Shavuot

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.

“When the ram’s horn sounds a long blast, they shall go up on the mountain” (Exodus 19:13). The original intention was for all Israelites to be like priests, and experience YHWH’s revelation on the mountain top. But when YHWH descends and the horn sounds, the people recoil and remain below.

The Shavuot rebellion and consequent burning of the Temples’ porticoes during the time of Augustus Caesar made no impression on subsequent Jewish historiography, despite the later humiliating defeat of the rebellion’s suppressor, Varus, in the Battle of Teutoburg Forest. Another lost memory of Shavuot is the all-night vegetarian feast, prayer, and Torah study of the Therapeutae, an egalitarian ascetic Jewish community in Egypt.

Both Shavuot and Pentecost celebrate the culmination of a fifty-day season in the spring, after Passover and Easter respectively.

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.

And the Re-imagining of the Harvest Festival in the Wake of the Babylonian Exile

Inaugurating TheTorah.com

The exodus story, which is presented as the basis for many of the Torah’s rituals, is a secondary insertion in many of these contexts.

The book of Jubilees is the earliest source to connect Shavuot to the Sinai covenant.

No biblical text states that the Torah was given on Shavuot. What does it mean then that Shavuot is the “time of the giving of our Torah”?

Illustrating four aspects of Shavuot from critical and traditional perspectives.