The dogs that didn’t bark at the Exodus

Guests have brought a dog to our Seder several times over the years. Our tradition is to sit on sofas around the coffee table which we transform into a Seder plate. We only move to the dining table for the meal, so we must be careful our canine visitors do not munch on the lettuce or slurp the charoset.

Dogs hardly appear in the Torah, but they do feature in the Pesach story. On the night set for leaving Egypt, God promised that “no dog shall snarl against the Israelites” (Exodus 11:7). It’s an odd thing to mention. Why worry about a few woofs?

The point might be that yelling dogs would have sounded the alarm on the impending exodus. The 16th-century Italian commentator, Rabbi Ovadia ben Yaakov Sforno, states that watch dogs are used at night to alert the guards to escaping prisoners.

Alternatively, Rabbi Avraham Ibn Ezra of 12th-century Spain suggests the silencing of the dogs was to prevent them from barking at the Israelites and biting them too, which would be very frightening and may have held them back from leaving.

The problem is that these answers do not really explain the rest of the verse: “so that you may know how the Lord sets apart Egypt and Israel”. In what way do noisy beasts teach us how God distinguished between the Egyptians and the Israelites?

Drawing on historical context helps to identify another approach. A common canine in the region is the Egyptian jackal. This is a subspecies of the African golden wolf, so called for its gold and black fur. These animals tend to be nocturnal, communicate by howling, and are scavengers that frequent burial sites and uncover shallow graves.

As a result, the ancient Egyptians associated them with the dead. Anubis was the name given to the god of funerary rites, protector of graves and tombs and guide to the underworld. It was usually depicted as a jackal or a man with a jackal head.

Anubis was one of the most famous and powerful figures of the ancient Egyptian pantheon. In drawings, Anubis is coloured black to symbolise regeneration, the Nile’s soil and the discoloration of corpses after embalming. Statutes of Anubis are also adorned with gold leaf around the neck and ears. I have pointed out a good number of these on the tours which I lead at the British Museum.

The ancient Egyptians believed that every night, as the sun set, the sun-god Ra would merge with Osiris, the lord of the underworld, only to re-emerge the following morning, reborn. The howling of jackals at night would frighten the masses, reminding them of Anubis as they worried about the surrounding darkness and the possibility of death.

So the verse in Exodus could be read “no jackal shall howl”, because it refer to God defeating the Egyptian god Anubis. This tallies with what God told Moses later, “on this night… I shall mete out judgments against all the gods of Egypt, for I am God.” (ibid. 12:12).

When I discussed this line of thought with Rabbi Professor Joshua Berman of Bar Ilan University, who has become somewhat of an expert in this area, he directed me to a fascinating midrash which explains how “Moses took the bones of Joseph with him” (Exodus 13:19) when leaving Egypt.

According to this midrash: “While some say Joseph was buried in the Nile, others say he was buried in a temple, like the pharaohs. The Egyptians had used sorcery to craft jackals of gold (kelavim shel zahav), so if a person tried to enter, they would bark and their voices would carry throughout the land of Egypt… Moses managed to silence them and called out, ‘Joseph, Joseph, the time has come!’… Immediately, his coffin began shaking, and Moses took it.”

This rabbinic text, which mentions a mausoleum protected by golden jackals that howl, shows a clear knowledge of the role of Anubis. Thus, the defeat of Egypt was not just a matter of superior strength, it also required exposing the false power of their gods. This is the meaning of God’s “great judgments” against Egyptian deities (Exodus 6:6, 7:4).

To win a war requires more than subduing the enemy, it means defeating their ideology and showing it to be unjust. A different vision must be advocated to prevent future conflicts, and to allow human freedom and dignity to return. This is “winning the peace”, and it is just as challenging as the battle itself, maybe more.

A final echo of Anubis. Famously, no chametz (leaven) may be eaten during Passover. But what defines chametz as food? According to Jewish law, items are only considered chametz if they are “fit to be eaten by a dog”. And so it is fine to use lip balm and sunscreen, even if they contain leaven products, because dogs are not partial to them.

Eight days without eating chametz is a constant reminder of the purpose of Passover. Freedom requires great effort, hard battles, and new thinking. There will always be opposition that howls against change and barks against progress. These voices may come from others or from inside us. Either way, we must silence those fears to become free. We need to be ready for Moses’s call in that midrash: the time has come!

Rabbi Dr Raphael Zarum is the dean of the London School of Jewish Studies (LSJS)