There is an irony set at the cornerstone of Jewish memory, the very text that proclaims the Jewish people's liberation from Egypt, the song of the sea, the account of the splitting of the waters, the Hagada that we will recite at the Passover Seder table in just a few days' time,

borrows its most evocative imagery from the propaganda of our Egyptian oppressors.

The phrase, mighty hand and outstretched arm, which the Torah uses to describe God's miraculous

actions in history, that phrase appears hundreds of times in the royal inscriptions of the

Egyptian New Kingdom as a description of the Pharaoh himself.

The Torah doesn't just recount the Hebrew slaves' deliverance from Egypt.

The Torah took Egyptian language, Egyptian symbols, indeed Egypt's greatest military triumph,

and turned it all inside out. This is the argument that the Bar-I-Lan University Bible professor

Joshua Berman has been

developing for years, including in the pages of mosaic.

And that insight now resides at the center of a new Haggada, lavishly illustrated with hieroglyphics,

photos, and sketches that situate the Passover Seder back in the historical setting from which the Hebrew slaves escaped.

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