The Mystery of the Four Cups
Imagine you are a Roman citizen, living in Caesarea in the second century of the common era. You have been invited to a banquet by a friend. Before you even enter the room, a servant helps wash your hands. Once you are in the banquet hall, you are shown to a couch, where you lay down, reclining on your left side. A servant mixes a cup of wine with water and hands it to you and you offer a brief libation to Bacchus before you drink. A small table is placed in front of you with hors d’oeuvres, including lettuce and a delicious mixture of nuts, wine, and fruits. After the appetizers the tables are removed and new ones are brought in, set with tasty dishes of meat and poultry. When you have completed your meal and thanked the gods, your host asks philosophical questions, some about the food, some on other topics. You offer more libations and go home satiated with food and wine and the pleasure of good company.
This Greco-Roman symposium is nearly a perfect echo of the seder as we know it from the Mishnah, which was composed in the same era. The Greco-Romans offered libations, we recite blessings. The Mishnah describes servants washing participants’ hands. The Greco-Romans reclined as they ate off small tables; the Mishnah says, “Even a poor person should not eat until he has reclined.” We, like the Greco-Romans, eat lettuce and a mixture of nuts, wine, and fruits. And most importantly, both the seder and the symposium were an opportunity for discussions often based on the foods at the table. “Rabban Gamaliel says: Whoever has not explained these three things on Pesach has not fulfilled his obligation: the Pesach sacrifice, the matzah, and the bitter herbs.”
When the Temple was destroyed in 70 CE, and sacrifices were no longer possible, the Jews searched for a replacement for the sacrificial meal. Their solution was to celebrate Passover with the type of formal, organized meal with which they had become familiar, the Greco-Roman symposium.
Thus, the elements of the seder that differ from a Greco-Roman symposium are all the more striking, although some are fairly obvious. For example, children would not have participated in symposia. The rabbis, in contrast, saw Pesach as a prime opportunity to fulfill the Torah’s commandment “and you shall tell your child on that day.” Poor people would not have participated in symposia, whereas the Mishnah begins its description of the seder saying “even a poor person should not eat until he reclines.” On the other hand, Greeks and Romans often engaged in drunken revelry at the end of a meal, behavior explicitly prohibited by the Mishnah.
But perhaps the most important feature of the seder – the four cups of wine – does not have a parallel in Greco-Roman custom and cannot be explained easily. While ancient peoples usually celebrated with wine, symposium literature never records that precisely four cups were drunk. Scholarly attempts to answer why the Mishnah insists on the number four have not been convincing. A popular theory is that the number three was problematic because of the Christian trinity. The problem is that in the original version of the Mishnah, the Mah Nishtanah – what we call the Four Questions – consists of three questions, not four, and Rabban Gamaliel mandates the three food items to be mentioned. Furthermore, Christians did not develop the notion of the trinity until after the Mishnah already had been composed.
Recently, scholars have arrived at a better answer to solve the puzzle. The notion of four cups is first mentioned in Tosefta Pesahim 10:1, a second/third century text slightly older than the Mishnah. The Tosefta reads: “And they should provide him [the poor person] with not less than four cups of wine that together have a quarter of a log.”
The Tosefta clearly is directed at those who give out charity – they are to provide a poor person with enough wine for four cups on Pesach, and each cup must have a minimum measure. The Tosefta does not mention the four cups of wine again, leaving us to wonder why this specific number. The most obvious answer would be so the poor person could fulfill the commandment of drinking four cups at the seder. However, it is odd that the Tosefta never mentions when you are to drink the cups, as the Mishnah does. And if the Tosefta is an earlier text than the Mishnah, we cannot assume that it relies on familiarity with it. Anyone reading just the Tosefta would not know why there are four cups.
The answer may be quite simple – the poor person must be provided with enough wine for a proper celebration. Four cups of wine is a generous enough measure to allow for true rejoicing. Furthermore, since each cup contains a quarter of a log of wine, four cups add up to a full log, which signifies completion.
The radical transformation of the four cups from something that aids in rejoicing to a ritual in itself takes place in the Mishnah. Rabbi Judah Hanasi, the editor of the Mishnah who lived in Tziporri at the end of the second century, punctuated each point of the seder with a cup of wine. Kiddush is recited over the first cup. The second cup accompanies the mitzvah of retelling the story of the Exodus, the third cup accompanies birkat hamazon, grace after the meal, and we drink the fourth after we recite hallel. Each cup now accompanies another ritual and becomes a ritual in its own right. Rabbi Judah Hanasi transformed what originally was a means by which to gladden the participant’s heart to the meal’s organizing principle and thereby heighten the celebration of the Exodus.
The four cups are what makes the seder a seder, an organized meal, and Rabbi Judah Hanasi properly can be called the inventor of the seder. He accomplished this largely through the four cups.
This provides us with a larger window into how Judaism develops. Judaism always has been, and cannot help but be, influenced by the cultures that surround it. But Jewish practice is a lot more than a reflection of external culture. Judaism is a textual/traditional culture, built on the study of previous texts and customs. In each and every generation, Jews transform these texts and customs into even richer and more meaningful practices. Wine at the seder is a perfect example. Rabbi Judah Hanasi ritualized these four cups to punctuate and organize his innovative seder. The fact that these four cups are still a main focus of our seder ritual is testimony to Rabbi Judah Hanasi’s success.
Dr. Joshua Kulp is a Talmud instructor at the Conservative Yeshiva at United Synagogue’s Fuchsberg Jerusalem Center and at the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. His first book, The Historical Haggadah, was recently published by the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies Press and can be ordered at www.schechter.edu.
