Passover

Meanings

1. The one-day Biblical feast or festival (not a holy day) that begins at twilight at the beginning of the fourteenth day of the first month (Abib or Nisan 14), during which the firstborn sons of the Israelites were passed over by God while those of the Egyptians were killed; this feast day is then immediately followed by the seven-day Feast of Unleavened Bread (Nisan 15 to 21; the first and seventh days are holy days or yearly Sabbaths).
2. Synonym of Last Supper (“the meal that Jesus Christ ate with his disciples on the night before his death”).
3. Synonym of Paschal Lamb (“Jesus Christ symbolized as a sacrifice for the sins of humankind”).
4. The seven-day (in Reform Judaism) or eight-day (Orthodox and Conservative Judaism) Jewish festival of Pesach (also called the Feast of Unleavened Bread (מַצּוֹת (matsót)), commemorating the Biblical story of the Exodus.
5. Synonym of Paschal Lamb (“the lamb traditionally eaten during Pesach”); also, the meal at which this lamb is eaten.
6. A lamb which was sacrificed during the original Passover (sense 1).
7. A major festival or observance.

1. Alternative letter-case form of Passover.

Etymology

Deverbal from pass over as a calque of Hebrew פֶּסַח (pésakh, “to pass over”) (see sense 1), coined by the English Biblical scholar and linguist William Tyndale (c. 1494 – 1536), in his 1530 translation of Exodus 12 of the Bible, the first in modern English: see the quotation.