Kavanot: הלל המצרי

I’m going to start with looking at the section of ספר תהילים that we usually call “הלל”,‎ תהילים קיג-קיח. Much of what I’m going to say comes from Rabbi Yitzchak Etshalom and his essays on Hallel that was presented as part of his Mikra series for torah.org. As far as I can tell, only the first two (I, II) are available on the site; he was kind enough to email me the others. He says they will be available on yutorah.org “soon”. All errors and misinterpretations are, of course, mine.

The פרקי תהילים that we call “Hallel” is called in the halachic literature “הלל המצרי”, ”The Egyptian Hallel“. The first mention of that name is in the gemara:

The gemara uses the term הלל הגדול for תהילים קלו:

And we will look at that perek in detail (and why it gets to be “גדול”), so the תהילים we say every yom tov needs another name. Rashi explains that it is called הלל המצרי because we read it at the seder.

But that is still hard to understand, since we read הלל הגדול at the seder as well, and we read הלל המצרי on other holidays that are not connected to יציאת מצרים. Others propose that the name comes from תהילים קיד,‎ בצאת ישראל ממצרים. But even that is hard to understand, since הלל הגדול mentions יציאת מצרים as well: למכה מצרים בבכוריהם…ויוצא ישראל מתוכם; כי לעולם חסדו.

So why הלל המצרי?

I think the answer lies in the gemara’s discussion of the origin of these פרקים:

“הלל זה”, in the context here, is referring to what we call הלל. The gemara tells us it was composed by “נביאים שביניהן”:

And we know that there were נביאים among בני ישראל beside Moshe:

The gemara objects: ספר תהילים was written by David!

We cannot imagine all those centuries of celebrating יום טוב in the משכן without some sort of “Hallel”. The gemara goes on to list the historical times when Hallel must have been said:

Note the subtle distinction: there are two ways to recite Hallel: one, at the moment of a miraculous salvation (both at the time of the צרה and at the time of the גאולה). The second, when we remember those historical times (on יום טוב and the like). ואכמ״ל.

But what do we do with the idea that David wrote ספר תהילים, if Hallel was said from the time Israel left Egypt? And how could Israel, when leaving Egypt, sing about the splitting of the Jordan, the exclusive roles of בית אהרן and יהודה, the בית ה׳ in ירושלם? I think the answer is clear, but it is spelled out by the Ramban when he discusses the Rambam’s ספר המצוות. Rambam says that saying Hallel cannot be a מצוה דאורייתא,since it was written by David.

So Ramban would say that there was an obligation to sing “Hallel”, but the text wasn’t defined. David wrote what we call “Hallel”, and established it (or it was established later) as the standard text for “Hallel”. But the gemara says “הַלֵּל זֶה”, which implies to my mind a specific text. So I would understand it like the Netziv:

In other words, הַלֵּל זֶה is much older than David. There was some original text whose final form is in תהילים now. So we have something like the Documentary Hypothesis, but for תהילים, and we can try to piece together what was original and what was added over the centuries. But that will all be guesswork; we have no way of knowing.

But it does answer the question of why call it הלל המצרי: it is the הלל that was composed in its original form back in מצרים, before the Exodus. Ironically, this means that the pasuk בצאת ישראל ממצרים is a red herring; that is part of the text that is not מצרי.

The Netziv says that חז״ל understood this, that there were older “texts” that would be incorporated later into ספרי תנ״ך, and that can help us understand why the text we have is written the way it is:

This is not really a radical idea, that the Jews had texts—whether written or orallly transmitted—that were not “holy enough” to be in the תורה or earlier books of נ״ך, but might have been incorporated in part or as a whole in later books.

It is the way I would look at הלל המצרי—the oldest text of a prayer that we have. Even though it is all praise of ה׳ for saving us, rather than a plea for future salvation, חז״ל said that it was said both עַל כׇּל צָרָה וְצָרָה and וְלִכְשֶׁנִּגְאָלִין, אוֹמְרִים אוֹתוֹ עַל גְּאוּלָּתָן. There is a concept of a “prophetic prayer”—we assume ה׳ will save us, and thank Him for his mercy even as we are begging for it. It’s an important theme in the יום כיפור davening, and is most obvious in Yonah’s prayer from inside the fish:

The past tense here is the perfect: קראתי, not ואקרא. In a narrative text it would be “I had called and You had answered”. In a prayer, it is “I will have called and You will have saved us”. It is an expression of Yonah’s faith inה׳'s mercy. So too, in הלל we say מקימי מעפר דל; מאשפת ירים אביון even from the depths of the אשפת.

So let’s look at the structure of הלל. I assume everyone knows it well: there are 6 chapters, that clearly divide into 5 of הללויה and one of הודו לה׳, as we discussed last time. Two of the chapters we subdivide when we skip half of those chapters in “חצי הלל”, so we could look at הלל as having 8 sections.

The 7 “הללויה” sections are divided by a הללויה between most of the chapters (as well as the inclusio at the beginning and the end), but there is no הללויה between קיד‎ (בצאת ישראל) and קטו‎ (לא לנו). And in fact, in the Aleppo Codex does not have a paragraph break between them:

So I would group those 7 sections not into 5 chapters, but into 4 parts: פרק קיג, then the combined פרקים קיד and קטו, then פרק קטז, and then the concluding 2 psukim of פרק קיז.

The first part, הללו עבדי ה׳; הללו את שם ה׳, is a general introduction; there is no specific event that the psalmist is praising ה׳ for. I would assume that מקימי מעפר דל is metaphoric, not referring to a particular דל or אביון.

The next part, בצאת ישראל ממצרים and לא לנו, are clearly fixed in history, with references to קריעת ים סוף‎ (הים ראה וינס),‎ מעמד הר סיני‎ (ההרים רקדו כאילים), the wandering in the wilderness (ההפכי הצור אגם מים) and entering ארץ ישראל‎ (הירדן תסב לאחור), and then move on to the general mission of בני ישראל to declare the glory of הקב״ה in the world (ואלקינו בשמים…ישראל, בְּטַח בה׳) and their reward (יברך את בית ישראל).

The next part is in first person. The Psalmist is talking about themself (אהבתי כי ישמע), what ה׳ has done for them and the obligation to somehow pay that back (מה אשיב לה׳ כל תגמולוהי עלי). It adds an aspect of הודאה to this section of הלל.

The next part is the shortest in תנ״ך, expressing exactly what הלל means (הללו את ה׳ כל גוים).

The next perek is the second part of הלל, the הודאה‎ (הודו לה׳ כי טוב), that has its own introduction and conclusion.

So with that structure, I would propose that the ur-hallel, the הלל that נְבִיאִים שֶׁבֵּינֵיהֶן תִּקְּנוּ לָהֶן לְיִשְׂרָאֵל, was the introduction and concluding sections, with each generation inserting the שבח to ה׳ that was appropriate (and that our version has בצאת ישראל).

But in the eyes of חז״ל, there has to be more: I elided the quotes of the prooftexts in the gemara.

So, in my model, הלל that was תִּקְּנוּ לָהֶן לְיִשְׂרָאֵל was הללו את שם ה׳, then לא לנו ה׳ לא לנו; כי לשמך תן כבוד, then הללו את ה׳ כל גוים. David (as the compiler of ספר תהילים) puts them together, with his own בצאת ישראל and הודו לה׳, to create what we call הלל.