Leviticus23chapter 23

Leviticus 23:1-3

The calendar is announced as God's own before it is Israel's, since verse 2 calls them my feasts and leaves the people only the proclaiming of them. Holy convocation occurs eleven times in Leviticus and every one of those eleven falls in this chapter. The weekly sabbath is set at the head of a list of annual dates, so the first appointed time named is the one that comes round every seventh day.

Leviticus 23:4-6

Verse 4 begins the list again, and the annual dates open with two observances on consecutive days. The passover is a single evening, the fourteenth day of the first month at even, and the feast of unleavened bread is the week that runs from the fifteenth. Paul takes up the first of them plainly at 1 Corinthians 5:7, where Christ our passover is sacrificed for us, and he tells the Corinthians on that ground to keep the feast.

Leviticus 23:7-9

The week is bracketed by two convocations, the first day and the seventh, with an offering made by fire on all seven days. The chapter holds two grades of rest apart and keeps them apart throughout: no servile work on the feast days at verses 7, 8, 21, 25, 35 and 36, and no work at all on the weekly sabbath at verse 3 and on the day of atonement at verses 28 and 31. John Gill reads the lighter grade as leaving open what a household needs for its food, so the two days of complete rest are the two the chapter guards most closely.

Leviticus 23:10-11

This is the first law in the chapter that cannot be kept where Israel is standing, since it waits on a harvest in a land they have not entered. The date is given by a relation rather than by a number, on the morrow after the sabbath, and which sabbath is meant was argued for centuries. The Sadducees read the weekly sabbath that fell inside the feast week, which puts the sheaf always on a first day; the Pharisees read the first day of unleavened bread, which fixes it to the sixteenth. The Mishnah, the rabbinic law code compiled about 200 AD, records at Menahot 10:3 that the sheaf was cut in public so the Boethusian reading could be seen to be refused.

Leviticus 23:12-14

A lamb, fine flour with oil and a fourth part of an hin of wine go up with the sheaf, so the first of the grain is never presented on its own. Nothing of the new crop may be eaten until the offering has gone in, and verse 14 names bread, parched corn and green ears to close every way round it. Paul calls Christ the firstfruits of them that slept at 1 Corinthians 15:20 and repeats it at 15:23, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown observe that he rose on the day the sheaf was waved.

Leviticus 23:15-16

This is the one appointed time in the chapter with no date of its own. It is located by counting, seven sabbaths complete and then the morrow, fifty days measured out from the sheaf, so the day arrives only because somebody kept count. Acts 2:1 places the outpouring of the Spirit on the day when this fiftieth day was fully come.

Leviticus 23:17

Two loaves are brought out of the people's own houses and they shall be baken with leaven. Leaven was put out of every house at the passover four chapters earlier, it is required here fifty days later, and the text gives no reason for the change. Matthew Henry and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown both read these as the ordinary leavened bread of daily food, offered in thanks for the wheat harvest rather than in memory of the haste of Egypt. The verse itself says only that they are the firstfruits unto the LORD.

Leviticus 23:18-20

The fiftieth day carries the fullest set of offerings named for any single day in the chapter: burnt, meat, drink, sin and peace offerings all on one date. The two loaves are waved with two live lambs, and loaves and lambs alike end as holy to the LORD for the priest. The bread of the wheat harvest travels from a farmer's house to a priest's table, which is where the offering of verse 17 actually finishes.

Leviticus 23:21-23

The fiftieth day closes as a convocation and a statute for ever, and then verse 22 sets a farming law in the middle of a calendar. The corners of the field and the gleanings are left for the poor and for the stranger, repeating Leviticus 19:9 and 19:10, and the sentence ends I am the LORD your God, which is the reason this book gives for most of what it commands. Matthew Henry read the joy of harvest as owing something to the poor, and the placing does the arguing here, since a harvest feast is handed a rule about who else eats from that harvest.

Leviticus 23:24-26

The seventh month opens with a memorial of blowing of trumpets, and the text does not say what is being remembered. Every other appointed time here is tied to a harvest, to a rite or to the exodus, and this one is given a sound and a date and nothing further. Adam Clarke connects it to the beginning of the civil year and reports that some read it as the anniversary of creation; the verse settles neither, and the silence is what an honest note hands a reader.

Leviticus 23:27-28

Chapter 16 arrives in the calendar as a date. Nothing here repeats the goats, the blood or the linen garments, and what the people are handed instead is a day to afflict their souls and an order to do no work. The one solemnity in the list that is a fast sits among feasts and is called by the same word, which Jamieson, Fausset and Brown render as an appointed time or season of assembling rather than a celebration.

Leviticus 23:29-33

These are the only penalties attached to anything in the chapter, and there are two of them. A man who is not afflicted on that day is cut off from among his people, and a man who works meets the LORD speaking in the first person, the same soul will I destroy. Verse 32 then times the day from even unto even, beginning on the evening of the ninth, which states the evening-to-evening reckoning more plainly than anywhere else in Leviticus.

Leviticus 23:34-36

Tabernacles runs seven days and then adds an eighth. The eighth day is a convocation and a solemn assembly of its own, standing outside the seven it follows, and the chapter gives it no rite beyond an offering made by fire. John 7:2 sets Jesus at this feast and John 7:37 has him standing and crying on the last day, that great day, with an offer of living water.

Leviticus 23:37-38

The list closes in the words it opened with, and verse 38 then sets all of it beside the sabbaths, the gifts, the vows and the freewill offerings, so the calendar is a floor under Israel's worship rather than the whole of it. Reading the seven appointed times as a calendar of prophecy, with the spring feasts answered at the first coming and the autumn feasts still ahead, is a tradition taught by Chuck Missler, Troy Brewer, Chuck Pierce and Jonathan Cahn. What the New Testament states is narrower and firmer: 1 Corinthians 5:7 calls Christ our passover, 1 Corinthians 15:20 calls him the firstfruits of them that slept, and Acts 2:1 places the outpouring on the fiftieth day.

Leviticus 23:39-41

The chapter closed its list at verse 37 and then returns to tabernacles to give more. Boughs of goodly trees, palm branches, thick trees and willows of the brook are gathered, and the people are told to rejoice before the LORD their God seven days. The word rejoice occurs once in the whole of Leviticus, here at verse 40, in a book otherwise given to blood, quarantine and penalties.

Leviticus 23:42-44

This is the one appointed time in the chapter whose reason the text states outright, that your generations may know that I made the children of Israel to dwell in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt. A settled nation with houses is ordered out of them for a week every year so that its children will ask why. The chapter that is almost entirely God speaking ends with a man speaking, since verse 44 has Moses declaring the feasts of the LORD to the people who will keep them.