Bikkurim

The land of milk and honey, the ladder to heaven, Mount Sinai, the seven heavens—these are some of the themes explored in Shavuot’s food history.

Throughout the Bible, we find that the land of Israel is blessed with grain, wine, and oil (דגן, תירוש, ויצהר). In the Torah, however, the festival of Bikkurim, “First Produce,” only celebrates the wheat harvest. In the Temple Scroll, the Essenes rewrote the biblical festival calendar to include two further bikkurim festivals to celebrate wine and oil.

Deuteronomy directs male landowners to bring the first fruits and recite a declaration. The Rabbis distinguish between the two parts of this commandment, including everyone in the bringing of the produce and excluding Levites, converts, and women only from the declarations. Eventually, even this exclusion largely falls by the wayside.

A look at the Torah and Mishnah’s treatment of the mitzvah of bringing bikkurim (first fruits) to the Temple and its associated requirement to recite a historical confession through five prisms: phenomenological, historical, anthropological, feminist and liturgical.

The rabbis translate the phrase ארמי אובד אבי in Deuteronomy 26:5 “an Aramean tried to destroy my father” and understand it as a reference to Laban, who they claim was worse than Pharaoh. But whereas the biblical Laban can be read either sympathetically or unsympathetically, he is hardly a Pharaoh-like villain, so why demonize him?

The Difference between God’s “Name (שם)” and “Presence (כבוד)”