Annual Feasts of Rejoicing
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Meaning of the Festivals
The Passover was followed by the seven days’ Feast of Unleavened
Bread. On the second day of the feast, the firstfruits of the year’s
harvest were presented before God. A sheaf of grain was waved by
the priest before the altar of God, an acknowledgment that all was
His. Not until this ceremony had been performed was the harvest to
be gathered.
Fifty days from the offering of firstfruits came Pentecost, the feast
of harvest. As an expression of gratitude for grain, two loaves baked
with leaven were presented before God. Pentecost occupied but one
day.
In the seventh month came the Feast of Tabernacles, or ingathering.
This feast acknowledged God’s bounty in the products of orchard, olive
grove, and vineyard. It was the crowning festival gathering of the year.
The harvest had been gathered into the granaries, the fruits, oil, and
wine had been stored, and now the people came with their tributes of
thanksgiving to God.
This feast was an occasion of rejoicing. It occured just after the
great Day of Atonement, when assurance had been given that their
iniquity should be remembered no more. At peace with God, the labors
of the harvest ended and the toils of the new year not yet begun, the
people could give themselves up to the sacred, joyous influences of
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the hour. So far as possible, all the household were to attend the feasts,
and to their hospitality the servants, the Levites, the stranger, and the
poor were made welcome.
Like the Passover, the Feast of Tabernacles was commemorative.
In memory of their pilgrim life in the wilderness, the people were
to leave their homes and dwell in booths, or arbors, formed from
the green branches “of goodly trees, branches of palm trees, and the
boughs of thick trees, and willow of the brook.”
Leviticus 23:40
.
At these yearly assemblies the hearts of old and young would be
encouraged in the service of God. Association of the people from
different quarters of the land would strengthen the ties that bound them
to God and to one another. As Israel celebrated the deliverance God
had wrought for their fathers and His miraculous preservation of them
during their journeyings from Egypt, so should we gratefully call to