Protection, Passover and Easter

 One of the silliest hills you will see a KJV Onlyist die on is defending the use of the word Easter in Acts 12:4 specifically and nowhere else.

Now I suspect the people at the King James Research Center YouTube Channel I discovered in December of 2024 are scholarly types who’d know better than to do that.  They would just argue that in King James English Easter and Passover are synonyms so it’s not a big deal that this one verse translates the name of the holiday differently then the others.  And that position isn’t entirely wrong, I’m not one of those “Easter is Pagan and the very etymology of the word proves it” types.  But I do think the baggage the word now has is a good reason to avoid it at least in how we translate Scripture.

These bad KJV Onlyists first argument is “it’s during Unleavened Bread so Passover is past already”.  That is based on Exodus 12 and Leviticus 23’s rather strict usage of Passover for the 14th specifically, but Deuteronomy 16 and Ezekiel 45:21 set the precedent for using Passover to describe the entire Spring Festival season and that’s clearly how all New Testament references are using it like in Luke 22:1-7.

Herod Agrippa was a devout Jew not a Pagan, so no he would not have been observing any “Ishtar” festival in Jerusalem. 

The fact is this verse of Acts uses the same word as every other reference to Passover in the Greek, Pascha which is a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew Pesach.

The little historical footnote they will cling to is that it was William Tyndale who coined the word Passover and he used Easter in this verse.  The problem is Tyndale used Easter for every Pascha verse of the New Testament.  You see he did the New Testament first and then started work on the Hebrew Bible which he never got to finish and it was for that he coined Passover.  If you asked him if future translations should use Passover for Pascha in the New Testament including Acts 12:4 he would probably say yes.

I am however now going to say something that will be anathema to even those more sane KJV Onlyists. I think even Passover was a wrong translation of Pesach.  I think Tyndale got a lot of stuff right, but he messed up here.

As the name of a Holy Day Pesach should perhaps just be transliterated.  

But as far as what the word means when used as a Verb I agree with scholars like Nehemiah Gordon that it really means Protect and thus as a name means Protection. Gordon’s articles are behind a Paywall now so I’ll instead link to this one.

https://fatheroflove.info/article/view/explaining-that-passover-means-god-protecting-not-deciding-not-to-kill

Both uses of “pass over” in Exodus 12 make more sense if translated “protect” especially verse 23, and “passed” in verse 27 works as “protected”.  Likewise “passing over” in Isaiah 31:5 definitely makes more sense in context as “protecting”.  

The seemingly contradictory way this word is translated in 1 Kings 18 as “halt” in verse 21 and “leaped: in verse 26 is fixed by understanding inherently defensive actions as what both verses were going for.  In 2 Samuel 4:4 the second “lame” in the KJV is a form of Pesach but the first “lame” is different, in this case I think it’s an ironic usage about Johnathon’s son being defenseless.

Continuing the running joke of me when talking about translation issues suggesting a Japanese word because I watch Anime, the best Japanese Translation of Pesach would be Mamoru.