The last song of the seder, in Aramaic rather than Hebrew, and the one every child in the room is waiting for. A father buys a goat for two coins; a cat eats the goat; a dog bites the cat; and each verse repeats the whole chain from the top before adding a new link. Ten verses, and the last one ends the chain. Whether it is a nursery rhyme that wandered into the Haggadah or a compressed history of empires depends entirely on who you ask, and nobody at the table needs to decide before singing it.
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Key: Dm · 3 chords used ·Dm · Gm · A
116 BPM · 4/4 · the last thing sung at the seder, and the tempo climbs with every verse · ten verses, each one the previous verse with a new line on top · to reset the chord panel:
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One little goat, one little goat, that father bought for two zuzim.
This is Aramaic, not Hebrew, which is why the definite article comes at the END of a word — גַּדְיָא (gad-ya) is "the kid", with the article as a final vowel. Every noun in the song does it, and once you have heard it four times you have the rule.
And a cat came and ate the goat, that father bought for two zuzim.
The new material is the first three words; everything from דְּזַבִּין (de-za-bin) onward is verse one again. That is the whole engine of the song, and it is why nobody needs the words in front of them after the second verse.
And a dog came and bit the cat that ate the goat, that father bought for two zuzim.
Two words are doing the linking: לְשׁוּנְרָא (le-shun-ra) introduces the new victim and דְּאַָכְלָה (de-ach-la) turns the previous verse into a relative clause. Aramaic builds the chain with one syllable, de-.
And a stick came and beat the dog that bit the cat that ate the goat, that father bought for two zuzim.
By the fourth verse the sentence has three relative clauses stacked inside each other, and it is still perfectly clear. This is the song teaching subordination faster than any grammar table could.
And water came and quenched the fire that burned the stick that beat the dog that bit the cat that ate the goat, that father bought for two zuzim.
Six verses in, the tempo is usually well ahead of where it started and the table is racing to get the whole chain out in one breath. That race is the point of the form.
And an ox came and drank the water that quenched the fire that burned the stick that beat the dog that bit the cat that ate the goat, that father bought for two zuzim.
תוֹרָא (to-ra) is an ox, and the rhyme has been the same vowel since the first line: gadya, shunra, chalba, chutra, nura, maya, tora. Aramaic hands the song an easy rhyme and the song uses it for all it is worth.
And the slaughterer came and slaughtered the ox that drank the water that quenched the fire that burned the stick that beat the dog that bit the cat that ate the goat, that father bought for two zuzim.
הַשׁוֹחֵט (ha-sho-chet) is the first human being to enter the song, and he arrives eight links in, between an ox and the angel of death.
And the angel of death came and slew the slaughterer, who slaughtered the ox that drank the water that quenched the fire that burned the stick that beat the dog that bit the cat that ate the goat, that father bought for two zuzim.
The chain has been running on appetite and violence for eight verses, and this is where it stops being funny. It is also where every child at the table goes quiet, which is presumably the design.
And the Holy One, blessed be He, came and slew the angel of death, who slew the slaughterer, who slaughtered the ox that drank the water that quenched the fire that burned the stick that beat the dog that bit the cat that ate the goat, that father bought for two zuzim.
The last verse is the only one that ends the sequence rather than extending it. Nothing comes after הַקָּדושׁ (ha-ka-dosh), and the song simply stops — which, at the end of a night about a redemption, is an argument made entirely by structure.
♫ Singing notes
It gets faster every verse and it is meant to. By verse ten the table should barely be getting the words out.
Everyone knows the first line and the last few words. The middle of the chain is carried by whoever remembers the order, and the rest join back in at דְּזַבִּין (de-za-bin).
The chords do not change across ten verses. One shape per verse, and let the voices do the accelerating.
Some families do animal noises. This is not in any manuscript and is not going away.
♦ About this song
The language
Aramaic, which is the language of the Talmud and of the Kaddish, not the Hebrew of the rest of the Haggadah. The definite article is a final vowel rather than a prefix, and the relative particle is a single syllable at the front of a word — two features that make the whole song audible as a foreign register even to someone who does not know why.
What it is about
One long tradition reads the chain as the empires that swallowed one another over Israel's history, ending with the one that ends them. Another reads it as a children's counting song, of the same family as the house that Jack built, adopted into the Haggadah because the children were falling asleep. Both readings are old. The song does not choose between them and neither does this page.
Two zuzim
זוּזֵי (zu-zei) is a real coin of the Talmudic period, and two of them is a small sum — the price of a goat, not of an inheritance. The song opens on the smallest possible transaction and ends on the largest possible one.
Hebrew: Haggadah, Nirtzah, Chad Gadya · Pesach Haggadah · Public Domain, via Sefaria, pinned in this repo at content/songs/source/023.json.
English gloss lines authored for this site; the source translation is used as raw material only. Transliteration generated by this site's own engine (assets/translit.js).