NOTES for Lev 23:1-44
Today, among Jews, and among Christians too, there is much debate about the meaning of the traditional Hebrew and Jewish feasts. Are they simply the consecration of the ordinary agricultural yearly cycle, or a special philosophy with its own independent meaning? There is no single answer. On the one hand, the subject is certainly the traditional agricultural cycle. Moreover, it is important to take into account that not all the feasts listed are equally ancient.
One can think, for example, that Pesach and Yom Kippur, or some prototype of it, existed among the Hebrews, more precisely among the descendants of Abraham, even before the migration to Egypt, while the other traditional feasts appeared after the conquest of Palestine, when the recent nomads rather quickly settled on the land and mastered agriculture. The matter is quite clearly the consecration of the agricultural year; this was absolutely necessary, otherwise local paganism, already influential, would have gained final victory over Yahwism.
At the same time, in the Yahwist festal cycle one can see the symbolism that, already in Jewish reflection, made it possible to present it as the spiritual path of the people into the promised land, as its actualization repeated again and again every year: from the booths of the feast of Sukkot, symbolizing the wilderness, through Pesach, recalling the Exodus, to the land with its fruits, which God consecrates for His people. On closer examination, the one does not really contradict the other. Indeed, God gave the people the land on the condition that the people remain faithful to Him; here the transfer is not into ownership, but rather into possession, and on quite definite conditions.
These conditions presupposed relations with God, which cannot exist outside the dynamic set by the deeper meanings of the traditional festal cycle; after all, the point is the continual renewal of these relations, without which they inevitably degrade. Meanwhile, the fertility of the land also entered into these relations, and the land was more fertile the more grace-filled it was, the more God's presence showed itself on it. After all, God created not only the human spirit, but also human nature, just as He created all nature in general. That is why it is bound together with a person's spiritual life in such a way that separating them, if possible at all, is possible only for convenience of consideration and description.