LEVITICUS 23 and 24
Chapter 23 lists all the key festivals and special events that Israel was expected to observe. There were three resting events: the weekly Sabbath, the Sabbath Year (see Ch. 25), and the Year of Jubilee (Ch. 25). The aim was rest and spaciousness, not restriction, and was intended to benefit people, animals, the land, and to rebalance the entire economy and the social structures.
Then there were three key festivals that every citizen had to attend: Passover / Unleavened Bread (in March/April for 8 days); Festival of Weeks / Pentecost (the start of the wheat harvest, in May/June); and Tabernacles (the end of the grape harvest, in Sept/Oct for 8 days).
Finally, there were three individual days of special significance: First Fruits (in March/April, to give God the very first of the new year’s crop); Trumpets (in Sept/Oct., which later became the New Year’s Day); and the Day of Atonement, or ‘Yom Kippur’ (Sept/Oct., which was the only one in which fasting was prescribed).
Some of these Old Covenant events take on a bigger meaning in relation to the New Covenant. For example, First Fruits was a ‘wave’ offering of the first sheaf of the harvest, brought on the day after the Sabbath – i.e. a Sunday – along with a burnt offering lamb. Seven full weeks later – i.e. the fiftieth day from First Fruits was also a Sunday feast called Festival of Weeks / Pentecost, on which was brought offerings of new grain, loaves baked with yeast, seven male lambs, a bull, two rams, a food offering, a male goat and two more lambs. In 1 Corinthians 15:20, Paul tells us: “But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep”. Then, fifty days exactly after the Resurrection Sunday we have Pentecost Sunday, the first ‘harvest’ of the saved and the birth of the Church on earth! Acts 2:41 states: “Those who accepted his [Peter’s] message were baptized, and about three thousand were added to their number that day”.
Some additional festivals were added later in Israel’s history, but these are the basic set that God intended them to observe. It is a feature of the kindness and thoughtfulness of God that he chose to break up the monotony of everyday labour and struggle in society by calling his people together to rest, to feast, and to celebrate. Of course, he himself was the focal point of that celebration every time, but he provided a purpose and a beautiful rhythm to Israel’s annual cycle that must have been very pleasant and enjoyable for all. The days, years and Jubilee year of rest were a mercy and a blessing, and indeed, the Jubilee provided a second chance to every citizen from an economic, a social and a spiritual standpoint – there is nothing like this even in our so-called civilised nations today. God really cares!
Olive oil is very good for you – as evidenced by the fact that the Lord was also keen on it for twelve hours a day! The command to Aaron was to keep the lamps burning continually during the hours of darkness in front of the Ark in the tabernacle. The twelve large loaves of bread – a gift of gratitude from each of the tribes – were a memorial to the inexhaustible supply of manna that God had supplied in the desert and a promise of continued provision thereafter in the Land.
An Israelite blasphemed the name of the Lord – expressly forbidden by the third commandment – and so was judicially condemned to death. Interestingly, the very next verse says that anyone who kills another human must be put to death; but this must have referred to murder – or else the executioners of the blasphemer would themselves have had to be killed! Judicially, the penalty for harming a fellow citizen was to be proportionate to their crime – to prevent escalation into family feuds. Almost certainly the penalties were mostly commuted to fines and recompenses in favour of the victims and their families. Killing someone’s animal only demanded restitution, whereas murdering a human always resulted in death; this underscores the fact that God regards humans as uniquely special, created to be his imagers on earth – and not merely a highly evolved animal as some biologists would have us think!
The Big Picture 