Harvest Feasts in the Bible · Unleavened Bread, Weeks and Booths Explained with Pictures
In the previous post we looked at the history of Thanksgiving, which is said to have begun in 1621 at Plymouth, in what is now the United States. But giving thanks to God for the crops gathered from the field is far older than that. The people of Israel in the Bible were already doing it every year.
In this post we walk through the three harvest feasts of the Bible one by one, so that even someone hearing about them for the first time can follow along. Whenever an unfamiliar word comes up, we explain it right there.
๐ค The pictures in this post were drawn with AI (ChatGPT) based on the Bible text and records of farming in ancient Israel. They are released under CC0 1.0 (the creator has given up copyright so that anyone may use them freely), so you may use them without credit. All Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain).
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First, What Is a “Feast”?
In the Bible, a feast is a special day kept whenever a set time comes around each year. Just as we have holidays like New Year’s Day that return every year, the people of Israel in the Bible also had days they kept every year.
Among them were feasts that God told Israel to keep without fail, three times a year. Exodus puts it like this.
What is remarkable is that all three of them fall at the times when grain and fruit are gathered, that is, at harvest time. Every time they brought in a harvest, the Israelites gathered before God and gave thanks. So these three feasts can be called the harvest thanksgiving of the Bible, long before today’s Thanksgiving.
To see why the three feasts came when they did, we first need to know how farming in Israel was different from farming in Korea.
1. A Farming Year in Ancient Israel
In Korea, seeds are sown in spring and crops are gathered in autumn. That is why Thanksgiving is kept in autumn too. But things were different in Israel.
In Israel almost no rain falls in summer; the rain comes from autumn to spring. So when the autumn rain softens the ground, seed is sown, the grain grows through the winter, and it is harvested in spring. The “former rain” and “latter rain” the Bible speaks of are exactly these rains, falling at sowing time and before the harvest (Deuteronomy 11:14).
This order has also survived in a real artifact. In 1908 a stone tablet about the size of a palm was found at Gezer, an ancient city of Israel. It seems to have been carved about 3,000 years ago (around the 10th century BC), and it is called the Gezer Calendar. On it, the farm work of the year is written down in order.
- Two months of gathering (autumn, olives)
- Two months of sowing (grain)
- Two months of late sowing
- One month of cutting flax (a plant used to make cloth)
- One month of barley harvest
- One month of harvest and feasting (wheat)
- Two months of tending the vines
- One month of summer fruit
The tablet is now in the Istanbul Archaeology Museums in Tรผrkiye. Many scholars read the “harvest and feasting” line as the time of the wheat harvest.
In short, Israel’s harvests came in this order: barley in spring, wheat in early summer, and fruit such as grapes and olives from summer into autumn. Each of the three feasts matches one of these three harvests.
2. The Three Feasts at a Glance
As the picture shows, the three feasts come when the barley harvest begins (the Feast of Unleavened Bread), when the wheat is harvested (the Feast of Weeks), and when the threshing of grain and the grape harvest are finished (the Feast of Booths). Now let us look at each one closely.
3. The First Feast: Unleavened Bread and “the Sheaf of the First Fruits”
The Feast of Unleavened Bread was kept for seven days, starting on the 15th day of the first month of Israel’s calendar. On today’s calendar that is around March or April. “Unleavened” means made without leaven (yeast, which makes bread rise). Remembering the day they hurried out of Egypt, the people of Israel ate flat bread that had not risen. It is joined to Passover, which is kept on the evening just before, so the two are sometimes named together.
Around this time the barley in the fields begins to turn golden. Then, before anything else, God told them to do this.
A priest lifts up the first sheaf of barley and waves it before God.
A sheaf is an armful of cut grain stalks tied together, with the heads of grain still on them. A priest was a person whose work was to lead worship and offer sacrifices to God, and the Sabbath is the day of rest that comes around every seventh day, which is Saturday on today’s calendar. Yahweh is the name of God used in this translation. So this command means: bring the very first bundle of barley from the year’s harvest to God first.
There is an even more striking command in verse 14. Until this first sheaf had been offered, they were not to eat any of the new grain.
Even if they were hungry, even with ripe grain right in front of them, they offered to God first and only then ate. It was a way of confessing, “This grain was given to us by God.”
4. The Second Feast: Counting Seven Weeks
From the day the first sheaf was offered, the Israelites began counting the days. When seven weeks, that is 49 days, had passed, they kept the second feast on the next day, the 50th day.
Because seven weeks were counted, this feast is called the Feast of Weeks (seven times seven). On today’s calendar it falls around May or June, when the barley harvest is over and the wheat is being harvested.
At the barley harvest a sheaf of grain was offered just as it was, but at the Feast of Weeks they baked two loaves of bread from the newly harvested wheat and offered them.
Two loaves were baked from flour ground from the newly harvested wheat.
During the Feast of Unleavened Bread they ate bread without yeast, but this time the bread was made to rise with yeast. In the quotation, a “meal offering” is a gift of grain to God, a “wave offering” is a gift lifted up and waved before God, and an “ephah” is a unit for measuring grain. They offered the very same ordinary bread that people ate every day. We can read this as a sign that thanksgiving to God is not only for special days but is tied to the everyday table.
The Feast of Weeks came with one more important instruction: do not rejoice alone, but rejoice together.
Here the foreigner is a traveler from another land who is staying among them, and the Levites were people who received no land and were given the work of the tabernacle (the place of worship). In other words, these were people with no field of their own to harvest. God told Israel not to forget them. Leviticus goes further and says that when they reaped their fields, they should not cut all the way to the corners but leave some behind.
5. Ruth, Who Gleaned in the Fields
Behind the harvesters, Ruth picks up the grain that has fallen.
The book of Ruth shows how this command was actually kept. Ruth had lost her husband, and she followed her husband’s mother, Naomi, to Bethlehem, a land that was strange to her. When was that?
With nothing to eat, Ruth followed the workers who were cutting grain in someone else’s field and picked up the grain they dropped, to provide for Naomi (Ruth 2:3). This is called gleaning. Boaz, the owner of the field, told his workers to pull out a little from the bundles and leave it behind, so that Ruth could gather plenty (Ruth 2:16). The time Ruth spent gleaning is recorded like this.
From the “barley harvest” to the end of the “wheat harvest”, that is, from around the Feast of Unleavened Bread to around the Feast of Weeks. The command in Leviticus to leave the gleanings for the poor and the foreigner was kept in exactly this way for Ruth, who was herself a foreigner. Even today, Jewish people read the book of Ruth at the Feast of Weeks.
6. The Third Feast: Living in Booths
Once the grain had been threshed, and the grapes had been gathered all summer long and pressed in the winepress, the great harvest of the year was over. The last feast, kept at that time, is the Feast of Booths (Deuteronomy 16:13; the World English Bible calls it the “feast of tents”). It lasted seven days from the 15th day of the seventh month of Israel’s calendar, around September or October on today’s calendar.
“The fruits of the land” means everything gathered from the ground. When the harvest was complete, God told them to take beautiful fruit and branches and rejoice for seven days. But this feast had one very special rule: leave the house and live in a booth.
The whole family spends seven days in a booth roofed with palm branches and leaves.
A booth is a rough, temporary hut made of branches and leaves; the translation above calls it a “temporary shelter.” At the very time when the storehouses were full and life was most plentiful, God had them stay in an uncomfortable hut on purpose. When the people of Israel came out of Egypt and walked through the wilderness, they lived in booths (temporary shelters), with no houses and no fields, yet God fed them and protected them every day. The feast was a reminder never to forget that.
When the storehouse is full, people easily think, “I did well, so I gathered this much.” The Feast of Booths made them remember with their whole body, at exactly that moment, that “everything came from God.” So Deuteronomy closes its words about this feast like this.
7. Sorting Out the Names
As you read the Bible, the same feast shows up under several names. This is the part that confuses first time readers most, so we have sorted it out here.
| Feast | Other names | What the names mean |
|---|---|---|
| Unleavened Bread | Named together with Passover | The feast of eating bread without yeast |
| Weeks | Feast of Harvest, Pentecost | Counting seven weeks · gathering the crop · the 50th day |
| Booths | Feast of Tabernacles, Feast of Ingathering | Living in booths · bringing the harvest into storage |
You will also often hear the word “Firstfruits.” It means “the first of the harvest,” and since it is used in two ways, it is worth being careful. Exodus 34:22 links the Feast of Weeks with “the first fruits of wheat harvest.” But in churches, “Firstfruits” usually means the day during the Feast of Unleavened Bread when the first sheaf was offered (Leviticus 23:10~11). When you read, look at the words around it to see which day is meant.
Here “the feast of weeks” is the second feast. “The feast of harvest at the year’s end” is the third feast, the Feast of Booths, when everything gathered was brought into storage. Exodus 23:16 calls this same autumn feast “the feast of ingathering,” and there “the feast of harvest” means the Feast of Weeks. So the same word can point to different feasts, and the context tells you which one.
Many Korean churches keep the first Sunday of July as Barley Harvest Thanksgiving Sunday. In Korean Bibles, the Feast of Harvest is translated “Maekchujeol,” which means “barley harvest feast.” Because the names are so alike, it is easy to think they are the same feast, but the Bible’s Feast of Harvest (the Feast of Weeks) was kept in May or June in the land of Israel, when wheat was harvested.
A paper by Kim Jinkyu in Journal of Biblical Text Research (No. 43, 2018), the academic journal of the Korean Bible Society, explains that the translation “Maekchujeol” does not fully carry the original meaning (“feast of harvest”), and that the grain offered at the Feast of Weeks was wheat, not barley. Even so, the paper says that the Korean churches’ barley harvest thanksgiving is not a wrong tradition. It grew out of the old Korean farming year, when barley was harvested in June, and today it can be kept as a day to give thanks for God’s grace over the past half year.
8. The Story Continues in the New Testament
The three feasts do not end in the Old Testament. They connect with the story of Jesus.
First, Jesus, the first fruits. Jesus was crucified around the time of Passover. Then at dawn on “the first day of the week,” when the women went to the tomb, Jesus had already risen (Matthew 28:1~6). If “the next day after the Sabbath” in Leviticus is read as the day after the weekly Sabbath, it falls on the same day of the week as the day the first sheaf was waved. (In Jewish tradition, the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread is sometimes taken as that Sabbath.) The apostle Paul described the risen Jesus like this.
“Those who are asleep” means those who have died. Just as the first sheaf was a sign that “the harvest to come begins like this,” the resurrection of Jesus is the beginning of a promise that those who believe in Him will also live again.
Second, the Holy Spirit came at the Feast of Weeks. The Feast of Weeks is also called Pentecost, from the Greek word “pentekoste,” which means “fiftieth.” It was on this very day of Pentecost that the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples gathered in Jerusalem.
That day about three thousand people heard Peter’s sermon and were baptized (Acts 2:41). At the feast when wheat was harvested, the church “gathered” its first people.
Third, the great day of the Feast of Booths. John 7 records that Jesus went up to Jerusalem at the Feast of Booths. On the last day of the feast, Jesus cried out like this.
The Feast of Booths came when the year’s harvest was finished and people were waiting for the autumn rain for the next season. According to Jewish tradition, during this feast water was drawn and poured out on the altar at the temple. On the last day of that very feast, Jesus cried out that He is the One who satisfies our true thirst. John adds that these words point to the Spirit, whom those who believe in Jesus would receive (John 7:39).
9. What the Three Feasts Say to Us Today
Put the three feasts side by side, and we see three pictures of thanksgiving.
- Thanks that gives first (the first sheaf at the Feast of Unleavened Bread) · They did not give God what was left after the whole harvest was in. They gave Him the very first of it, first.
- Thanks that shares (the Feast of Weeks and the grain left in the field) · Even foreigners, the fatherless and widows were to rejoice together. Ruth, too, lived with Naomi on grain that was left behind like this.
- Thanks that remembers (the booths of the Feast of Booths) · At the most plentiful time, they recalled the poorest time and confessed that everything came from God.
Our Thanksgiving can hold these three things too. It is a day to give God the best of what we received this year first, to share with the neighbors around us, and to remember the God who kept us through the past year.
How to live out these three in our lives today is the subject of the next post, “Thanksgiving Beyond One Day”.
Questions for Children's Ministry
- The Israelites did not eat the new grain until they had offered the first sheaf. Among the things you have received, what could you give to God “first”? (time, pocket money, talents)
- Because the workers left grain behind, Ruth was able to glean. This Thanksgiving, what could our class “leave behind” to share with others?
- At the Feast of Booths, people stayed in uncomfortable huts on purpose to remember their years in the wilderness. Shall we recall, one by one, how God kept us through the hard times of this past year?
More Resources
- The Origin of Thanksgiving · from Plymouth 1621 to the churches of Korea
The previous post in this series. It traces the history of Thanksgiving in America and in the churches of Korea, with pictures. - Thanksgiving Bible Verse Images · 20 Free Designs (CC0)
Thanksgiving verse images you can use in church bulletins, slides and classroom boards. - Our Thanksgiving activity sheets for children (answers included) are now available. PPT backgrounds and coloring pages will be added to our Thanksgiving collection as they are ready.
Sources
- Bible text · World English Bible
- The Gezer Calendar · Biblical Archaeology Society, Wikipedia
- The Feast of Weeks and the Feast of Booths · Britannica, Wikipedia
- Ruth and the harvest · Tyndale House
- Translating “Maekchujeol” · Kim Jinkyu, “The Problem of Translating the Term Maekchujeol,” Journal of Biblical Text Research 43 (in Korean)
Origin Bible · Mission Zedero
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