The Festival of

• The festival of the matsot (unleavened bread) is a agricultural feast, and is therefore connected to the sedentary lifestyle.
• The commandments to celebrate this feast can be found in the Bible as follows:
  
  et hag hammattsot tishmor shiv'at yamim tokhal mattsot ka'asher tsiwwitikha lemo'ed hodesh ha'aviv...
  (Thou shalt keep the feast of unleavened bread: thou shalt eat unleavened bread seven days, as I commanded thee, in the time appointed of the month Aviv.)(Ex. 23:15, see also 34:18, )
  
  shalosh pe'amim basshanah yera'eh khol-zekhurkha et-peney adonay eloheykha bammaqom asher yivhar behag hammattsot uvehag...
  (Three times a year shall all thy males appear before the Lord thy God in the place which He shall choose; in the feast of unleavened bread and in the feast...)(Dt 16:16).
• It is a striking fact that in these verses neither pesah nor its qorban (sacrifice) are mentioned.
• This is the reason that we may assume that originally there were two feasts in the same month:
  1. , the feast of the normadic shepherds.
  2. The feast of the of the sedentary population.
  Only much lateron were the two feast united, when the central religious authority of the Temple ("beit hammiqddash") felt the need to celebrate the main festivals in the , instead of at local sanctuaries or in domestic circles.
• That may also be the era when a new meaning and content was given to the unified festival, viz. of the liberation from Egyptian slavery, which was common to all the Children of Israel, both the sedentary farmers, and the semi normadic shepherds.
• Maybe because its origins lie in a Canaanite feast, we have little information how the feast of the was formerly celebrated.
• Durring the days of the feast, it was forbidden to eat hamets (leavened food), and it was even forbidden to keep leaven or yeast in the home:
  
  shiv'at yamim mattsot tokhelu akh bayyom hari'shon tashbitu se'or mibbattekhem ki kol-okhel hamets wenikhreta hannefesh hahi miyyisra'el miyyom hari'shon 'ad-yom hasshevi'i
  Seven days shall you eat unleavened bread; but on the first day you shall put away leaven out of your houses: for whoever eats leavened bread from the first day until the seventh day, that soul shall be cut off from Israel (Ex. 12:15).
• The custom of bi'ur hahamets (burning of the leaven) is not mentioned in the Bible, thus we may assume that this custom developed much later in the time of "hazal" (the Sages) because the severe punishment for eating in the days of Passover.

• The etymology of the word is dubious.
• the root is (the dot in the in the word is a doubling dot).
• The basic meaning of this root is "to suck", "to sip" or "to drain out" and appears in the Bible twice in the basic verb stem (Jes. 66:11, Ps. 73:10).
• The root is known in Arabic, Ugaritic, and Aramaic with this meaning.

• The we eat to day on are very dry, and we would be tempted to connect the with the meaning of "drain out", but those who once have eaten the flat unleavened bread of the Bedouins, not baked in a modern oven, know that dryness is not characteristic of this bread.

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