a synthesis of various patterns and traditions: the forty-day post-Epiphany period of Egypt, already associated with Jesus' temptation in the desert; the typological association of "forty" to however this period was calculated within the different Christian traditions; and the final calculation of this period to equal a litetal "forty days." What needs to be further developed, in my opinion, is his insistence on the Jewish origins of the three weeks of preparation for Easter baptism, and the implied "original" typological dominance of Passover-Easter within the baptismal theologies and practices of the early Christian communities. Indeed, such an original dominance is implied when he writes that after Nicea "the original three-week period is thus moved back to where it had begun." But had it ever moved away from this context in North Africa and Rome? And had it ever been there "originally" within other Christian traditions? North African, Roman, and, possibly, Jerusalem practice may support Hoffma~'s overall hypothesis. The diversity of early Christian practice an~ theology reflected elsewhere, where a three-week pattern ~ preparation is also discernable, however, calls this hypotheSIS

LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN AND MAXWELL E. JOHNSON

into question. Passover-Easter typology may explain it in part for some churches. But it certainly does not explain the domi_ nance of a Jordan-Epiphany typology in other places, even among those early Christians of strong Semitic background in Syria. Therefore, while I still find Hoffman's thesis appealing in that it provides an answer to "where" a three-week period of Christian baptismal or Easter preparation may have originated, I am not convinced that his is the answer or that the Jewish three-week period before Passover discerned by Hoffman is any more than a coincidence or conjecture.

PART 2

The Aftermath of Sacred Time:

From Passover/Easter to

Shavuot/Pentecost

From Passover to Shavuot

EFRAT ZARREN-ZOHAR

The seven-week period between Passover and Pentecost is known today in Judaism as the S'firat Ha'omer or the Days of the Counting of the Orner, "orner" being the biblical term for "sheaf." The period takes its name from the instructions in Leviticus 23:15 to count fifty days from the day when the first sheaf of barley is offered until the final celebration of the harvest, termed (in Deuteronomy 16:10) the Feast of Weeks (shavu 'ot). Greek-speaking Jews called Shavuot Pentecost since it occurred fifty days after the offering of the barley

sheaf. It is hard to imagine a set of scholarly problems more complex than those occasioned by the S'firat Ha'omer season. The various biblical accounts regarding this interval display a maddening lack of clarity, which in turn, lead to multiple traditions concerning the exact date when Shavuot should be celebrated. The well-documented Pharisaic ritual of reaping the first fruits of the barley harvest and presenting them at the Temple in Jerusalem necessarily disappears after the Temple's destruction in 70 C.E. Yet its liturgical replacement in post-Temple times remains a question mark for more than a thousand years owing to a dearth of detail in our extant sources. By the late Middle Ages, folk tradition had established many customs for the period, some of which have legitimate origins in antiquity and some of which do not. The difficulty, of course, is determining which are which. How and when did S'firah traditions arise? When did mourning customs begin to be associated with the season? And what is the role of Lag Ba'omer, the specially demarcated thirty-third day of the

EFRAT ZARREN-ZOIiAR.

d? These are some of the tangled questions which

. we will attempt to address below.

PASSOVER TO SHAVUOT IN THE BIBLICAL PERIOD

The Ecological Context

In biblical Israel, seven main crops formed the basis for economic prosperity: wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives, and dates.l Wheat and barley were milled into flour for bread. Fermented grapes produced wine, the main beverage of the day. Olives were crushed for oil, to be used in cooking and as a source of light. The syrup squeezed from ripe dates made a sweet honey. But the fate of these crops depended upon a complex set of climatic phenomena which occurred during the critical period between Passover and Shavuot.2

From mid-April to mid-June, the flowers of the olive, grape, pomegranate, and date open, and the embryonic figs begin to develop. In addition, the kernels of wheat and barley fill with starch. T~is season in the Land of Israel is distinguished by contrasts m weather. Scorching southern winds alternate with cold north~rn and western ones. The northern wind which fre~uently bnngs rain, is most beneficial to wheat if it 'blows durmg the whe~t's early stages of ripening, while it is still young.3

owever, thiS same wind k can wrea havoc on the olive crop if

ave already ad'

pene mto flowers, since the flowers

own away before 11' .

po matIon has begun. The samereatens the grape ' pomegranate, and date flowers.

y contrast, a prolonged h t' sout ern/southeastern wind bring

ea IS good for th I'

pomegranate crops b t ' e a Ive, grape, date, and if it comes before th Uk It can devastate the wheat and barley

e herdnels have filled with starch, for then

rc e and th .

b e entire crop destroyed.4 In

can e abies' .

h smg to one set of crops, It

at ers if it bl

remams for too brief ows too early or too late or too prolonged a time. Even if the

FRoM PASSOVER TO SHAVUOT

winds blow favorably, heavy rain after the wheat has ripened (i.e., during the harvest) can destroy the grain.5

The biblical farmer was no doubt aware of his dependence on the delicate balance of nature during this crucial interval between Passover and Shavuot. Once the sickle was put to the mature grain (Deut. 16:9), Nogah Hareuveni proposes, "it was natural that the farmers of the land of Israel should count off each day with great trepidation and with prayers to get through these fifty days without crop damage."6

Determining the Counting Period and the Subsequent

Celebration of Shavuot

Shavuot (Pentecost) is the sole biblically ordained festival with no specific date affixed to it, but depending instead on counting from a prior date. All we know for certain about when the counting was supposed to commence is that there is no uniform agreement even in the Bible about its beginning.

H. Louis Ginsberg posits a three-stage development of the celebration of Shavuot.7 In stage one, described in Exodus 23:14-19, the festival was called Chag Hakatzir or the Feast of Reaping. While no exact date is given for the celebration of this festival, it probably occurred when barley reaping started, sometime around the beginning of the month of Iyar (May). Unlike later stages in the development of the festival, no period of anticipatory counting is mentioned.

In Ginsberg's stage two, delineated in Exodus 34:18-22 and Deuteronomy 16:9-10, the festival is termed Chag Hashavuot, the Feast of Weeks. Since all worship during this stage was centralized in the Temple in Jerusalem, the holiday was postponed from the beginning of the barley harvest (when leaving the fields to journey to Jerusalem would have been impractical) to the subsequent reaping of the wheat (which ripens later than barley). Thus, in Exodus 34 (in contrast to Exodus 23), each farmer is commanded to observe the festival with the first fruits specifically of wheat. Additionally, in Deuteronomy 16:910, the farmer is further instructed to count seven weeks from the time when the sickle is first put to the standing grain (Le.,

EFRAT ZARREN-ZOHA~

the barley) and then, following the c~unting period, to observe f Weeks. Needless to say, smce barley does not ripen

the Feast 0 8 . at the same time throughout the land .of ~srael, thIS reckoning does not provide for a standard begmmng to the count and thus, as in stage one, no uniform day for the observance of

Shavuot existed. Only in stage three, illustrated in Leviticus 23:10-21, do we detect an attempt to fix the day when counting should begin. (Yet ironically, the very words intended to establish religious order and uniformity of counting will produce the opposite effect, engendering heated controversy among various Jewish sects, as we shall see.) According to the priestly source of stage three, liturgical traditions relating to the S'firah season are combined from stages one and two to create a more harmonious whole. In Leviticus, the biblical farmer is instructed to contribute two offerings from his grain crop. The first, the orner of presentation, constitutes a rite of desacrilization, which gives to God the first cuttings of the barley crop and thus releases the rest of the crop for human use.9 The second offering, known as bikkurim (first fruits) , was made on the fiftieth day after the presentation of the barley and was given in the form of bread, the "finished product," so to speak, of the wheat harves~. T~chnically speaking, this second offering was not part of a pIlgnmage, since it is called mikra kodesh ("a holy convocation") rather than chag ("pilgrimage") and since it was to be celebrated b'chol moshvoteichem ("in all your settlements").

The Linking of Passover and Shavuot in Biblical Times

H .

a~bel~velm offers a novel approach to explain the need of the bI Ica authors in De t . .

u eronomy 16 Leviticus 23 and

Numbers 28 to link P , ,

. 10 assover and Shavuot through a season

of countmg. To his m· d .

and thus the f f m.' smce the fate of the major crops cate bal;nce aadte a Isr~el~te SOciety, depended upon the deli-

n exact tImmg of .

explained abov ) . . . Opposmg forces of nature (as

e ,It IS easy to s h h

ena could logically have b e~ ow t ese natural phenombetween various d ·t· .e~n viewed as the result of battles

el les glvmg rl· t 1 .. .

, se 0 po ythelstIc worship or

fROM PASSOVER TO SHAVUOT

even worship of Baal, the god ~f rain.The intertwining of Passover, the festival commemoratmg the Exodus from Egypt, with Shavuot, the agricultural festival of first fruits, was meant to underscore for ancient Israelites that the God who delivered them from Egypt controlled also the forces that determine the fate of the grain, wine, and olive crops. Testimony for this hypothesis comes from Hosea 2:1-19, where the prophet complains that Israel does. not acknowledge that it is Yahweh, the deliverer from EgyptIan bondage, not Baal, who gives the grain, wine, and oil. Hareuveni opines:

Why did a commandment which deals with an agricultural crop stipulate a single specific date for a variable event? The answer becomes apparent when we consider the custom that could have evolved in the absence of a clear mandatory obligation, laid equally on all the people of Israel, to come to Jerusalem on a duly appointed day. The omer offering would have been likely to develop as a purely agricultural observance on separate dates in different regions .... The commandment to bring the omer offering on one specific date .. . served as a tremendous unifying force. One people brought the same one crop on one date to the one Temple, as an offering to the one God in one city, Jerusalem."ll

PASSOVER TO SHAVUOT FROM THE POST-BIBLICAL THROUGH THE GEONIC PERIOD

The Ecological Context As Seen by the Rabbis

The Rabbis were well aware of the impending danger to the food supply posed by the climatic conditions of the S'firah period. Leviticus Rabbah asks: How was the orner waved?

R. Simon b. R. Joshua said, "The movements forward and backward were to counteract the effects of injurious winds, and the movements upward and downward were to counteract the effects of injurious dews.,,12 Moreover, R. Eleazar taught: "'~he Lord our God ... keeps for our benefit the weeks appomted for harvest' (Jer. 5:24); this means no scorching heat,

EFRAT ZARREN-ZOHAR

blasting winds, and no noxious dews for the seven full no p "13 Th R bb'

weeks between Passover and entecost. e a IS see the orner as a quid pro quo for God's stewardship over the grain.

R. Judah said in the name of R. Akiba: "Why did the Torah state that we should bring an orner on Passover? Because Passover is the season of grain. Therefore, the Holy One, blessed be He, said, 'Bring before me an orner on Passover so that yOUr grain in the fields may be blessed.' "14 R. Phinehas said: "The Holy One causes winds to blow, clouds to rise, rains to come down, dews to bespangle plants, plants to spring up, fruits to grow plump-and you are asked to give Him in return no more than the orner of barley!"15

Finally, the entire harvest season becomes known as a time of judgment, for "the world is judged at four periods in the year.... On Passover for grain, on Shavuot for the fruit of trees." 16 If pleased, God says, "I close [the heavens] before you at Passover [i.e., rain ceases], and you go out and reap and thresh and winnow and do all that is required in the field and find it rich in blessing."I? But "If Nisan passes and rain falls, it is a sign of divine anger."IS In rabbinic, as in biblical days, the period of the S'firah was filled with trepidation as human beings watched to see whether the grain harvest would lead to

the proverbial "feast or famine."

Th~ Counting Period, the Counting "Liturgy," and the Remterpretation of Shavuot

R Th~,rabbi~ic fixing of the counting period derives from the

. abbl~ .readmg of the Hebrew phrase rnirnochorat hashabbat m LeVIticus 23:10-12.

When you enter the land d .

. . . an reap Its harvest you shall bring

the first sheaf of you h . '

r arvest to the pnest. He shall elevate the sheaf before the La d t r or acceptance on your behalf . . . on the day after the sabbath (. h

. mlmoc orat hashabbat) . .. . Until that very day, untIl you have bra ht h .

ug t e offenng of your God you shall

eat no bread or parch d . ,

h· h . e gram or fresh ears . . .. From the day on

w IC you brmg the sh f f .

ea a elevation offering-the day after

FROM PASSOVER TO SHAVUOT

the sabbath (mimochorat hashabbat)-you shall count off seven weeks.19 They must be complete: you must count until the day after the seventh week-fifty days. Then you shall bring an offering of new grain to the Lord .. . two loaves of bread from fine [wheat] flour ... as first fruits to the Lord .... On that same day you shall hold a celebration . .. . "

The Hebrew phrase found twice here, rnirnochorat hashabbat, engendered controversy because it does not specify which Sabbath is intended. Shabbat normally means "Sabbath day" (i.e., Saturday), but some held that in context, it referred to a festival day that has "Sabbath-like" qualities. Resolving this issue mattered, because it determined (1) when to present the orner (thUS desacralizing the barley crop and freeing it for consumption); (2) when to begin counting the fifty days; and

(3) when to celebrate the harvest festival of Shavuot.

Of all the possible interpretations of the word shabbat here,2° we need examine only the two that marked the original debate between the Pharisees and the Sadducees. The Pharisees, whose interpretation became normative after the destruction of the Second Temple (70 C.E.), interpreted shabbat as referring not to any Sabbath at all, but to Nisan 15, the first festival day in the week of Passover.21 By contrast, the Boethusians, generally identified as Sadducees, interpreted shabbat here to be the Sabbath day within the Passover week.22 For them, the counting of the orner began the day after (on Sunday) and Shavuot thus fell every year on a Sunday, fifty days later. The Sadducean interpretation probably does reflect the original meaning of Leviticus, since the word shabbat in the

Bible is never used by itself to refer to any festival or holy day other than the Sabbath itself. Moreover, the Samaritans and the Septuagint (in Lev. 23:15) understand shabbat as Saturday,23 and even several Rabbis have difficulty explaining the Pharisaic interpretation.24

Nevertheless, the Pharisees underscored their interpreta

han. by prescribing a grand public ceremony around the. orner-Cuttmg rite, the first testimony of a liturgy connected wIth the S'firah season:

EFRAT ZARREN-ZOHAR

. " dark [the reaper] called out to them [the bystand_When It gre' I' d "Yi I" "H

n set?" and they rep Ie , es. as the SUn"Has the su .

]

ers , . ?" "v. I" "Is thl's the sl'ckl ?" "Yi

?"" I''''lsthistheslckle. les. e . es!"

set . Yes. ]?" ....V. I" "I thO h

" I' he basket [to hold the omer . les. S IS t e bas-Is t liS t " " v. I" "0 I' S b

t?" "Yes!" "On this Sabbath? les. n t liS a bath?" ke . I" "Sb II lap?" "R I" Th

"v. I" "Shall I reap?" "Reap. a re . eap. ree

les.

times [the reaper called out] for every separate matter and they would reply "Yes! Yes! Yes!" And wby so much [pomp]? Because of the Boethusians who used to claim that the omer should not be reaped on the evening of the [first] Festival day [of Passover].25

Louis Finkelstein26 posits several reasons for the controversy between the two groups but holds ultimately that the dispute is really about the date of Shavuot, which only secondarily involved that of the orner, since the former was computed by counting from the latter. The Pharisees identified Shavuot as the day of Revelation at Mount Sinai, an event whose date is not mentioned in the Bible.27 The Sadducees, in contrast, insisted upon regarding Shavuot as a simple agricultural festival, and stood to gain materially (thinks Finkelstein) if the pilgrims were to arrive on Sundays.28 Was this controversy purely politics then, with an overlay of economic interest? Was it honestly motivated by the historicizing of Shavuot? Or was it a calendrical dispute that went back to two exegetical traditions? We will probably never know for sure.

Even after the Temple's destruction, when the orner could no .Iong~r be brought to the priest, the ritual of counting re~amed m force and various Rabbis attempted to bolster its

. Importance in the eyes of the people.29

QUASI-OMINOUS CHARACTERISTICS

LINKED TO THE S'FIRAH PERIOD

. In time, the S'/irah season became associated with mournmg, and Jews were adju db'

working ft re to a stam from getting married, post-talm:d~~.sunset, and cutting their hair. But all of this is

DASSOVER TO SHAVUOT

FROM r,

The Prohibition Against Marriage

Natronai Gaon (853-858) was asked, "Why do we not allow weddings to take place between Passover and Shavuot? Is this due to a halakhic prohibition or not?"30 We may infer that by Natronai's time, at least some Jews were already abstaining from marriage within the S'firah season, yet had no idea why they were doing SO.31 Natronai responds by classifying the restriction as a mere mourning custom, not an actual halakhic prohibition, and ascribes its origin to talmudic-midrashic reports that many students of Rabbi Akiba died during this time. But he adds, "From that time onwards [second century C.E.] the sages did not countenance weddings then."

There are no fewer than four accounts in rabbinic literature

concerning the death of Rabbi Akiba's students. B. Yebamot

62b says that 12,000 pairs of disciples (24,000 all together) died

between Passover and Shavuot because they did not treat each

other with respect. Midrash Ecclesiastes Rabbah 11:6 attrib

utes to Akiba himself the statement that 12,000 (not 24,000)

of his disciples died during the period between Passover and

Shavuot because they were envious of one another in knowl

edge of Torah. Genesis Rabbah 61:3 concurs: the number is

12,000; they died because of mutual envy. But the period in

which they died is unspecified. Finally, Midrash Tanchuma

(Chayei Sarah 6) cites the number of disciples who died as

only 300, and knows nothing of why or when they perished.

None of the legends associates their death with national

mourning, and in fact , since the students died as a result of

their own sinful behavior it seems odd that mourning customs

would ever become attached to the event. Indeed, counting the

orner begins on Nisan 16, but the Babylonian Talmud (Ta'anit

17b) actually forbids mourning from Nisan 8 to Nisan 21.

In sum, we know from geonic literature that the custom of

not marrying during the S'firah period was common by

the time of Natronai Gaon, but was post-talmudic in origin,

and only retrospectively associated with earlier reports of the

deaths of Rabbi Akiba's students.

Holding that the death of the students is a historical 80 rationalization of an earlier cust~m, Theodor Gaster posits a

more ancient and primitive practIce as the real origin for the ban on marriage after Passover.

The true explanation is to be found in the universal CUstom of regarding the days or weeks preceding the harvest and the open_ ing of the agricultural year as a time when the corporate life of the community is,so to speak, in eclipse, one lease of it now draw_ ing to a close and the next being not yet assured. This state of suspended animation is expressed by fasts and austerities and by curtailment of all normal activities. Especially interesting in this connection is the ban on marriages-originally a method of showing that, at the time when the annual lease of life is running

out, human increase also is arrested."32

Gaster's explanation accords with the anxiety concerning the health of the crops that we saw expressed above in rabbinic literature. The season of reaping was indeed thought to be a dangerous time, when God could wreak judgment Upon the I. Israelites by afflicting the food that sustains them. Jews were not alone in their apprehension. Many ancient cultures consid~r the harvest period to be an especially critical time during

whIch elaborate taboos and restrictions are imposed.33

There may, however, be a second Source for the restrictions

against marriage during this period. A theory going back to

M. Landsberger explains it as borrowed from the Romans.34

The ominous character of May and the first half of the month

of June (roughly corresponding to the S'firah season) is re

cord~d by Ovid and attributed to fear of the dead. Apparently,

bannmg. marriages during this time was connected with the

celebratIOn of Lem· R

d· una, a oman festival during which acSc?r .1Og to. Plu~arch, offerings were made to honor the de~d.35

Imdarly, m hIS study f d·

h · 0 me leval Jewish life Israel Abra

ams opmes "The d. ' creeds are I' I .mo ern weddmg customs of all races and the Jews CO;i~; ~h~ndebted to heathen sources. . .. In Spain new moon I ~ Greek .custom of marrying only on the

. . .. n lact the M ddl A

free trade in su .' . leges encouraged a perfectly

pershhons and J . . d

terrors from one h' ews and ChnstIans borrowe

anot er with th .

e utmost enthuslasm.,,36

.....,

UASSOVER TO SHAVUOT Ii

FROM c, 81

We now have evidence specifically of a Roman prohibition riage during the harvest season. While it would not have

of mar ..

reatly affected the Jews untIl approxImately 63 B.C.E. (when gl Land of Israel came under the Roman sphere of influence),

tIe d . . I

eneral anxiety roote m an agncu tural economy might

t e g . I· 'T! b

have been prevalent ce?tunes .e~r H~r. ~o e sure, the rest ric· 1·s not mentioned m rabbmlc hterature of the time but

tIOn .. .' that may be because It was Just a custom denved from generalized cultural apprehension, but not yet a halakhicly proscribed practice. The practice of avoiding marriage from Passover to Shavuot was apparently passed down from generation to generation long after Jews ceased earning their livelihood primarily from agriculture and long after they ceased living under the influence of Roman culture. Knowing nothing of its real origins, Natronai Gaon explicitly links the custom of not getting married during the S'firah season to talmudic reports of the secondcentury death of Akiba's students. He felt compelled to seek out justification for what he knew to be an old custom and found it in the Rabbi Akiba account.

The Prohibition against Working after Sunset

The prohibition against working after sunset is first mentioned in our extant sources by Hai Gaon (998-1038), who explains that the disciples of Rabbi Akiba died during the daytime and were buried after sunset; people had been excused from work that evening in order to bury them. But even Hai suspects this line of reasoning and offers also a second explanation, based on the similarity of syntax between the instr~ction to count fifty days of the orner and the parallel instructIon to count fifty years until the sabbatical year.

. . f the orner. "You

The phrase (Lev. 23:15) regardmg the countmg 0 , ' . h I .. ( h habbatot t rnmwt)

s a I COunt seven complete weeks. . . s eva s

implies rest from labor and the sabbatical year, because we read

similarly [about the sabbatical year] (Lev. 25:8). "You shall cou~t

. ) Just as work III

seven weeks of years" (sheva shabbatot s hamm .

EFRAT ZARREN-ZO

BAR

the field is forbidden in the sabbatical year, so too when We COUnt the omer, a liturgical rite that occurs at sunset, we rest from work also [in the period stipulated, namely, after sunset].37

Whatever its real origin, by the early fourteenth century th custom seems to have been rarely observed, if indeed, it eve~ had been. Jacob ben Asher records it in his law code, the Tur along with the custom not to marry. But whereas for the latte: he says explicitly, "It is the custom everywhere . . . ," with re~ gard to the cessation from work, be simply says, "I have found it written tbat it is customary not to do work.... " He then cites Hai's responsum with tbe additional explanation, "Moreover, women customarily did not work after nightfal\ then." He kept tbe ban on marriage, albeit still (like Natronai) as a mere custom, not a real legal prohibition; he did not keep the work

regulation at all.38

The Prohibition against Haircuts

Unlike the prior two prohibitions, the ban on haircuts during th~s time period is not found among the geonim. It is ~ost likely a later custom wbich originated in post-geonic tImes, probably after tbe time of Rashi (1040-1105), who seem~ not to know of it. Tbe next generation mentions it, however; It turns up in several of the legal manuals of Spain and

Provence.Not cutting bair wa5 already a well-known custom related to mourning' I' .

. 10 genera , so that Its observance m connection with the S'firah season . t . . I '

. IS no ' a surpnsmg evo utlOn, once mOUrn1Og and the S'firah were firmly linked.40

THE ORIGIN OF AND CUSTOMS SURROUNDING LAG BA'OMER

On the tbirty-third d f h .

in H b ay 0 t e countmg of the orner. known

e rew as Lag Ba'ome 41 th '

are relaxed d' r, e restrictions discussed above

, an 10 many comm'f h I

bra ted as a semi-holida ,um le~, t e day is even ce e-

y. Lag Ba orner IS shrouded in mystery;

DASSOVER TO SHAVUOT

FROM r, 83

I rs are unsure of the reason for its celebration, and tra

scho a 'f b " .

. ' al Jewish sources, 1 t ey mention It at all, dIsagree over

dluon . . d' h

to observe it. It IS not mentlone m t e Talmud or geonic

hoW . II . I' I . .

es and Iiturglca y, no specla ntua IS practiced on it.

sourc

Lag Ba'orner in Traditional Sources

There are two approaches to the question of how the date of Lag Ba'omer is to be deter~ined, ,:hich in turn explain ~he divergent estimates of the penod of time when the mourmng restrictions are believed to be in force. One school of thought views Lag Ba'omer as the day when the plague that killed Akiba's disciples ended. Our first extant witness, Abraham Hayarchi (1155-1215) of Provence, attests, "It is the custom in France and Provence to marry from Lag Ba'omer on; and I have heard in the name of R. Zerachiah Halevi from Gerona [1125-1186] that it has been foun~ w.ritten in an [~nid:ntifi~d] old Spanish manuscript that the dIscIples of RabbI Aklba dIed from Passover until . .. fifteen days before Shavuot, and that is Lag Ba'omer.,,42 The talmudic tradition knew nothing of the plague ending midway in the orner period; but by the twelfth century, a new holiday called Lag Ba'omer had arisen and had been connected to a new tradition regarding the plague's early cessation.

Hayarchi does not attach any special significance t~ La~

Ba'omer, however. It is merely a day like all days, but hIstOrI

cally significant because on it the plague ended; from Lag

Ba'omer onwards, therefore, the period of mourning ceased ..

But should Lag Ba'omer be included in the period of l~nI

ency, or is it the end of the mourning period, so that weddmgs

are permitted only the day after? In keeping with the idea t~at

the day itself is unimportant, later Spanish commentators m

terpreted Hayarchi to mean that mourning should end on ~he

day fOllowing Lag Ba'omer, not on Lag Ba'omer itself, whIch

is merely the final day of restrictions.43

In the second school of thought,Lag Ba'omer is not jus~ the

anniversary of the day the plague ended. Rather, the thIf.ty

third day of counting the orner was determined by subtractmg

. , e

on that day and

observed it

" .

o SSOVER TO SHAVUOT

FROM c'A

. the war against Rome from the days of Rabbi Akiba.46 acun~ believe that the bow with which children play symbol~YStIhCS rainbow that, according to the Zohar, will appear in

Izes t e . f h M . h 47 H

before the com109 0 t e essla. owever, accord-k

the s Y G I' . h b

. folklorist Theodor aster, p aymg Wit ows and armg to. . . d' d I' h .

ws excursions mto the forest, smgmg, ancmg, an Ig hng ro fi, es are more likely "the last lingering survival of the typi

bon r h f '" .

I May Day ceremony. For t e act IS, It IS customary 10 many ca t of the world to kindle bonfires at the end of April or the

par s . beginning of Mayas a means of forefendmg demons and witches.,,48 Lag Ba'omer began, therefore, as a Jewish May

Day. Ch 'd' J L B' .

For many Sephardic and aSI IC ews, ag a omer IS associated with another death: not of the students of Akiba but of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, also a student of Rabbi Akiba but more importantly, the putative author of the Zohar. The day of Bar Yochai's death is termed a hillula ("festivity")49 and is marked by pilgrimages to his tomb in the village of Meron in the Galilee. At these pilgrimages, huge bonfires are lit, young boys receive their first haircut, and the Torah scrolls are brought with great ceremony from Tsfat, the closest city to Meron. Until recently, scholarship has tried to find the origin of these customs in incidents from Bar Yochai's life or from statements of his quoted in the Zohar.

There is, however, no reason even to believe that Bar Yochai died on Lag Ba'omer. Moreover, scholars have had to assume, along with tradition, that Lag Ba'omer is indeed the day upon which he died, since no written source makes reference to such a date, including the Zohar itself.

Recently, Avraham Ya'ari has thoroughly researched how the date of Bar Yochai's death was fixed on Lag Ba'omer, as well as (1) why and how the hillula celebration originated, and

(2) why the customs practiced during it are associated with the sage at all. A close reading of the historical sources, including diaries written by pilgrims in the late Middle Ages, reveals that hilLula customs practiced at Bar Yochai's gravesite were originally observed at the reputed tomb of the prophet Samuel in

Ramah (Nebi Samwil).so

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