Ki Tavo

In the synagogue the Torah is read aloud in a fixed annual cycle of fifty-four weekly portions (parashiyot), one each Shabbat morning, with certain adjacent portions doubled in ordinary years so the sequence fits the calendar. Each portion is named for a distinctive word near its opening and is paired with a haftarah, a reading from the Prophets. The cycle closes and restarts on Simchat Torah. Ki Tavo ('When You Enter', Deuteronomy 26:1-29:8) prescribes the offering of first fruits with its declaration of Israel's history, the tithe, the ceremony of blessings and curses on Mounts Gerizim and Ebal, and a long and severe tochacha foretelling exile if the covenant is broken.

The ceremony of blessing and curse the portion prescribes for Mounts Gerizim and Ebal (27:1-26) preserves one of the clearest textual divides between Jewish and Samaritan scripture: the Masoretic Text names Ebal as the site of the altar to be built (27:4), while the Samaritan Pentateuch reads Gerizim instead, consistent with Samaritan tradition's identification of Gerizim, not Jerusalem, as the divinely chosen place of worship. Samaritan manuscripts go further still, incorporating a version of this Gerizim commandment into their own numbering of the Ten Commandments, one of roughly six thousand differences, most trivial, a few doctrinally significant, that separate the Samaritan Pentateuch from the Masoretic Text.

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.