How many days is unleavened bread to be eaten during the Passover?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

Five passages require seven days of unleavened bread (matzot): Exodus 12:15, Exodus 13:6-7, Exodus 23:15, Leviticus 23:6, and Deuteronomy 16:3 ("seven days shalt thou eat unleavened bread therewith, even the bread of affliction"). Yet Deuteronomy 16:8, only five verses after 16:3, states: "Six days thou shalt eat unleavened bread: and on the seventh day shall be a solemn assembly (עֲצֶרֶת, atzeret) to the LORD thy God." The count flips from seven to six within a single pericope.

The arithmetic harmonization, defended by Keil and Delitzsch, Peter Craigie in the New International Commentary, and Jeffrey Tigay in the JPS Torah Commentary, reads 16:8 as enumerating six ordinary days of eating matzot followed by a distinct seventh day — the atzeret — on which matzot is still eaten but which is set apart as a sacred assembly. On this reading the "six days" are simply the six non-festal days, and the total remains seven days of unleavened bread. The reading is grammatically possible: Hebrew festal calendars do single out terminal days for assembly (cf. Leviticus 23:8, where the seventh day of Matzot is a holy convocation), and "six days" need not deny that bread is eaten on the seventh. To that extent the numerical contradiction is reconcilable.

The harmonization does not, however, dissolve the substantive issue, and it is here that critical analysis and the harmonizers' own data converge. Only Deuteronomy 16:8 introduces "six days" language; the Exodus and Leviticus texts give an unqualified "seven days." The anomaly is therefore localized in Deuteronomy, and Bernard Levinson's study of Deuteronomy's legal hermeneutics argues that Deuteronomy 16 is deliberately rewriting the inherited festival legislation. The older calendars (the Covenant Code in Exodus 23, the Priestly calendar in Leviticus 23, the ritual material in Exodus 12-13) treat Pesach (the paschal sacrifice) and Chag ha-Matzot (the seven-day unleavened-bread festival) as related but distinguishable observances. Deuteronomy 16:1-8 fuses them into a single pilgrimage festival and binds it to the centralized cult "in the place which the LORD shall choose" (16:6-7), requiring worshippers to sacrifice there, then return home. The "six days" of 16:8, on Levinson's analysis, is a vestige of this reworking: once the paschal night and its sacrifice are folded into the festival week and the worshipper departs the sanctuary, the remaining days of matzot are reckoned differently. The friction between "seven days" in 16:3 and "six days" in 16:8 is the seam left by Deuteronomy's editorial combination of distinct earlier observances.

This is why the apologetic and the critical readings point at the same phenomenon under different descriptions. The harmonizer reconciles the numbers by treating the seventh day as a separate liturgical category — but doing so concedes that Deuteronomy's festival structure differs from that of Exodus-Leviticus, which is precisely the source-critical claim. Jacob Milgrom's Anchor Bible treatment of Leviticus 23 and Friedman's source analysis both locate the Deuteronomic calendar in a distinct legislative tradition. The numerical surface tension is therefore genuinely harmonizable; the deeper datum it registers — that Deuteronomy reworked an older seven-day rite into a centralized festival with a differently reckoned week — is not erased by the arithmetic.

Where the critical reading lands: numerically harmonizable, but the six/seven discrepancy is a real trace of Deuteronomy's redactional reshaping of the Passover-Matzot calendar.