StrongerBible

pasaḥ

פָּסַח

HebrewH6452“pass over, spare, ...”

Appears 7 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Exo 12:13Exo 12:23Exo 12:272Sa 4:41Ki 18:211Ki 18:26Isa 31:5
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradepah-SAKHverb

What pasaḥ means

1

to protect and spare from harm by standing guard over someone, so that a deadly threat cannot reach them.

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintyContested

This is the verb behind the name Passover, and its meaning is one of the more surprising puzzles in the Hebrew Bible. The traditional English wording, pass over, pictures God skipping or stepping past the Israelite houses on the night the firstborn of Egypt died. But the oldest and most likely sense is nearly the opposite of skipping past: it is God standing guard over the doorway, shielding the family inside so that the deadly plague cannot get in.

Two things point that way. In the one place outside the Exodus story where this verb clearly appears, Isaiah pictures God like a mother bird hovering over Jerusalem to shield it, in a line stacked with words for rescue and deliverance. And in the Exodus account itself, God is described as standing at the door to keep the destroyer from entering, an image that fits guarding far better than skipping by. The ancient Greek and Aramaic translations understood the word as sheltering and sparing, not passing by.

So the familiar festival name rests on a translation that most scholars now doubt. The heart of that night was not that God passed by, but that God personally protected his people from the death that fell on everyone around them.

Nuances

1ato shield and spare a household from a deadly plague, God's action on the first Passover night.
Exo 12:13Exo 12:23Exo 12:27
1bto protect a city or people from attack, shielding them the way a bird spreads its wings over its nest.
Isa 31:5

Disputed

What the verb means in the Exodus Passover account: to protect and spare, or to pass over and skip.

  • majorityTo protect, shield, and spare. Most modern critical scholars read the verb this way, resting on Isaiah 31:5 (where it parallels verbs of rescue under a maternal-bird image), on Exodus 12:23 (where YHWH stands at the door to block the Destroyer), and on the Septuagint's use of skepazo, "to shelter," at Exodus 12:13 and 12:27. The Targumim (Onkelos "spare," Pseudo-Jonathan "protect") and the Mekhilta agree.; Nahum M. Sarna, The JPS Torah Commentary: Exodus (1991), on 12:11-13; William H. C. Propp, Exodus 1-18, Anchor Bible 2 (1999), 401-402; Brevard S. Childs, The Book of Exodus, OTL (1974), 183, 202-204; J. B. Segal, The Hebrew Passover from the Earliest Times to A.D. 70 (1963), 95-101, 163
  • minorityTo pass over, skip over. The dominant reading in the Western translation tradition, canonical in English since Tyndale and reflected in Jerome's transcendet and Rashi's preferred gloss. The older lexicons treat the basic verbal sense as a disjointed motion (skip or limp) and derive "spare" from it as a figure of speech.; BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), s.v. פסח; Wilhelm Gesenius, Hebraisches und Aramaisches Handworterbuch uber das Alte Testament, s.v. פסח
2

to limp, to move with an uneven, halting gait.

TranslatabilityPartialCertaintySettled

Spelled exactly like the Passover verb, there is a second and unrelated verb that simply means to limp, to move with a halting, uneven step. Most scholars treat it as a wholly separate word that only happens to look the same.

It covers real physical lameness, as when a child is dropped and is crippled for life. It also stretches to a vivid picture of indecision: the prophet Elijah asks the crowd how long they will keep hobbling back and forth between two opinions, unable to commit either to God or to Baal. And it names the staggering, hopping dance the prophets of Baal performed around their altar.

This limping sense is the settled, well-understood one. Its only overlap with the Passover verb is in spelling, which is exactly why the two are best kept apart.

Nuances

2ato be or become lame, crippled in the feet.
2Sa 4:4
2bto waver, to hobble back and forth between two options without committing to either.
1Ki 18:21
2cto perform a hobbling, hopping ritual dance.
1Ki 18:26

What scholars say about pasaḥ

The verb is exceptionally rare, attested only at Exodus 12:13, 23, 27 (of YHWH on Passover night), Isaiah 31:5, and 1 Kings 18:21, 26, alongside the more frequent adjective for lame. Four interpretive camps exist: pass over or skip (the dominant Western reading via Tyndale, Jerome's transcendet, and Rashi, treated by BDB and Gesenius as a figurative extension of limping); protect, shield, or spare (favored by most modern critical scholars); limp or be lame (the well-attested sense of the non-Exodus texts and of the adjective); and a proposed cultic limping-dance (Glasson). The protection reading rests on Isaiah 31:5, where the verb parallels three verbs of rescue under a maternal-bird image; on Exodus 12:23, where YHWH stands at the door to block the Destroyer; and on the Septuagint, which renders the Exodus verb with skepazo, to shelter, and Isaiah 31:5 with peripoieomai, to preserve. The Targumim (Onkelos to spare, Pseudo-Jonathan to protect) and the Mekhilta concur, as do Sarna, Segal, Childs, Propp, Houtman, Le Deaut, and Loewenstamm. Whether Hebrew has one polysemous root or two homonyms is a live lexicographical question: HALOT (pasach I to limp, pasach II to protect or pass over) and Clines's DCH list them separately, and Cohen and Brettler defend the homonym hypothesis, while BDB, Gesenius, and Klein prefer a single root with semantic extension, and Houtman judges the question philologically unsettled. No cognate has secured consensus: Akkadian pashahu, to placate, is semantically attractive but phonologically irregular; Couroyer's Egyptian derivation is widely rejected; Arabic and Geez proposals remain fragmentary. Across the canon the verb of divine action recedes (already gone from Deuteronomy 16 onward) as the noun expands to denote the festival, its sacrifice, and its observance. In Greek reception Aquila and Josephus standardized hyperbasia, an overstepping; Philo allegorized pascha as diabasis, a crossing; and a distinctively Christian folk etymology linked pascha to pascho, to suffer (Melito of Sardis), a connection Origen, and after him Eusebius, Jerome, and Augustine, explicitly corrected, and which modern lexica (BDAG, LSJ) treat as wordplay with no etymological basis.

Where scholars disagree about pasaḥ

Whether Hebrew has one polysemous root פסח or two unrelated homonyms, one meaning to limp or be lame, the other to protect or pass over, that happen to share the spelling.

  • majorityTwo homonymous roots. The limping texts (1 Kings 18, 2 Samuel 4, and the adjective for lame) form a stable semantic domain that never intersects with the Passover usage, and Hebrew is known to collapse originally distinct Semitic sounds into homophones. The modern critical lexica treat them separately.; HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), s.v. פסח I and פסח II; David J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. 6, s.v. פסח; Chaim Cohen, "Additional False Friends in Biblical Hebrew," Studies in Language 11-12 (2008): 188-191
  • minorityA single root whose basic idea is a disjointed motion (limp or skip), from which the Passover sense of passing over and sparing developed as a figurative extension.; BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), s.v. פסח; Wilhelm Gesenius, Hebraisches und Aramaisches Handworterbuch uber das Alte Testament, s.v. פסח
In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), s.v. פסח I and פסח IIlexicon
  • BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), s.v. פסחlexicon
  • David J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. 6, s.v. פסחlexicon
  • Werner Gesenius, Hebraisches und Aramaisches Handworterbuch uber das Alte Testament, s.v. פסחlexicon
  • P. Laaf et al., "פֶּסַח," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (TDOT), vol. 12dictionary
  • New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis (NIDOTTE), 3:642dictionary
  • Nahum M. Sarna, The JPS Torah Commentary: Exodus (1991)commentary
  • William H. C. Propp, Exodus 1-18, Anchor Bible 2 (1999)commentary
  • Brevard S. Childs, The Book of Exodus, OTL (1974)commentary
  • Cornelis Houtman, Exodus, Historical Commentary on the Old Testament, vol. 2 (1996)commentary
  • J. B. Segal, The Hebrew Passover from the Earliest Times to A.D. 70 (1963)monograph
  • Tamara Prosic, The Development and Symbolism of Passover Until 70 CE, JSOTSup 414 (2004)monograph
  • Samuel E. Loewenstamm, The Tradition of the Exodus in Its Development (1992)monograph
  • Roger Le Deaut, La Nuit Pascale, Analecta Biblica 22 (1963)monograph
  • John W. Wevers, Notes on the Greek Text of Exodus, SBLSCS 30 (1990)monograph
  • T. F. Glasson, "The Passover, a Misnomer: The Meaning of the Verb pasach," Journal of Theological Studies 10 (1959): 79-84article
  • Jeffrey H. Tigay, The JPS Torah Commentary: Deuteronomy (1996)commentary

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of פָּסַח

niphal consecutive-imperfect 3ms

וַיִּפָּסֵחַ

2Sa 4:4

piel consecutive-imperfect 3mp

וַיְפַסְּחוּ

1Ki 18:26

qal consecutive-perfect 1cs

וּפָסַחְתִּי

Exo 12:13

qal consecutive-perfect 3ms

וּפָסַח

Exo 12:23

qal infinitive-absolute absolute

פָּסֹחַ

Isa 31:5

qal participle m p absolute

פֹּסְחִים

1Ki 18:21

qal perfect 3ms

פָּסַח

Exo 12:27