The Feast of Firstfruits

Sacrifices & Feasts of the Old Testament collection. Smallest offering in the calendar, biggest theological weight. Paul makes it the primary image for the resurrection.

Requirements

• A sheaf ('ōmer) of the first-cut barley, waved by the priest.
• Timed to the harvest, not the calendar. Sklar places it "the day after the first Sabbath of harvest" - which is why, unlike Passover and Booths, it has no fixed date.
  • Meaning of "the Sabbath" in v. 11 was disputed between Jewish groups in the Second Temple period, with knock-on consequences for when Pentecost fell. Doesn't affect the theology.
• Accompanied by a male yearling lamb without blemish (burnt offering), two tenths of an ephah of fine flour with oil (grain offering), a quarter hin of wine (drink offering) - 23:12-13.
• A prohibition is attached. Nothing of the new harvest could be eaten, in any form, until this offering had been made.
  • An entire nation's food supply standing ripe in the fields, and nobody touches it until a single armful has been lifted before God.
• No work prohibition, no pilgrimage requirement. A small, local, almost domestic rite in the middle of a major pilgrimage festival.
• Deut 26:1-11 supplies the liturgy - the credo beginning "A wandering Aramean was my father," tying the produce of the land directly to the deliverance from Egypt.

Two Functions, One Human and One Divine

The firstfruits served two purposes, one human and one divine. First, worshippers brought firstfruits in gratitude for God's bounty, trusting that he would provide the rest of the harvest. They thereby acknowledged that the whole harvest came from and belonged to God. Second, God's causing the firstfruits to grow was his pledge that he would bless the remainder of the harvest.

• Morgan & Peterson, The Glory of God and Paul (NSBT)

• That reciprocity is the force of the rite. The sheaf is simultaneously the worshipper's confession that the harvest isn't his, and God's guarantee that the harvest is coming.

Provision in the New Land

• Sklar reads the calendar structurally and this offering sits at the hinge: "While the Passover and Festival of Unleavened Bread celebrated the Lord's deliverance from the old land, the offering of firstfruits and the Festival of Weeks celebrated his provision in the new land."
• Canaanite religion was agricultural religion, and the temptation Hosea names is precisely that Israel would credit Baal for the grain, the wine and the oil (Hos 2:8-9).
  • The firstfruits rite forecloses it. Before a single loaf of the new harvest is baked, the nation has publicly named who grew it.
• The process is the wave rite. The sheaf isn't burned - it's waved. This matters for the NT application: what makes barley into firstfruits isnt its destruction but its being lifted up before God and accepted on behalf of everything still standing in the field. See The Wave & Heave Offerings.

New Testament Fulfilment - 1 Corinthians 15

Four things from Lev 23.

1. Same in Kind

• Morgan & Peterson: "Just as the firstfruits sacrifice was the same in kind as the final harvest, so the resurrection of Jesus, our representative, is the same in kind as ours. We will have glorious resurrection bodies, like Christ's."
• You can't wave a sheaf of barley as the firstfruits of a wheat harvest. The offering only works if it's a sample.
• This is the argument against every spiritualising account of the resurrection. If Christ's resurrection was of one kind and ours will be of another, He isn't the firstfruits of anything.

2. Guarantee, Not Merely Precedent

Christ's resurrection is referred to as 'first fruits' to show not only that his resurrection is the first of more to come, but also that the additional future resurrections must necessarily come because they actually belong to Christ's resurrection itself.

• G. K. Beale, quoted in Morgan & Peterson, The Glory of God and Paul

• Thiselton rebutt: firstfruits is "an agricultural term for the first installment of the harvest that pledges more of the same kind to come… Christ's resurrection, therefore, is a pledge and assurance of the future resurrection of the dead in Christ."
• Why Paul can argue in both directions in vv. 12-19: deny our resurrection and you've denied His, because they're one harvest.

3. An Interval

• Thiselton stresses "each in the properly arranged order" (tagma, a term for ordered military ranks) in v. 23.
• Wellum via the already/not yet: "Just as the firstfruits of the harvest are a foretaste of the full harvest (Lev. 23:9-14), so Christ's resurrection anticipates and ensures the believer's resurrection."
• The rite itself had the interval built in. Sheaf waved, rest of the harvest still standing in the field, unreaped, for weeks. Everybody knew it was coming but nobody had it yet.
  • That's the condition the church lives in, and 1 Cor 15 is Paul explaining to a congregation with overrealised eschatology why the field is still standing.

4. Representative, Not Merely First

• Thiselton: the term "also denotes a representative example of the rest of the crop" - feeds directly into the Adam-Christ typology of vv. 21-22, 45-49.
• Wellum: "Just as Adam was the covenant head of the old creation and by his disobedience brought death to us all, so Christ is the new covenant head who brings life and salvation for all those who believe in him."

Other Firstfruits Language

• The Spirit as "the firstfruits" (Rom 8:23) - a down payment on the redemption of the body.
• Believers as "a kind of firstfruits of his creatures" (Jas 1:18).
• Epaenetus as "the first convert (aparchē) to Christ in Asia" (Rom 16:5).
• And the harvest of Pentecost sits right where the calendar puts it. Ferguson: the three thousand converted that day were "the firstfruits of the gospel in the new epoch."
  • The Christian sequence reproduces Lev 23: lamb, sheaf, harvest. See The Feast of Weeks (Pentecost).

Why it Matters

• Such a small offering. One sheaf. Cut by hand, carried to a priest, lifted up. That's the whole rite. Nothing compared to a whole barley field.
• On the third day after Passover, in a garden outside Jerusalem, one man came out of a tomb. Against the whole cemetery of human history it's nothing.
• Except that it's the first sheaf of it, and the field is already ripe.