The Feast of Weeks (Pentecost)

Sacrifices & Feasts of the Old Testament collection. Fifty days after the firstfruits sheaf, at the wheat harvest. Deut 16 ties it to Egypt and to generous inclusion of the vulnerable, which sets it apart from the other harvest feasts. Sinai association is later than the OT, but the NT sets up its own Sinai-Pentecost parallel.

Requirements

• No fixed date. Block lists this first among its distinctives: "It is never assigned a precise date on the religious calendar." Counting begins from the firstfruits sheaf and runs seven weeks > Shavuot, "weeks" > Greek pentēkostē, "fiftieth."
• Two loaves, baked with leaven (23:17). One of only two contexts where leaven appears in an approved offering.
  • Sklar: leavened bread accompanied praise fellowship offerings and was "like the Israelites' normal fare," so expressed thanksgiving for daily bread.
  • Process: couldn't go on the altar (Lev 2:11), so the priest waved the loaves to dedicate them, then received them back. See The Wave & Heave Offerings.
• Extensive additional offerings (23:18-19): seven lambs, a bull, two rams (burnt) with grain and drink offerings, a male goat (purification), two lambs (fellowship).
  • Sklar: "Very few households would have been able to provide so many offerings, and this makes it likely that the offerings were brought by the entire community."
  • Through these the Israelites achieved atonement, expressed praise, and celebrated covenant fellowship in a single day.
• Pilgrimage feast (Deut 16:16); families attended in practice (16:11). Partial work prohibition (23:21).
• Gleaning law repeated (23:22). Lev 19:9-10 restated here minus the vineyard clause - grapes ripen later.
  • Sklar: "The repetition of the verses here reminded the Israelites that all they have is a gift from the Lord and therefore to be generously shared."

An Agricultural Feast with a Redemptive Rationale

• Block identifies the anomaly and finds it deliberate. Of all the major festivals, Weeks "is never associated with specific events in their history. Instead, it has the appearance of an agricultural festival." Called Festival of Harvest (Exod 23:16) and Day of Firstfruits (Num 28:26).
• And yet Deut 16:12 attaches it to Egypt: "You shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt."

By associating what was otherwise an agricultural festival with Egypt, he highlights the conviction that everything Israel has is to be received as a gift. Like his provision of salvation, Yahweh's provision of harvest calls for free and spontaneous expressions of gratitude.

• Daniel I. Block, Deuteronomy (NIVAC)

Generosity Is the Shape of the Celebration

Three features from Deuteronomy's version:

• Offering is proportionate to the harvest and freely given. Block: "those who are genuinely grateful for the grace of God in the harvest will be liberal in their offerings."
• Guest list is large:

with greater enthusiasm than earlier invitations, the catalogue of participants includes every imaginable member of the community. Combating natural tendencies toward marginalization of outsiders, the list draws all of them, beginning with members of the household, but including outsiders to the community and the economically vulnerable.

• Daniel I. Block, Deuteronomy (NIVAC)

• Son, daughter, male and female servant, Levite, sojourner, fatherless, widow. That's the feast. And the gleaning law in Lev 23:22 makes the same point: you don't harvest to the edges.

The Sinai Association

• Second Temple sources associate Pentecost with the giving of the law. Köstenberger, Alexander & Carson note it as established background: "Second-temple Jews regarded it as the day when God gave the law to Moses on Mount Sinai."
• Keener: DSS celebrate Pentecost as a covenant-renewal feast, but texts explicitly linking it to Sinai "are later than Acts."
  • Whether Luke intends the parallel he reports the debate: "Some commentators have suggested that Luke intends a parallel between Moses' giving the law and Jesus' giving the Spirit, but other scholars argue that little in Acts 2 suggests that Luke makes the connection."
  • Possibly Luke's primary reason: "Perhaps Luke's real or at least main reason for mentioning the feast, however, is the crowd it would have drawn in terms of both size and geographic diversity."
• Ferguson grants the uncertainty and then makes the stronger argument - the parallel is established in the NT regardless:

even if that association in Judaism is questioned, a Sinai-Pentecost parallel is established in the New Testament itself. The revelation of God to Moses at Sinai had been accompanied by fire, wind and a divine tongue (Heb. 12:18-21). Moses had ascended the mountain. When he descended he had in his possession the Ten Commandments, the law of God. Christ too had recently ascended. At Pentecost he comes down, not with the law written on tablets of clay, but with the gift of his own Spirit to write the law in the hearts of believers.

• Sinclair B. Ferguson, The Holy Spirit

• Anchors the parallel in Heb 12 rather than in rabbinic sources.
• Hold the Sinai parallel on Ferguson's grounds, not on the Second Temple evidence alone.

New Testament Fulfilment

The Harvest Reading Is Peter's

• Ferguson: "Pentecost was the fiftieth day from the Passover. It was the Feast of Firstfruits, celebrating the offering of the harvest. There is, therefore, a certain appropriateness in the large number and wide ethnic representation of converts on that day, the firstfruits of the gospel in the new epoch."
• Three thousand baptised in a day (Acts 2:41). Luke's own word for it is a harvest number.
• And the two leavened loaves of Lev 23:17, ordinary bread rather than the pure unleavened kind, are a fitting sign for a people gathered from the nations.
• Köstenberger, Alexander & Carson trace the universalising:
  • Jews "from every nation under heaven" (2:5)
  • list of nations in vv. 9-12 bearing "a marked similarity to the Jewish table of nations based on Genesis 10"
  • Peter extends the promise to "all who are far off" (2:39)
  • The harvest isn't finished on the day. It's started.

The Obsolescence of the Mosaic Economy

Turns on what Joel's prophecy actually promises.

• Under the old covenant the Spirit's characteristic effect was prophecy, and it was "limited to only a few, almost exclusively men."
• Joel promises sons and daughters, young and old, male and female servants.

Implied in this is the principle that the divinely given, but temporary, distinguishing features of the Mosaic covenantal economy were now rendered obsolete… in the new covenant, the boundaries of the Mosaic economy within which the Spirit had, by and large, previously manifested himself are rendered obsolete.

• Sinclair B. Ferguson, The Holy Spirit

• Makes Pentecost the fulfilment of a longing Moses himself expressed and couldn't satisfy: "Would that all the LORD's people were prophets, that the LORD would put his Spirit on them!" (Num 11:29). Ferguson: "Now it was a reality."
• Ferguson: "Appropriately for this day, Peter's exposition indicates that the peculiarly Mosaic economy is rendered obsolete. The end of the Mosaic epoch and the universal preaching and reception of the gospel are two sides of the same coin."
  • On the day the law was traditionally remembered as given, the law was written on hearts instead of stone - Jer 31:31-34.

Babel Reversed

Nations list, languages, crowd from every nation under heaven, a scattering that becomes a gathering. Developed in Babel, Pentecost, and the Reversal of Language Division

Should Christians Keep It?

• No, in the sense that Col 2:16 removes the obligation along with the rest of the festival calendar. Argument at The Sabbath.
• Obligation and wisdom are different, and the church has kept Pentecost from very early on for the same reason it kept Easter: because something happened.
  • Easter and Pentecost observance "may well have gone back to the first century," unlike Christmas and Epiphany which developed much later.
• We don't treat the day as an annual attempt to recreate Acts 2.
  • The feast Israel kept was a harvest festival, and the appropriate response to a harvest is gratitude and generosity, not an effort to make the wheat grow again.
  • The Spirit was given. He has not been withdrawn.