In the liturgical Christian churches that observe the traditional church year, there is a festival called Pentecost. It is also called Whitsunday because it was customary for newly baptized people to wear white robes on that Sunday. Churches were decorated with green branches and trees. It is regarded as the birthday of the Christian church and the festival of the Holy Spirit. This day has a fascinating backstory that is rooted deep in the Tanakh and Jewish traditions.
The ancient harvest festival of Israel (Exodus 23:16) was also called Shavuot, the Festival of Weeks (Deuteronomy 16:10), because its observance came after a week of weeks, forty-nine full days, but fifty days inclusive, after the offering of the wave sheaf connected with the Festival of Unleavened Bread. Leviticus 23:11 says that the priest was to wave the sheaf of the first fruits of the grain harvest before the Lord "on the morrow after the Sabbath;' and 23:15, 16 says, "You shall count from the morrow after the Sabbath, from the day after you brought the sheaf of the wave offering; seven full weeks shall they be, counting fifty days to the morrow after the seventh Sabbath; then you shall present a cereal offering of new grain to the Lord:'
During the Second Temple period, there was disagreement about the meaning of "the morrow after the Sabbath.' Which Sabbath? The first and last days of the Feast of Unleavened Bread were rest days, but during the seven days of the festival, there would also be a weekly Sabbath. The Pharisees argued that the Sabbath referred to in Leviticus 23:11–15 is the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread. Accordingly, the wave sheaf, or Omer, was presented on the sixteenth day of Nisan, and Shavuot would always come on the sixth day of Sivan, which could be any day of the week. But all other Jewish denominations of the Second Temple period said that the Sabbath that the text refers to was the weekly Sabbath that occurred during Unleavened Bread, which meant that the day in the month of Sivan on which Shavuot fell could vary somewhat, but it would always fall on the same day of the week, namely Sunday. These other groups included the Samaritans, the Sadducees, the Essenes (the people of Qumran), and later, the Karaites. Modern Judaism follows the reckoning of the Pharisees, but many modern scholars believe the other reckoning is correct.
Shavuot was one of the three pilgrimage festivals (chagim), but unlike the other two (Passover/Unleavened Bread and Tabernacles in the Bible), it does not commemorate an event in Israel's history. During the last centuries before the Common Era, however, it began to acquire such associations. Exodus 19 implied that the giving of the Torah and the making of the Covenant occurred in the month of Sivan, and according to 2 Chronicles 15, King Asa of Judah led a renewal of the Covenant also in Sivan. So it was natural to associate these events with Shavuot. Some even said that the Lord's covenants with Noah and with Abraham, as well as the covenant between Jacob and Laban, were accomplished on this day. So Shavuot became the commemoration of the making of the Covenant and the giving of the Law, marking the real birth of the nation.
The forty-nine days between Unleavened Bread and Shavuot also acquired special significance and traditions. It is called the Omer, the countdown to the time of the Sinaitic revelation. At some point, it became a time of mourning, and now it is forbidden to marry or attend concerts during this time. It was a time of expectant waiting, waiting for the revelation of the Torah. Then, when Shavuot comes on the fifty-first day, the synagogue is decorated with green branches and even trees.
In the Greek-speaking Diaspora, the word for Shavuot was Pentekoste, which is the feminine adjective meaning "fiftieth," because it fell on the fiftieth day after the Sabbath of the week of Unleavened Bread (the Greek word for "day" is feminine). From this word, we get the English word Pentecost. This is the word also used in the Greek New Testament (Acts 2:1; 20:16; 1 Corinthians 16:8). Philo of Alexandria, the most important Jewish philosopher of the Diaspora, was contemporary with Yeshua; he wrote that when the Lord spoke from Mount Sinai, His voice changed the air to a flaming fire (Decalogue 33). Philo even wrote, "Then from the midst of the fire that streamed from heaven there sounded forth to their utter amazement a voice, for the flame became articulate speech in the language familiar to the audience, and so clearly and distinctly were the words formed by it that they seemed to see rather than hear them' (Decalogue 46).
This brings us to the beginning of the Christian Church. According to the Gospels, Yeshua died at the time of Passover, or unleavened bread. In fact, according to the Gospel of John (18:39), it was on Passover that he died. The next day was the weekly Sabbath, and the day after that, he arose from death. According to the reckoning of all Jewish groups except the Pharisees, that would be the beginning of the Omer period, the day of the wave offering of the first fruits of the harvest. In his letter to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul made use of all this to speak of Yeshua as the Messiah. He wrote, "Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed" (1 Corinthians 5:7) and called Christ "the first fruits" of the resurrection (15:23).
According to the book of Acts 1:3, Yeshua "presented himself alive after his passion by many proofs, appearing to them [his disciples] during forty days, and speaking of the kingdom of God:' He told them not to depart from Jerusalem, but "to wait for the promise of the Father, which, he said, 'you heard from me, for John baptized with water, but before many days you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit"' (1:4, 5). So they waited expectantly for ten more days, devoting themselves to prayer.
At last, on the fifty-first day, Shavuot came. It was a Sunday, as it always would be according to non-Pharisaic reckoning. The disciples were all together in one place (Acts 2:1). 'And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind... and there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them' (2:2, 3). We cannot fail to recognize the echo of the Sinaitic experience, according to Jewish tradition. But there is more.
'And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance" (verse 4). Another Jewish tradition held that at Sinai, all of the seventy nations heard the voice from the mountain in their own languages (b. Shabbath 88b). On this Shavuot, all the pilgrims that had come to Jerusalem "from every nation under heaven' heard the sound and were astonished, because each one heard the disciples speaking in his own language. 'And they were amazed and wondered, saying, Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear each of us in our own native language?" (2:6, 7). It was a miracle of communication, but was it a miracle of the tongue or a miracle of the ear? Perhaps this question is beside the point when viewed against the background of Jewish tradition, which said that the divine voice at Sinai was a miraculous sound that could even say different things simultaneously.
The New Testament is rich in the use of typology drawn from the First Testament and from Jewish tradition. Just as the divine voice and experience at Sinai confirmed the great covenant with Israel and gave birth to the nation, so now the outpouring of the Holy Spirit confirmed the New Covenant, and the Church, after long gestating, was born. A new exodus has now culminated in a new age. This is how Shavuot became the Pentecost of the Church.
The disciples, thus inspired, stood up and proclaimed their message, and the words of Peter are summarized in Acts 2:14–36. He took as his beginning text Joel 2:28–32: And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams; yea, and on my menservants and my maidservants in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy... And it shall be that whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.
Peter claimed these words were now being fulfilled. But the main burden of his sermon was to tell the story of Yeshua, culminating in his resurrection: "This Yeshua God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses" (Acts 2:32). He then made this significant claim: "Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this which you see and hear" (verse 33). Thus, Pentecost was the day of Yeshua's enthronement in heaven, and the sending of the Holy Spirit was the sign of that.
Though the account in Acts does not make an explicit connection between the experience of the disciples and Sinai, the symbolism pointed in that direction, and later Christian writers did not fail to make the connection. In the New Covenant, the Law, instead of being inscribed on tables of stone, is written on the hearts of believers, as it says in the letter to the Hebrews, chapter 8, which quotes the promise in Jeremiah 31: This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my laws into their minds and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall not teach every one his fellow or every one his brother, saying, "Know the Lord;' for all shall know me, from the least of them to the greatest. For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more. (Hebrews 8:10–12, quoting Jeremiah 31:33–34.)
This is the Christian understanding of Shavuot: that God's revelation is now made available not only to one ethnic group but to "all flesh''; that the law is internalized; that sins are forgiven; and that the final harvest of the world is the resurrection of all who believe.
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