It’s a Cookbook!

Today’s biblical contradiction is so basic, so obvious, that it even has the dictionaries running scared. There is a Hebrew word, bashal. It means “to cook by boiling.” It’s very specific. It doesn’t mean generically “to cook by any means.” Just “to boil.”

A look at all the uses of the word bashal (aside from today’s contradictory verses) demonstrates this. There are three categories:

• Some distinguish boiling from baking or roasting (Exod. 16:23; 1 Sam. 2:15; Ezek. 46:10).
• Most specify cooking in a liquid or a pot (Exod. 23:19; 34:26; Lev. 6:28; Deut. 14:21; 1 Sam. 2:13-14; Job 41:20, 31; Isa. 64:2; Jer. 1:13; Ezek. 24:3-10; Zech. 14:21).
• Some just use the word by itself, but never in a context that requires cooking by dry heat (Exod. 29:31; Lev. 8:31; Num. 16:19; 1 Kings 19:21; Ezek. 46:24).

“To boil,” and nothing else. Except, according to the dictionaries, for two verses.

Quick—how do you cook the Passover lamb? Roasting, right! Everyone who knows even a little about Passover knows that. God’s instructions to Moses are perfectly clear on this point:

They shall eat the lamb that same night; they shall eat it roasted over the fire with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. Do not eat any of it raw or boiled in water, but roasted over the fire, with its head, legs, and inner organs. (Exod. 12:8-9, NRSV)

Not a whiff of ambiguity about it. Except… Deuteronomy has it different.

Deuteronomy is weird in general, the only one of the four sources of the Torah to be entirely contained within, and virtually coterminous with, one book. There are a few pieces of the other three sources at the beginning and end, but the middle is entirely the fourth source.

As a separate source, as we’ve seen, it’s liable to have its own view on certain matters. And one of them is the recipe for the Passover lamb:

You cannot sacrifice the Passover lamb in one of your gates which the Lord your God is about to give you, but only in the place which the Lord your God will choose to cause his name to dwell. There you shall sacrifice the Passover lamb in the evening, when the sun goes down, at the hour you left Egypt. And you will boil and you will eat in the place in which the Lord your God chooses. (Deut. 16:5-7a, my translation)

In place of the flatly contradictory bashal, “boil,” both the NRSV and the NJPS have the bland and misleading “cook.” There is no justification for this translation, except for the obvious desire to avoid embedding a contradiction in the translation. The fact that the contradiction is present in the original text is not troublesome, since people who regularly use those translations presumably have less access to the original. But that’s why it’s misleading.

Such an obvious contradiction did not escape notice, not even in the process of composing the Bible. The very late books of Chronicles tell the story of the renewal of the covenant of Deuteronomy in King Josiah’s time (shortly before the end of the kingdom of Judah at Nebuchadnezzar’s hands). This author clearly had both the Exodus and the Deuteronomy texts before them, and tried to use the language of both to take the sting out of the contradiction and, in so doing, propose a completely new, hitherto unheard-of definition for bashal:

They boiled the Passover sacrifice with fire, according to the judgment. The holy things they boiled in pots, cauldrons and pans, and they distributed it to all the children of the people. (2 Chron. 35:13, my translation)

First, the Chronicler introduces a brand-new phrase never before seen in biblical Hebrew: bashshel ba’esh, “to boil with fire.” While fire of course is essential to the boiling process, what is more important, in the biblical Hebrew vocabulary of cooking, is how the heat of the flames is applied to the food. Logically, it adds nothing more notable that saying, “to boil with heat.”

However, recall how the original Exodus passage put it: “roasted over the fire,” ts’ly-esh. Chronicles has added the word “fire” from Exodus back into the instruction, despite the fact that nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible are “boiling” and “fire” combined.

The instruction continues with the cooking vessels that the people are using. Pots and cauldrons are clearly for cooking with liquid. If you’ve ever put a pot over heat, and that pot then ran out of liquid, you know how disastrous dry-cooking in a pot is. Pans can of course be used for dry-cooking, but this is frying or sautéing, not roasting by direct heat, ts’ly-esh.

It seems clear to me that Chronicles is using the Deuteronomic law for how to prepare the Passover lamb, while using a little obfuscation to bring an important word in from the Exodus version. That one word has then become the rationale for translators and dictionary authors to suppose that in 2 Chron. 35:13, and thus also in Deut. 16:7, there is a second meaning to bashal, which means, somehow, “to cook with dry heat.” This translation flies in the face of every other use of the word, and the full context of the Chronicles passage. Bashal means “to boil,” ts’ly-esh means “to roast over fire,” and these verses contradict each other.

So we can add another genre that does not tolerate contradictions well: a cookbook. This contradiction required a choice, and there is no evidence that the Chronicler’s preferred solution, to use the method of Deuteronomy obfuscated with the words of Exodus, was ever used. The first time the Passover ritual appears in rabbinic Hebrew, in the Mishnah tractate Pesahim 7:1 (c. 200 CE), the lamb is being roasted. A little earlier, around 100 CE, the Jewish historian Josephus, in his Antiquities 10:5, also records the Passover lamb being roasted entirely.

Perhaps the liturgical power of the narrative in Exodus was simply too much to ignore, and the Deuteronomic practice never caught on outside a small group of ancient Judeans. But their attempt at innovation—perhaps an attempt at democratization, since boiling requires a smaller fire—died out, except in the troubled dreams of lexicographers.