Happy Easter!

The origins of Easter are many and varied. There is the connection to the Jewish celebration of the ancient Israelites liberation from Egyptian bondage and the exodus that followed. Pesach, or Passover, always begins on the 15th day of the Hebrew month of Nisan, and because the Hebrew calendar is a lunar one, this will always fall on the day of a full moon.

Historians have studied possible dates for when the Last Supper happened and apparently the books of Mark, Matthew, and Luke describe the Last Supper as a Passover Seder.

Certainly this is reflected in languages other than English; the French, for example, call Easter Pâques, the Spanish say Pascua, the Italians say Pasqua, and the Portuguese say Páscoa. These words all derive from Latin pascha, from Ancient Greek πάσχα (páskha), and ultimately from Hebrew פסח (pesakh).

The Germans say Frohe Ostern for Happy Easter and this comes a bit closer to the English version. There are some scholars who argue that Easter in Britain was originally an Anglo-Saxon pagan celebration of spring and rebirth, and so the goddess of spring, the dawn, and fertility— Ēostre or Ostara—was invoked accordingly.

Yet another theory says that Easter comes from an older German word for “east” as the cardinal direction from where dawn appears. And yet others say that the celebration goes back to the Assyrian and Babylonian goddess of fertility, Ishtar, (who herself was a version of the earlier Mesopotamian goddess, Inanna).

Returning to the German train of thought, it was said that the goddess Ostara transformed a bird into a hare, but retaining it’s bird-origins, laid beautiful multi-colored eggs to celebrate the vernal equinox.

With the arrival of German immigrants in America as early as the 1700’s, especially around what is now known as Pennsylvania, the tradition of an egg-laying hare called “Osterhase” came over with them.

The Greek celebration of Πάσχα (Pascha), a transliteration of the Aramaic word פסחא, cognate to Hebrew פֶּסַח (Pesach) was among the first in the early Christian world to comemmorate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

It was the Roman Emperor Constantine who actually instituted a regular reckoning of this commemoration in an effort to unify the various Christian groups that had risen up in the centuries following the actual event and tie this to the Julian calendar rather than the Hebrew one. And so the observance was set for the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox.

And then apparently it was Pope Gregory XIII who moved to switch from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar that most Western societies use today. He was motivated to do so in order to keep the celebrations close to the vernal equinox around when the story originally unfolded.

So in February 1582, the calendar was reformed to eliminate the leap day in century years not evenly divisible by four. Thus 1600 and 2000 have leap days but not 1700, 1800, or 1900.

And there you have it! A description of where the term Easter came from, and why it is celebrated at different times every year. Happy Easter/Chag Pesach Samech to those that celebrate!