Leviticus23chapter 23

Leviticus 23:4-6

Verse 4 begins the list again, and the yearly dates open with two observances on consecutive days. The Passover is one evening, at twilight on the fourteenth day of the first month, and the Feast of Unleavened Bread is the week beginning on the fifteenth. At 1 Corinthians 5:7 Paul calls Christ the Passover sacrificed for us, and on that ground tells the Corinthians to keep the feast.

Albert Barnes reads the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread as distinct feasts, as Exodus 12 and Numbers 28 also treat them. Exodus 12:6 fixes the same hour. By the Hebrew reckoning the fifteenth, when verse 6 opens the feast, began on the evening of the fourteenth.

Albert Barnes runs the feast from the fifteenth to the twenty-first, with a sacred assembly on the first day and the last. The seven days of unleavened bread repeat Exodus 12:15. Verses 7 and 8 set the rest and the offerings for the week.

Leviticus 23:7-9

The week opens and closes with a sacred assembly, with an offering made by fire each day. The chapter bars regular work on its feast days but all work on the Sabbath at verse 3 and the Day of Atonement at verses 28 and 31. John Gill reads the lighter rule as allowing the preparing of food, so the two days of complete rest are guarded most closely.

The chapter names the fire offering for each of the seven days and leaves its contents to Numbers 28. The seventh day mirrors the first. Matthew Henry reads a sacred assembly as gathering whoever could reach the tabernacle door, while others met elsewhere for prayer, praise and the reading of the law.

A fresh word from the LORD opens the harvest laws. John Gill reads this formula as a preface that marks off one precept from the next, and no new one stands before the fiftieth day at verse 15. Gill, following the medieval commentator Aben Ezra, gives the reason: the fiftieth day depended on the sheaf and was reckoned from it.

Leviticus 23:10-11

This law waits for a harvest in the land, and it dates the sheaf only as "the day after the Sabbath". The Sadducees read the weekly Sabbath, putting the sheaf on a first day, and the Pharisees read the first day of Unleavened Bread, fixing it to the sixteenth. The Mishnah records at Menahot 10:3 that the sheaf was cut in public to show the Boethusian reading refused.

wave the sheaf before the Lord: Adam Clarke describes the waving as moving the sheaf to and fro before the people, to turn their minds to the providence that gave the harvest and stir their thanks. The priest waves it for the whole people. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read the one sheaf as sanctifying the whole harvest, and cite Romans 11:16.

Leviticus 23:12-14

A lamb, fine flour mixed with oil and a quarter hin of wine go up with the sheaf, so the first grain is never presented alone. Verse 14 forbids bread, roasted grain and new grain until the offering has been brought. Paul calls the risen Christ the firstfruits at 1 Corinthians 15:20 and 15:23, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown observe that he rose on the day the sheaf was waved.

The grain offering is two-tenths of an ephah, double the tenth that goes with a lamb. John Wesley reads one tenth as the lamb's usual portion and the other as belonging to this feast, a thanksgiving for the fruits of the earth. The loaves of verse 17 use the same measure, two-tenths each.

John Gill notes that the unleavened bread of the feast week could not be baked from the new grain until the sheaf had been offered. Adam Clarke reports that parched ears and green ears, fried, were still eaten by the Arabs of the Holy Land in his day. The ban covered the commonest food of the field.

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.

Adam Clarke sets the count from the sixteenth day of the first month to the sixth of the third. He adds that the fiftieth day is the one called Pentecost, a name taken from the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament. The new grain is the wheat harvest.

The two loaves come from the people's dwellings and are "baked with leaven", though leaven was barred at Unleavened Bread fifty days earlier, and the text gives no reason. Matthew Henry and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read them as ordinary daily bread, given in thanks for the wheat harvest rather than in memory of Egypt's haste. The verse itself calls them only "the firstfruits to 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 4:14 requires a young bull when the congregation sins, and here a male goat serves. John Wesley explains the difference: chapter 4 deals with a particular sin of the people, and this goat covers their sins in general. The two lambs are the chapter's only peace offering.

holy to the Lord for the priest: John Gill, following the medieval Jewish commentators Jarchi and Ben Gersom, holds that the two lambs were waved alive together with the loaves. The waving joins the peace offering of verse 19 to the bread of verse 17. Both then pass to the priest.

Leviticus 23:21-23

After the fiftieth day's sacred assembly, verse 22 sets a farming law inside the calendar. The edges of the field and the gleanings are left for the poor and the foreign resident, repeating Leviticus 19:9 and 19:10. Matthew Henry read harvest joy as owing something to the poor, and the placing makes that point by handing a harvest feast a rule about who else eats.

John Wesley calls the verse an excursion, a return to a law already given, set down in the middle of a list of feasts. He reads the placing as a lesson that God sets little value on devotion unaccompanied by charity to men. It sits between the wheat harvest and the seventh month.

A new word from the LORD opens the seventh month. Three of the chapter's annual appointed times fall in it: trumpets, atonement and tabernacles. Matthew Henry read the trumpet of verse 24 as a figure of the preaching of the gospel, and cites the great trumpet of Isaiah 27.

Leviticus 23:24-26

The seventh month opens with a day announced by trumpet blasts, and the text does not say what it marks. Every other appointed time is tied to a harvest, a rite or the exodus, but this one has only a sound and a date. Adam Clarke ties it to the start of the civil year and reports some reading it as the anniversary of creation, and the verse settles neither.

The fire offering is left unspecified here. John Gill identifies it as a burnt offering and sends the reader to Numbers 29:1 for what it was. Gill defines regular work as the labour servants did on other days, such as farming or a trade.

John Gill reads the formula here as the divider between the Day of Atonement and the blowing of trumpets, and it returns at verse 33 before Tabernacles. The Day of Atonement falls nine days after the trumpets. Each of the seventh month's three dates gets its own heading.

Leviticus 23:27-28

the tenth day of this seventh month: 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.

John Gill sets this day's rest level with the weekly Sabbath. The medieval commentator Aben Ezra read for you as for Israel only. Gill answers with 1 John 2:2, where the atonement of Christ reaches the sins of the whole world.

Leviticus 23:29-33

These are the only penalties in the chapter, and there are two. Anyone who does not humble himself is cut off from his people, and anyone who works hears the LORD speaking in the first person, "I will destroy" him. Verse 32 times the day from the evening of the ninth until the following evening, the plainest statement of evening-to-evening reckoning in Leviticus.

Verse 29 punishes the man who will not humble himself, and verse 30 the man who works. John Gill reads the cutting off as an untimely death by the hand of God, and the Targum of Jonathan, an Aramaic paraphrase, names the pestilence. Here God names Himself as the one who acts.

Verses 28, 30 and 31 all turn on work. Wherever you live carries the day into every town, as John Wesley says of the Sabbath at verse 3. The rites of chapter 16 stayed at the sanctuary, while the rest reached every house.

John Wesley ties the evening start to the memory of creation, and notes that Christians came to begin their days with the morning, in memory of the resurrection of Christ. Only verse 3 shares the title Sabbath of complete rest.

The chapter's last heading introduces the Feast of Tabernacles. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown describe how the feast was kept, with the solid branches built into booths and the lighter ones carried in procession by men singing psalms. They cried Hosanna, a plea for salvation taken from Psalm 118.

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.

The chapter's two weeks of feasting open alike, on the fifteenth day of the first month and of the seventh. Each opens with a sacred assembly and no regular work. John Gill notes that the eighth day of verse 36 is kept as this first day is.

it is a solemn assembly: Numbers 29:12-38 sets out a changing succession of sacrifices across the seven days, and John Gill notes that the eighth day receives one bullock only. Albert Barnes reads that change as marking the solemn assembly off from the festal week. Gill calls it an assembly of all the people.

Leviticus 23:37-38

The list closes in its opening words, and verse 38 sets it beside Sabbaths, gifts, vows and freewill offerings as a floor under worship. Chuck Missler, Troy Brewer, Chuck Pierce and Jonathan Cahn read the seven feasts as prophecy, the autumn feasts still ahead. The New Testament states less: Christ our Passover at 1 Corinthians 5:7, the firstfruits at 15:20, and the fiftieth-day outpouring at Acts 2:1.

John Wesley reads the verse as a guard: a feast added its own offerings and took nothing from the Sabbath's. He notes that the weekly days are called the LORD's Sabbaths to set them above feast days that were sometimes given the same name. Albert Barnes places the Sabbath offerings at Numbers 28:9-10.

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.

Adam Clarke reports that the Jews take the fruit of majestic trees as the citron and the leafy boughs as the myrtle. John Wesley draws the trees from Nehemiah 8:15-16 and names the olive, the myrtle and the pine. Wesley adds that these were plentiful and kept their green.

Verse 39 set the feast after the produce of the land was gathered, and this verse fixes it to the seventh month every year. Matthew Henry reports the Jewish tradition that the joy was kept with dancing, hymns and instruments. Elders and wise men joined it in the sanctuary court.

Leviticus 23:42-44

This is the one appointed time whose reason the text states outright, "so that your descendants may know that I made the Israelites dwell in booths". A settled nation with houses leaves them for a week every year so that its children will ask why. A chapter spoken almost entirely by God ends with Moses announcing the feasts to the people who will keep them.

Albert Barnes sets the booth beside the tent Israel lived in through the wilderness, both being temporary places of camp life, and reads the seven days as a figure of the forty years. Matthew Henry applies the booth to the Christian. He reads it as a call to sit loose to this world, with no continuing city here, and cites Hebrews 13.

Moses carries out the order of verse 2. Matthew Henry reads the last feast he announced, Tabernacles, as the figure under which Zechariah 14 foretells the worship of God in the age of the New Testament.