Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the afikoman, a half-piece of matza that gets "stolen" and hidden during the Seder ceremony and then is found and ritually eaten for dessert, is that its origin is a dictate in the Mishnah, which explicitly states: "One should not have any afikoman after the Passover sacrifice" (Pesahim 10:8). So how did one rabbi's "don't" become everyone's "do"?The Babylonian Talmud was redacted somewhat later than that, and there is no guarantee that its traditions about R. Judah's disciples, who lived centuries earlier, are accurate. But by the time of the Talmud's traditions it seems that that there was no longer a clear memory of the meaning of the word in the context of Passover. Read the whole article for the history of the development of the modern custom.
But actually there is no consensus on what was the afikoman actually was. Some think the original reference was to a dessert after the Passover meal, while others believe it refers to Grecian post-feast debauchery.
It seems that even the students of Rabbi Judah the Prince, who compiled the Mishnah in approximately 200 CE, didn’t know what he meant either, as the Talmud (500 CE) preserves the answers of three of his students to the question “What is an afikoman?
[...]
Reminder: with free registration you can read the full text of a limited number of Haaretz articles each month.