4. PASS-OVER OR PASS-BY.
The common understanding of the term “passover,” in connection with the Hebrew exodus from Egypt, is that it was, on the Lord’s part, a passing by those homes where the doorways were blood-stained, without entering them. Yet this meaning is not justified by the term itself, nor by the significance of the primitive rite. Jehovah did not merely spare his people when he visited judgment on the Egyptians. He covenanted anew with them by passing over, or crossing over, the blood-stained threshold into their homes, while his messenger of death went into the houses of the Lord’s enemies and claimed the first-born as belonging to Jehovah.[[558]]
This word pesakh, translated “passover,” is a peculiar one. Its etymology and root meaning have been much in discussion. It is derived from the root pāsăkh “to cross over,” a meaning which is still preserved in the Hebrew word Tiphsakh, the name of a city on the banks of the Euphrates,[[559]] the Hebrew equivalent of the classical Thapsacus.[[560]] Tiphsakh means “crossing,” apparently so called from the ford of the Euphrates at that place.
Later Jewish traditions and customs point to the meaning of the original passover rite as a crossing over the threshold of the Hebrew homes by Jehovah, and not of his passing by his people in order to their sparing. A custom by which a Hebrew slave became one of the family in a Hebrew household, through having his ear bored with an awl at the door-post of the house, and thereby blood staining the doorway,[[561]] is connected with the passover rite by the rabbis. “The Deity said: The door and the side-posts were my witnesses in Egypt, in the hour when I passed-over the lintel and the two side-posts, and I said that to Me the children of Israel shall be slaves, and not slaves to slaves; I brought them out from bondage to freedom; and this man who goeth and taketh a lord to himself shall be bored through before these witnesses.”[[562]]
According to Jewish traditions, it was on a passover night when Jehovah entered into a cross-over covenant with Abraham on the boundary of his new possessions in Canaan.[[563]] It was on a passover night that Lot welcomed the angel visitors to his home in Sodom.[[564]] It was at the passover season that the Israelites crossed the threshold of their new home in Canaan, when the walls of Jericho fell down, and the blood-colored thread on the house of Rahab was a symbol of the covenant of the Hebrew spies with her and her household.[[565]] The protection of the Israelites against the Midianites,[[566]] and the Assyrians,[[567]] and the Medes and the Persians,[[568]] and again the final overthrow of Babylon,[[569]] all these events were said to have been at the passover season.[[570]] These traditions would seem to show that the pass-over covenant was deemed a cross-over covenant, and a covenant of welcome at the family and the national threshold.
In the passover rite as observed by modern Jews, at a certain stage of the feast the outer door is opened, and an extra cup and chair are arranged at the table, in the hope that God’s messenger will cross the threshold, and enter the home as a welcome guest.[[571]] All this points to the meaning of “cross-over,” and not of “pass-by.”
In some parts of northern and eastern Europe there is a custom still preserved among the Jews of jumping over a tub of water on passover night, which is said to be symbolic of crossing the Red Sea, but which shows that the passover feast was a feast of crossing over.[[572]]