Why does English even have a different word for "Easter" when many other languages generally call it "Passover"?
From Eostre in Britain, which was a strong enough association to retain when Anglic languages received the Semitic traditions.
Why does Easter sound so close to Esther/Ishtar/Eastern Star
Easter, Esther, Ishtar, Eastern, and Star all have rarefied etymological connections, but they are complex enough that distinctions are necessary before any dogmatic statements are made. The "Eastern Star" of Freemasonry is a very recent attempt to reimagine Biblical history and to pretend antiquity.
One cannot say that Easter is older than Passover unless the word is so far changed from its modern meaning as to be thoroughly unrecognizable, and if we were to do that we'd have to offer the same rights to the word Passover too. The question would be whether a spring festival were kept to a goddess under a name and meaning like Easter, and further back than Passover.
When I look, it appears Ishtar was first a tree goddess in Ebla (of the desert poplar), before she was syncretized with the broader goddess Inanna. I don't see a particular spring festival association until about the 20th century BC according to Samuel Kramer, where a night of the spring barley festival may have been dedicated to Inanna, though some consider this a later invention attributed to past kings of Uruk.
On the other hand, Moses specifically states that Passover (which I date to 1539 BC) was the 430th anniversary, to the exact day, of a particular covenant, namely when God "passed between" the sacrifices of Abram the Hebrew in Genesis 15 (1969 BC). This is a different word for passing, "abar", which goes back to Eber (b. 2269 BC) and all his descendants, which were called Hebrews (the word is now much more narrowly defined) and probably Habiru as well, because they were known for passing or crossing over into Eber's covenant.
Therefore, since Abram had the title Hebrew, and knew from Eber that he could hope for God to pass by on the full moon of spring, and he set aside a ram and other offerings with preparation comparable to the Mosaic preparation of the tenth of the month, we would claim priority for him, assuming the documents are not challenged (and challenges have never succeeded).
If we were to hypothesize that "Easter came first", namely that Abram received his unique worship from Sumer under a name of Easter rather than from Eber whose name he bore, all of the following would need to be met. (1) The Akitu spring festival must be pressed backward into the third millennium BC rather than from Sennacherib's Akitu house in Assur (683), as the spring barley harvest common to many cultures is insufficient in itself to count as an origin for Easter in particular. (2) Kramer must be regarded as correct, saying that the kings of Uruk celebrated Akitu, rather than Pirjo Lapinkivi, who cogently evinces it as a later literary backformation to attribute antiquity to it. (3) Kramer's theory that the king of Uruk may have slept with the priestess of Inanna on the tenth festival night (13th or 14th of the moon) would need sufficient documentation, which is not in evidence. (4) We would also need to prove that Inanna here was connected to Ishtar in the consciousness, as her loose connection to the sunrise is insufficient to connect the sunrise with an alleged intercourse ritual on an equinoctial full moon. (5) We would then need to connect this event with the wholly different practice of Abram, laying out clean beasts without eating them, having a vision in a dream rather than staying awake, meeting a creator God as a firepot and torch rather than an underworld goddess in the corporeal form of the mundane priestess, receiving a covenant of protection as an obscure tribal leader rather than putting on a show as a king of an ancient city.
This all seems so tenuous that I cannot accept the idea that Abram's Passover came from Easter without further data. The fact that man had celebrated the annual barley harvest for much longer does not indicate that the well-developed practice of Abram was a neologism and the backward-attributed theoretical sex narrative of certain legendary waning kings of Uruk was a continuous established root of Easter tradition. One can always argue the Bible is unreliable, but that side argument has not worked whenever the history is tested.
It seems to me rather that, once God established to Abram that the first full moon of spring was important to him, the devil started planting various theoretical seeds into his preformed religion of Dumuzid and Inanna in an attempt to anticipate what God would do next and prepare to claim that the devil had it first; this trend is visible at many points in religious history. The messy roots of "Easter" are so variegated and promiscuous ("rising" can mean anything, not just sunrise) that all four of these words come from it: eastern, western, australian (southern), and auroran (northern). So when we have theorizing from secular historians about unknowables and compare it to the firm testimony of Scripture and its historical integrity over time, there's not enough to support a claim that Easter is older.
TLDR: Certain things are older than both, like Dumuzid and barley, but the spring festival was associated with "passing" (Pascha) long before it was associated with "rising" (Easter). A theory exists that puts an Ishtar festival around the same time as the first passover rituals from Eber to Abram, but it has no provable connection and is rejected by later scholars as a literary invention. Certainly the Romans syncretized Christian Passover (the annual Lord's Day) with other elements (Eostre, sunrise, fertility), but tying these to a spring festival is less ancient than tying Passover to it is.
Because the Exodus story happened on the anniversary of the full moon of spring that had been kept in Abrahamic tradition. The crucifixion happened on the anniversary of the exodus too, and Christians often forget the exodus for the resurrection, but Jews often forget Abram's covenant for the exodus, and what came before Abram is mostly lost in familial tradition. What Abram celebrated in Gen. 15 in great detail demonstrates a developed cult of a monotheistic god who had five known clean species for sacrifice and who set the equinox and full moon as appointed times to meet with him and who called people to cross over into a covenant of life. Passover builds on all these factors without supplanting any.
I'm all for studying any strand of history if it can shed light on covenant and conspiracy. It's very hard to prove the negative that there was "never" any exodus of slaves; I deliberately haven't reviewed the pharaoh list in recent years because I need another touchstone or two before tackling Egyptology in full, but I remember there have been two good pharaoh candidates proposed whose timing meets the criteria of a year of crushing defeats (only obliquely acknowledged by inscriptions) and a voluntary depop that took a generation to recover from. Nomads don't leave archaeological traces! Obviously a good coordination of Egyptian records with the Bible would shed more contextual light on both, and I hope to get to that in time.
Last year I found a seven-year gap in Nebuchadnezzar's records (592-586) that corresponds nicely with his madness according to Daniel. You don't expect the king to keep annals those years evidencing his madness, though! In this case a gap is sufficient evidence, and the pharaoh records have been read the same way.
I'd love information about the Scottish princess legend, because it may have a valid root even if she weren't called Scots at the time. The fact that the Bible portrays a constant humbling narrative and the obelisks require constant paring back of exaggerations is one factor that gives the Biblical narrative greater weight. Both are very specific about dates, and if we recast the exaggerations of the Sumerian King List we may be able to harmonize the dynasty list sufficiently as well.
I completed my historical evidence for the Exodus. The exodus is simply one facet of the well-known Hyksos expulsion of the 16th century. The primary reason people claim to find no evidence for it is that they claim it was the 14th or 13th century for spurious reasons. But this discounts the testimony of Judges, Solomon, Manetho (in Josephus), and Ptolemy of Mendes (in Tatian), who all refer to Moses; and the testimony of the exodus event from contemporaries like Ahmose I, Ahmes the mathematician, Hatshepsut, Ramses II, and the Hearst Papyrus. The exodus was one big part of the sudden historical change from the contemporary 15th and 17th dynasties to the New Kingdom of the 18th.
Other notes: Thank you for mentioning Mot and Yam, because while I was familiar with their Hebrew meaning I didn't know the Ugaritic history behind them. They deserve investigation too. In terms of tying to a spring festival, there was no connection demonstrated (same for the earlier Dumuzid/Neti saga where Inanna gets denuded trying to recover Dumuzid); there was only a late theory that Baal's connection with the rain cycle was recalled in spring, which was not accepted as mainstream. So they're more in a mythopoeia limbo where the whole story is incomplete but people are trying to weave what parts they have.
The problem with JEDPR is that there is no disunity in the MT where a knife can successfully be inserted between Yah and El, they are never treated as separate gods. You could divide El from Baal while at other times identifying El with Baal, but that's because they are both titles in the earliest Hebrew (apparently the names are more personalized in Ugaritic so they're always separated). There's just no Tanakh text or forebear text that speaks of any equal-opportunity pantheon at all. So to claim that the source is polytheist honors neither the text nor polytheism nor the legend of Abram as iconoclast.
I also found an Egyptian Iah, who appears to be a syncretization of Yah that makes him primarily the moon god as squeezed into the pantheon. This too will reward study.
Grumbling, as I had an excellent writeup of Pharaoh analysis that vanished into cyberspace. Will need to wait. I now believe Apophis, 15th dynasty, is the pharaoh of the exodus, with cartloads of evidence.
Yes, Yahweh was a worldwide cult predating the Jews by thousands of years. You won't find that out by splitting the text into JEDPR though; but even as a fundamentalist I can work within those terms. It wasn't trying to get the story consistent, it was people sowing doubt on a consistent story by deliberately misinterpreting it to avoid its implications. To the fundamentalist, Ex. 12:41 and Gal. 3:17 prove that Gen. 15 is the anniversary event, and Abram was working from earlier Hebrew and Chaldean tradition.
Isis and Osiris-Seth-Baal are important, and go back to Inanna and Dumuzid, and I was just discovering the importance of Seth-Baal to Pharaoh Apophis. But when did they become associated with a spring festival? That's the catch. Perhaps on the Egyptian side (my evidence suggests) Seth was seen as responsible for the exodus chaos and thus was the origin of the king's practice in taking an Ishtar-Inanna priestess in spring as protection against a similar chaos in the first full moon of spring? This new data would require deeper review of Kramer.
I have a little separate data on the Yah and El names, suggesting that the Sethite line deliberately chose names afterward to contravene negative messaging from the Cainite line. Thus would also explain why the name Israel was given much later than Ishmael was, as it needed a generation for the connection to be recognized as a responsive improvement rather than a duality. There's no independence to Yam, as it always derives from Yah. And there's no time when Yah and El were ever separate or ever became merged; it was only liberal criticism that attempted to unmerge them. Gen. 1 introduces a deity title El, and Gen. 2:4b repeats 1:1 but adds the name Yahweh as the scope changes, using that personal name with the title afterward, like a deliberate monolithic account rather than a hodgepodge.
So I'll probably need to rewrite the amazing study I just concluded today and post it tomorrow separately and link you. I really appreciate your inspiring me to get through it, I just don't have the text written now.
From Eostre in Britain, which was a strong enough association to retain when Anglic languages received the Semitic traditions.
Easter, Esther, Ishtar, Eastern, and Star all have rarefied etymological connections, but they are complex enough that distinctions are necessary before any dogmatic statements are made. The "Eastern Star" of Freemasonry is a very recent attempt to reimagine Biblical history and to pretend antiquity.
One cannot say that Easter is older than Passover unless the word is so far changed from its modern meaning as to be thoroughly unrecognizable, and if we were to do that we'd have to offer the same rights to the word Passover too. The question would be whether a spring festival were kept to a goddess under a name and meaning like Easter, and further back than Passover.
When I look, it appears Ishtar was first a tree goddess in Ebla (of the desert poplar), before she was syncretized with the broader goddess Inanna. I don't see a particular spring festival association until about the 20th century BC according to Samuel Kramer, where a night of the spring barley festival may have been dedicated to Inanna, though some consider this a later invention attributed to past kings of Uruk.
On the other hand, Moses specifically states that Passover (which I date to 1539 BC) was the 430th anniversary, to the exact day, of a particular covenant, namely when God "passed between" the sacrifices of Abram the Hebrew in Genesis 15 (1969 BC). This is a different word for passing, "abar", which goes back to Eber (b. 2269 BC) and all his descendants, which were called Hebrews (the word is now much more narrowly defined) and probably Habiru as well, because they were known for passing or crossing over into Eber's covenant.
Therefore, since Abram had the title Hebrew, and knew from Eber that he could hope for God to pass by on the full moon of spring, and he set aside a ram and other offerings with preparation comparable to the Mosaic preparation of the tenth of the month, we would claim priority for him, assuming the documents are not challenged (and challenges have never succeeded).
If we were to hypothesize that "Easter came first", namely that Abram received his unique worship from Sumer under a name of Easter rather than from Eber whose name he bore, all of the following would need to be met. (1) The Akitu spring festival must be pressed backward into the third millennium BC rather than from Sennacherib's Akitu house in Assur (683), as the spring barley harvest common to many cultures is insufficient in itself to count as an origin for Easter in particular. (2) Kramer must be regarded as correct, saying that the kings of Uruk celebrated Akitu, rather than Pirjo Lapinkivi, who cogently evinces it as a later literary backformation to attribute antiquity to it. (3) Kramer's theory that the king of Uruk may have slept with the priestess of Inanna on the tenth festival night (13th or 14th of the moon) would need sufficient documentation, which is not in evidence. (4) We would also need to prove that Inanna here was connected to Ishtar in the consciousness, as her loose connection to the sunrise is insufficient to connect the sunrise with an alleged intercourse ritual on an equinoctial full moon. (5) We would then need to connect this event with the wholly different practice of Abram, laying out clean beasts without eating them, having a vision in a dream rather than staying awake, meeting a creator God as a firepot and torch rather than an underworld goddess in the corporeal form of the mundane priestess, receiving a covenant of protection as an obscure tribal leader rather than putting on a show as a king of an ancient city.
This all seems so tenuous that I cannot accept the idea that Abram's Passover came from Easter without further data. The fact that man had celebrated the annual barley harvest for much longer does not indicate that the well-developed practice of Abram was a neologism and the backward-attributed theoretical sex narrative of certain legendary waning kings of Uruk was a continuous established root of Easter tradition. One can always argue the Bible is unreliable, but that side argument has not worked whenever the history is tested.
It seems to me rather that, once God established to Abram that the first full moon of spring was important to him, the devil started planting various theoretical seeds into his preformed religion of Dumuzid and Inanna in an attempt to anticipate what God would do next and prepare to claim that the devil had it first; this trend is visible at many points in religious history. The messy roots of "Easter" are so variegated and promiscuous ("rising" can mean anything, not just sunrise) that all four of these words come from it: eastern, western, australian (southern), and auroran (northern). So when we have theorizing from secular historians about unknowables and compare it to the firm testimony of Scripture and its historical integrity over time, there's not enough to support a claim that Easter is older.
TLDR: Certain things are older than both, like Dumuzid and barley, but the spring festival was associated with "passing" (Pascha) long before it was associated with "rising" (Easter). A theory exists that puts an Ishtar festival around the same time as the first passover rituals from Eber to Abram, but it has no provable connection and is rejected by later scholars as a literary invention. Certainly the Romans syncretized Christian Passover (the annual Lord's Day) with other elements (Eostre, sunrise, fertility), but tying these to a spring festival is less ancient than tying Passover to it is.
Because the Exodus story happened on the anniversary of the full moon of spring that had been kept in Abrahamic tradition. The crucifixion happened on the anniversary of the exodus too, and Christians often forget the exodus for the resurrection, but Jews often forget Abram's covenant for the exodus, and what came before Abram is mostly lost in familial tradition. What Abram celebrated in Gen. 15 in great detail demonstrates a developed cult of a monotheistic god who had five known clean species for sacrifice and who set the equinox and full moon as appointed times to meet with him and who called people to cross over into a covenant of life. Passover builds on all these factors without supplanting any.
I'm all for studying any strand of history if it can shed light on covenant and conspiracy. It's very hard to prove the negative that there was "never" any exodus of slaves; I deliberately haven't reviewed the pharaoh list in recent years because I need another touchstone or two before tackling Egyptology in full, but I remember there have been two good pharaoh candidates proposed whose timing meets the criteria of a year of crushing defeats (only obliquely acknowledged by inscriptions) and a voluntary depop that took a generation to recover from. Nomads don't leave archaeological traces! Obviously a good coordination of Egyptian records with the Bible would shed more contextual light on both, and I hope to get to that in time.
Last year I found a seven-year gap in Nebuchadnezzar's records (592-586) that corresponds nicely with his madness according to Daniel. You don't expect the king to keep annals those years evidencing his madness, though! In this case a gap is sufficient evidence, and the pharaoh records have been read the same way.
I'd love information about the Scottish princess legend, because it may have a valid root even if she weren't called Scots at the time. The fact that the Bible portrays a constant humbling narrative and the obelisks require constant paring back of exaggerations is one factor that gives the Biblical narrative greater weight. Both are very specific about dates, and if we recast the exaggerations of the Sumerian King List we may be able to harmonize the dynasty list sufficiently as well.
I completed my historical evidence for the Exodus. The exodus is simply one facet of the well-known Hyksos expulsion of the 16th century. The primary reason people claim to find no evidence for it is that they claim it was the 14th or 13th century for spurious reasons. But this discounts the testimony of Judges, Solomon, Manetho (in Josephus), and Ptolemy of Mendes (in Tatian), who all refer to Moses; and the testimony of the exodus event from contemporaries like Ahmose I, Ahmes the mathematician, Hatshepsut, Ramses II, and the Hearst Papyrus. The exodus was one big part of the sudden historical change from the contemporary 15th and 17th dynasties to the New Kingdom of the 18th.
Other notes: Thank you for mentioning Mot and Yam, because while I was familiar with their Hebrew meaning I didn't know the Ugaritic history behind them. They deserve investigation too. In terms of tying to a spring festival, there was no connection demonstrated (same for the earlier Dumuzid/Neti saga where Inanna gets denuded trying to recover Dumuzid); there was only a late theory that Baal's connection with the rain cycle was recalled in spring, which was not accepted as mainstream. So they're more in a mythopoeia limbo where the whole story is incomplete but people are trying to weave what parts they have.
The problem with JEDPR is that there is no disunity in the MT where a knife can successfully be inserted between Yah and El, they are never treated as separate gods. You could divide El from Baal while at other times identifying El with Baal, but that's because they are both titles in the earliest Hebrew (apparently the names are more personalized in Ugaritic so they're always separated). There's just no Tanakh text or forebear text that speaks of any equal-opportunity pantheon at all. So to claim that the source is polytheist honors neither the text nor polytheism nor the legend of Abram as iconoclast.
I also found an Egyptian Iah, who appears to be a syncretization of Yah that makes him primarily the moon god as squeezed into the pantheon. This too will reward study.
Grumbling, as I had an excellent writeup of Pharaoh analysis that vanished into cyberspace. Will need to wait. I now believe Apophis, 15th dynasty, is the pharaoh of the exodus, with cartloads of evidence.
Yes, Yahweh was a worldwide cult predating the Jews by thousands of years. You won't find that out by splitting the text into JEDPR though; but even as a fundamentalist I can work within those terms. It wasn't trying to get the story consistent, it was people sowing doubt on a consistent story by deliberately misinterpreting it to avoid its implications. To the fundamentalist, Ex. 12:41 and Gal. 3:17 prove that Gen. 15 is the anniversary event, and Abram was working from earlier Hebrew and Chaldean tradition.
Isis and Osiris-Seth-Baal are important, and go back to Inanna and Dumuzid, and I was just discovering the importance of Seth-Baal to Pharaoh Apophis. But when did they become associated with a spring festival? That's the catch. Perhaps on the Egyptian side (my evidence suggests) Seth was seen as responsible for the exodus chaos and thus was the origin of the king's practice in taking an Ishtar-Inanna priestess in spring as protection against a similar chaos in the first full moon of spring? This new data would require deeper review of Kramer.
I have a little separate data on the Yah and El names, suggesting that the Sethite line deliberately chose names afterward to contravene negative messaging from the Cainite line. Thus would also explain why the name Israel was given much later than Ishmael was, as it needed a generation for the connection to be recognized as a responsive improvement rather than a duality. There's no independence to Yam, as it always derives from Yah. And there's no time when Yah and El were ever separate or ever became merged; it was only liberal criticism that attempted to unmerge them. Gen. 1 introduces a deity title El, and Gen. 2:4b repeats 1:1 but adds the name Yahweh as the scope changes, using that personal name with the title afterward, like a deliberate monolithic account rather than a hodgepodge.
So I'll probably need to rewrite the amazing study I just concluded today and post it tomorrow separately and link you. I really appreciate your inspiring me to get through it, I just don't have the text written now.