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Abstract
The Israelite Passover of biblical depictions was just one instantiation of a ubiquitous phenomenon in the ancient Near East celebrating the arrival of the vernal equinox. The holiday develops from an exceedingly ancient custom, which long predates its purported origin at the time of Israels exodus from Egypt. Despite this understanding, the prevailing tendency among historians has been to examine the biblical evidence of the holidays performance within the confines of the dominating motifs of the exodus. The primary literature on the Passover celebration has been anchored to the story of Israels exodus from Egypt since the time of the monarchy. However, compelling evidence that would suggest the Bibles exodus account was the first or only Passover story in Israel does not exist.This dissertation seeks to identify and examine Passover ritual in the Bible beyond the traditional framework of the Exodus and will demonstrate that histories of the pre- monarchic era recorded in the books of Judges and Samuel assert a Passover, or Passover- like, festival as taking place at the Northern religious center of Shiloh. The earliest prose narrative writings of the Pentateuch, J and E sources, identify the Passover story with Israels emergence from Egypt. Still, these exhibit awareness of what I hypothesize is a sequence of Passover stories from the books of Judges and Samuel. So the TorahsPassover is in part the result of a religious transformation attending a cultural shift from worship at Shiloh to centralization in Jerusalem.Prior to Jerusalems ascendancy as the center of worship in Judah, Shiloh was a hub of Israels religious activity. The Pentateuchal sources that give us Exodus show overt concern with the affairs of the Jerusalem priestly elite of their day and embed their precepts into the narratives of establishment of the priestly houses during the period of migration from Egypt to Canaan. Shilohs indelible history of Passover is subsumed within the motifs of the Exodus in a homogenization that takes place in order for the holidays surviving narrative to fit a new geographical and political context.