The four sons

Within the maggid section of the Haggadah, there is a list of four sons and their questions. The wise son has the longest question, the wicked son, the second longest question, the simple son has a brief question, and the fourth son has not question at all.

The list of the four types of sons appears in slightly different versions in the Mekhilta and the Yerushalmi. The Mekhilta (Bo 18) lists the four sons in a different order with the simple son being mentioned before the evil son. The Yerushalmi (Pesachim 10:4) has more differences, as for instance it refers to the simple son as a fool, and it switches the answers for the wise and simple/ fool son. The answer to the wise son in the Haggadah is the answer to the simple/ foolish son in the Yerushalmi and vice versa. Also in the Yerushalmi the question of the wise son is, "What is the meaning of the testimonies, statues and ordinances which G-d has commanded us?" According to this version, the wise son says "commanded us" instead of "commanded you" as in our Haggadah. The different versions have given rise to much discussion as to the origin of the list of four sons.

David Tzvi Hoffmann (1843-1921, original in German, quoted in Francis below) notes that the four sons do not refer to similar characteristics, as the wise son, the foolish son and the one who cannot ask are intellectual qualities, while the evil son is a moral characterization. Hoffmann argues that the simple son is a positive moral characterization, since the simplicity indicates faith. Hoffmann further suggests that initially there were two separate traditions, one referring to intellectual abilities of three sons, and one referring to moral qualities, two sons, and the two traditions merged into our list of four sons.

This idea that initially there was a smaller group of sons has been followed by other scholars. For example, Zeitlin (1948) also suggested that initially there were three questions, but he removed the son who could not ask because there is no question. I would have thought that if one was going to have only three questions, then one would remove the question of the wise son since his question is recorded in Devarim separate from the other sons whose questions are from Shemot chapters 12 and 13, and more importantly, the wise son's question does not relate to Pesach.

Yet, as noted by Fred Francis (1972), it is more likely that there were always four types of sons, as we find in Proverbs and other wisdom literature that it was common to group people into the four types that are in the Haggadah. Similarly, Shmuel and Ze'ev Safrai (1998) point out that the four types of sons can be found in Persian and Greek literature, and a similar structure of four qualities also appears in Pirkei Avot (5:14-19).

One of the difficulties in understanding the list of four sons is how did Chazal identify the sons from the text in the Torah, as the Torah does not indicate that a specific type of son is being referred to. The identification must be from the question being asked since as noted above the answer to the wise son in the Haggadah is the identical answer to the simple/ foolish son in the Yerushalmi. Possibly, once it was a given that there were four types of sons, Chazal had to determine which of the sons best suited each question. In some cases, this was relatively easy, as the son who could not ask did not have a question, and the simple son asks a simple question "what is this?" Yet, for the wise and evil sons, it is not obvious how the questions enable one to designate one son wise and the other evil.

The wise son asks "what is the meaning of the testimonies, statues and ordinances which G-d has commanded you?" and the evil son asks "what is this service of yours?" What is the difference between these questions? N. Leibowitz (Studies in Shemot, Bo 4) reviews several answers to this question. One answer is based on the Yerushalmi, which quotes the question of the wise son as using the term "us" instead of you as in our version, and hence it has been suggested that the wise son was including himself in the question, while the evil son was excluding himself from the nation. Yet, I am not convinced by this answer as the word "you" in the Torah by the question of the evil son seems to be appropriate and if one reads the question in the Torah independent of this drasha one would not assume that the person asking the question was evil.

A different possibility is that if the designation of the types of sons was a given, as suggested by Francis, then it had to be that one question would be viewed positively and one negatively, the question was just which one. According to this idea there is nothing necessarily intrinsic to the questions that led to their identification with either son. Rather, it could be that there was some small, even relatively insignificant, factor that tipped the balance that one question was to be identified with one son, and then the other question was also determined.

My guess is that the small factor was that the question of the wise son shows more thought, as it refers to testimonies, statues and ordinances, and this small factor was enough to designate the question as being from the wise son. Once one question was determined to be the question of the wise son, then the other question was forced to be the question of the evil son and the question was understood as being a mocking question.

Once the evil son's question was viewed as mocking, then the Haggadah could not use the answer in the Torah (12:27) to the evil son's question since in the Torah there is nothing pejorative about the question which is assigned to the evil son. Instead, the Haggadah records a harsh response to the evil son's question. He is told, "To you, but not to himself; because he (the evil son) has excluded himself from the community, he denied the essential of the faith, and you must blunt his teeth, and tell him: Because of this, G-d did for us in Egypt and had you been there you would not have been redeemed." How did the evil son deny the essentials of the faith?

Safari and Safari (1998, p.123) write that he was mocking the exodus from Egypt. However, if one examines the question in the Torah, the evil son's question was not referring to the exodus from Egypt but was with regard to the korban pesach. Shemot 12:21-25 records that Moshe told the people that they were to offer the korban pesach, to put the blood from the sacrifice on the doorposts of their homes, and then they would not be harmed from the tenth plague. Moshe also told the people that in the future their children would ask what is this work, the evil son’s question, and it is clear that the term work is referring to the offering the korban pesach. Accordingly, if the evil son’s question is understood as being a mocking question, then the evil son was mocking the korban pesach. This means that he would not have offered the sacrifice, and hence he would have been killed during the tenth plague. This sacrifice was to show the Jewish people's faith in G-d and then a denial of the sacrifice showed that the person did not believe in G-d. Accordingly, his denial of the korban pesach separated him from the Jewish people.

The statement for the son who cannot ask a question is that he is told "because of this, G-d did for me when I went out of Egypt." This same phrase was used in reference to the evil son, but as argued above, with regard to the evil son, the Haggadah connected the phrase to the korban pesach. However, with regard to the son who cannot ask, it is more likely that the phrase refers to its context in the Torah. The phrase occurs after the laws of matzot and hametz (13:6,7) which are to remember that G-d took the Jewish people out of Egypt (12:17).

Accordingly, with regard to the son who cannot ask, the statement to him is to teach him about the exodus, the history of his people. How could this son learn about the exodus from this phrase? If the son did not even know enough to ask a question, it is hard to understand what he will learn from this statement. Maybe one can understand that the following section of the Maggid where we review the history of the exodus in detail is the real answer to the son who cannot ask. If this is true, then the four types of son are an introduction to the following section of the maggid.