🕯️ Feasts of Israel

The founding feast of Israel. A spotless lamb was slain and its blood painted on the doorposts so the angel of death would pass over that house. It marks the night God delivered Israel from slavery in Egypt and is the anchor of the whole redemptive calendar.

A seven-day feast immediately following Passover in which all leaven (a picture of sin and corruption) was purged from the home. Israel ate the unleavened bread of haste, remembering their sudden departure from Egypt.

On the day after the Sabbath of Passover week, the first sheaf of the barley harvest was waved before the LORD — a pledge and guarantee that the full harvest was coming.

Counted fifty days from Firstfruits, this feast celebrated the wheat harvest with two loaves baked with leaven. Jewish tradition also links it to the giving of the Law at Sinai.

A day announced by the blowing of the shofar — a sacred assembly and a call to awaken, gather, and prepare. It opens the solemn fall season leading to the Day of Atonement.

The holiest day of the year. The high priest entered the Most Holy Place with sacrificial blood to make atonement for the nation’s sin, and a scapegoat was sent away bearing the people’s guilt into the wilderness.

A joyful seven-day harvest festival when Israel lived in temporary booths, remembering God’s provision during the wilderness wandering and celebrating the final ingathering of the year.

The ‘Eighth Day of Assembly’ follows immediately after the seven days of Tabernacles and is a solemn assembly all its own — the LORD drawing his people close for one final day, closing the entire sacred year. It is commanded in Leviticus alongside the other feasts, though it is widely overlooked. In Israel today it merges with Simchat Torah (Rejoicing in the Torah), when the annual reading cycle is completed and immediately restarted with great celebration.

The Feast of Dedication commemorates the cleansing and rededication of the temple after Antiochus IV desecrated it, during the Maccabean period between the Testaments.

Established in the book of Esther, Purim celebrates the deliverance of the Jewish people from Haman’s plot to destroy them — a feast of reversal, where mourning turned to joy.

The weekly day of rest, rooted in creation itself, when God rested on the seventh day. It was a sign of the covenant — a regular ceasing from work to remember that life and provision come from God, not from human labour.

The start of each month was marked with trumpet blasts and special offerings, consecrating the new month to God and ordering Israel’s sacred calendar around his appointed times.

Every seventh year the land was to rest — no sowing or reaping — and debts among Israelites were released. It was a corporate act of trust that God would provide in the sixth year enough for three.

After seven sabbatical cycles, the fiftieth year was announced by the ram’s horn on the Day of Atonement: liberty proclaimed throughout the land, debts cancelled, slaves freed, and ancestral land returned to its families — the great reset of society.

The most solemn fast in the Jewish calendar. The ninth of Av is the date on which tradition records the destruction of both Solomon’s Temple (586 BC) and Herod’s Temple (AD 70), as well as other national catastrophes across the centuries. Zechariah calls it ‘the fast of the fifth month’ and describes Israel weeping and mourning year after year over the desolation of the house of God.

‘The fast of the fourth month’ (Zechariah 8:19). This fast marks the breaching of Jerusalem’s walls before the Temple’s destruction. Tradition also links it to the day Moses shattered the first tablets of the Law upon seeing the golden calf. It opens the ‘Three Weeks’ of mourning that culminate in Tisha B’Av.

‘The fast of the seventh month’ (Zechariah 8:19). Gedaliah was the Jewish governor appointed by Babylon to oversee the surviving remnant after Jerusalem fell. His assassination extinguished the last ember of self-governance in the land, driving the remaining community into exile in Egypt. The fast mourns the final collapse of the kingdom.

‘The fast of the tenth month’ (Zechariah 8:19). On this date Nebuchadnezzar began his siege of Jerusalem. God told Ezekiel to record the day precisely: ‘The king of Babylon set himself against Jerusalem this same day.’ The siege that began here would end in the destruction mourned on Tisha B’Av — this fast marks the very first blow against the city.

On the thirteenth of Adar, the day before Purim, Jews observe the fast that Esther called before she risked her life to approach the king uninvited. Her words stand as one of the most courageous in Scripture: ‘So will I go in unto the king, which is not according to the law: and if I perish, I perish.’ The fast remembers the solemn cost that preceded the deliverance.