The declaration a farmer recites while bringing first fruits, beginning 'a wandering Aramean was my father' and continuing through slavery in Egypt to the gift of the land (Deuteronomy 26:5-10), became centuries later the core scriptural passage expounded phrase by phrase in the Passover Haggadah's retelling of the Exodus, so a liturgical formula composed for an agricultural offering unrelated to Passover itself now supplies much of the language through which Jewish households annually narrate their own foundational story at the seder table.
Source critics attribute this declaration, along with the surrounding material in Ki Tavo, to the Deuteronomic source, and some scholars have proposed that its compact historical summary represents one of the oldest fixed liturgical formulas preserved anywhere in the Torah, recited long before it was written into its present context, though this remains a proposal rather than a settled finding given how little can be independently confirmed about oral liturgical formulas that predate their first written attestation.
The declaration's opening phrase, arami oved avi, has itself been read two ways since antiquity: most traditional commentary and the Passover Haggadah itself read it as 'an Aramean sought to destroy my father,' understanding the Aramean as Laban threatening Jacob, while the same Hebrew words can equally be parsed as 'a wandering' or 'a perishing Aramean was my father,' a rendering some modern translations and scholars prefer, describing Jacob himself as a homeless wanderer of Aramean origin rather than naming Laban as a would-be destroyer.