Passover
- 1A Jewish festival lasting seven days in Reform Judaism or eight in Orthodox and Conservative Judaism, also called the Feast of Unleavened Bread, commemorating the Exodus from Egypt.
The synagogue hosts a communal seder on the first night of Passover each year.
Passover begins at sundown and is marked by retelling the story of the Exodus.
SimilarPesach
Note
In Jewish usage the name has widened to cover the whole week. Where the single Biblical feast day came just before the Feast of Unleavened Bread, here the two are one festival. Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread become two names for the same holiday, and the second is named for matsót, the unleavened bread itself. Pesach is the Hebrew name, and it is the same word that Tyndale's English renders.
- 2The one-day Biblical feast beginning at twilight on the fourteenth day of the first month, when the firstborn sons of the Israelites were spared while those of the Egyptians were killed.
According to the account in Exodus, the firstborn of Egypt died on the night of the first Passover.
Passover itself lasted one day, and the seven days of the Feast of Unleavened Bread followed right after.
Note
Here English borrowed a phrase rather than a word. William Tyndale, the first to translate the Bible into modern English, coined Passover as a calque of Hebrew pésakh, built from the verb pass over: the night the Israelite firstborn were passed over. Leviticus 23:5–6 keeps the day apart from what follows. The Lord's Passover falls on the fourteenth at twilight, and the Feast of Unleavened Bread begins on the fifteenth.
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Origin
Formed from the verb phrase 'pass over,' this word was coined by William Tyndale (c. 1494–1536), the first translator of the Bible into modern English, as a calque of the Hebrew פֶּסַח (pésakh).