Prager U.'s Passover quiz

Interesting trivia: in French, there's La Pâque, and there's Pâques. La Pâque is Passover; Pâques is Easter. The religious English word paschal or Paschal is related to Pâques, as is the name Pascal, which comes from an old Aramaic word, pasha, meaning "pass over," and the Hebrew pesah/pasah, of cognate (by which I mean def. 3) meaning.

The Prager U. newsletter recently put out a link to what I think is a pretty easy Passover quiz; I got a perfect score with no trouble, although on one question, I admit I made an educated guess. See how you do. Highlight the space between the [brackets] at the end to see the answers. If you've seen the Charlton Heston version of "The Ten Commandments," you'll probably get all of these questions right.

Question 1 of 9:
Where were the Jews [Hebrews] enslaved for hundreds of years?
a. Egypt
b. Babylon
c. Israel
d. Iran

Question 2 of 9:
How did Moses’ mother save him from being killed by the pharaoh?
a. She sent him away to family members living in a foreign land.
b. She paid an Egyptian soldier to protect Moses.
c. She sent him down the Nile River in a basket.
d. She hid him until he was 13.

Question 3 of 9:
How did God appear to Moses in the land of Midian while he was shepherding a flock?
a. as a cloud of smoke
b. as a terrible storm
c. as a pillar of fire
d. as a burning bush

Question 4 of 9:
How many plagues did God send upon Egypt?
a. 10
b. 14
c. 3
d. 7

Question 5 of 9 (lightly edited to improve it):
What were the Hebrews instructed to put on the doorposts of their homes to protect them from the final plague?
a. oil
b. salt water
c. the blood of a lamb
d. white linen

Question 6 of 9:
What body of water did the Jews cross on dry ground during their escape from Egypt?
a. Red Sea
b. Gulf of Suez
c. Nile River
d. Mediterranean Sea

Question 7 of 9:
What is not one of the symbolic foods used during a Passover Seder?
a. challah
b. a shank bone
c. matzah
d. an egg

Question 8 of 9:
What are Jews commanded to remove from their homes during Passover?
a. sugar
b. animals
c. alcohol
d. leaven

Question 9 of 9:
Did Jesus observe Passover?
a. no
b. yes

ANSWERS AND MY COMMENTARY:

[1. a

Whether the story of bondage in Egypt is true is at best arguable according to archeology. It may come as a shock to believers, but many events and characters in the Hebrew Bible (what Christians might call the Old Testament) are literary composites, pious fictions, and stories that might have power as myths but not as actual, literal histories. The Christian Bible, too.

2. c

According to tradition, the name Moses means "drawn from the water." This could be a folk etymology. See here for a deeper discussion.

3. d

This is the classic tale of Moses' first encounter with God. In religious studies, thanks mainly to the work of the religious historian Mircea Eliade (a big influence on my thinking), the sudden and significant appearance or manifestation of the sacred is called a hierophany (from the Greek hieros [sacred] + phainein [appearance]).

4. a

While it's always tempting to pick "holy" numbers like 3 or 7, the answer is 10. All three of these numbers represent some form of perfection or completeness.

5. c

The original wording of this question said "tenth and final plague" which, had you taken the actual quiz and gotten question 4 wrong, you could have gone back and corrected yourself upon seeing the phrase "tenth and final." So I removed the "tenth and."

6. a

Red Sea, Reed Sea, poh-tey-toh, poh-tah-toh.

7. a

If you cook, you could probably guess the answer to this one. Challah is an ancient bread, but its current form dates back only to post-medieval Europe (braided challah = 15th-century Europe). This was the question I guessed on. Challah just struck me as a modern-ish bread. Turns out I was wrong about how old challah really is (and the word can have the generic meaning of "loaf"), but my surmise led me in the right direction.

8. d

Judaism and the phrase unleavened bread (i.e., bread without yeast or other rising agents like baking soda or baking powder) are intimately associated. This one was easy.

9. b

Think it through logically. Even if certain Jews reject this, Christians consider Jesus to have been a devout, practicing Jew who, at a young age, was found debating theology with Jewish scholars at the great Temple (i.e., the Second Temple) in Jerusalem. In grad school, our prof once invited a rabbi to our class on interreligious dialogue. This rabbi sourly dismissed the idea that Jesus' Last Supper was some form of Seder, but plenty of theologians argue otherwise. I'm not enough of an expert to comment one way or the other on the Seder issue; both sides of the argument seem to have a point. The actual Seder supper contains elements of historical remembrance in it that aren't found in the New Testament account, and Jesus' "This is my body, this is my blood" symbolism would seem—aside from appearing cannibalistic—to fly in the face of Jewish theology, an objection that Jesus himself faced the moment he said, after quoting Isaiah, that "this scripture has been fulfilled today in your hearing," a scandalously arrogant claim to Jewish ears.]

The above commentary provided for each answer is my own. Take the Prager U. quiz here to see Prager U.'s commentary on the same answers. You'll see that it's much more rooted in scripture and much less tinged with the academic's hermeneutic of suspicion.

Side note: I somehow didn't realize I'd be departing the States on Palm Sunday. It'll be Holy Week when I get back to Korea. The Buddha's birthday in Korea, meanwhile, is on May 5 this year. Other countries celebrate Vesak on May 12 this year.