My Feasts
The seven appointed times of Leviticus 23, what each one turned out to be about, and how the church still keeps most of them without noticing
God calls them His own before He calls them Israel's: "Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, Concerning the feasts of the LORD, which ye shall proclaim to be holy convocations, even these are my feasts." (Leviticus 23:2). My feasts. The Hebrew behind "feasts" means appointed times, fixed meetings set in advance by the one calling the meeting. Read them that way and they stop being an old ceremonial calendar and start looking like a schedule, published centuries early, of what God intended to do.
The four that happened on the day
Passover. A lamb without blemish, killed at evening, blood on the doorposts, and death passing over the house. Paul does not treat this as an illustration. "For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us" (1 Corinthians 5:7). He died at the hour the lambs were being killed, and John notes that not a bone of Him was broken, which was the rule for the lamb.
Unleavened Bread. The week of purging the old leaven out of the house. His body in the tomb, and Paul's application in the same breath: "Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump."
Firstfruits. The first sheaf of the harvest waved before the LORD on the day after the sabbath, the pledge that the rest of the field is coming. "But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept." (1 Corinthians 15:20). Not the whole harvest. The first of it, on the exact day.
Weeks, or Pentecost. Fifty days later, two loaves baked with leaven, waved together. "And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place." (Acts 2:1). The Spirit fell on the day the feast fell, and the two loaves have long been read as Jew and Gentile brought in together, leaven and all.
Four appointed times, four events, each landing on its own date. That is either an extraordinary series of coincidences or it is what an appointed time is for.
The three in the autumn
Then the calendar stops for four months, and resumes with three more: Trumpets, the Day of Atonement, and Tabernacles. A trumpet blast, a day when the nation is covered and the high priest comes out alive, and a week of living in booths while the harvest is finally gathered in.
Christians have long assumed the last three must work the way the first four did. That is an inference, not a statement of Scripture, and it is the assumption every failed timetable has been built on. We do not make it here, and we do not build a schedule from it. Whole systems have been erected on the autumn feasts, complete with dates, and every one of them so far has been wrong. The site holds this loosely and says so: the shape is suggestive, the schedule is not ours to publish.
Jesus Himself did something with the last of them worth noticing. On the great day of the feast of Tabernacles, when water was being poured out in the temple, He stood up and shouted over the crowd: "In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water." (John 7:37-38). He did not abolish the feast. He stood in the middle of it and said it was about Him.
The seven, side by side
| # | Feast | Hebrew | When | Season | What it was | What it turned out to be about | Where the church still keeps it |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Passover | Pesach | Nisan 14 | spring | The lamb killed at evening, blood on the doorposts, death passing over. | Christ crucified at the hour the lambs were killed, not a bone broken. | Good Friday. The older churches still call the whole feast Pascha, the same word. |
| 2 | Unleavened Bread | Matzot | Nisan 15-21 | spring | Seven days with the leaven purged out of the house. | His body in the tomb; the old leaven purged out. | Holy Saturday and the fast that surrounds it. |
| 3 | Firstfruits | Bikkurim | the day after the sabbath in that week | spring | The first sheaf of the barley waved before the LORD, the pledge that the field is coming. | The resurrection, on that day. The firstfruits of them that slept. | Easter Sunday, and every funeral a Christian has ever hoped through. |
| 4 | Weeks | Shavuot | fifty days after Firstfruits | late spring | Two loaves baked with leaven, waved together; also kept as the day the law was given at Sinai. | The Spirit poured out on the day the feast fell. Two loaves, long read as Jew and Gentile together. | Pentecost, kept under its own Greek name, fifty days after Easter. |
| 5 | Trumpets | Yom Teruah, later Rosh Hashanah | Tishri 1 | autumn | A day of blowing, a summons out of the ordinary year. | Nothing claimed here. Scripture does not tie this day to any New Testament event. | No direct Christian counterpart. Advent is the nearest instinct, a season of being summoned to watch. |
| 6 | Day of Atonement | Yom Kippur | Tishri 10 | autumn | The one day the high priest entered the holy of holies; the nation covered; the scapegoat sent away. | Hebrews reads the whole day as fulfilled in Christ entering once for all, and treats it as finished rather than pending. | Lent and Ash Wednesday carry the penitential half; Hebrews 9 carries the doctrine. |
| 7 | Tabernacles | Sukkot | Tishri 15-22 | autumn | A week living in booths while the harvest is finally gathered in; water poured out in the temple. | Christ stood up on the great day of it and called the thirsty to Himself. The gathering of the harvest is not claimed as past. | No settled counterpart. Some read the new creation and God tabernacling with men in Revelation 21 as its answer. |
Scroll sideways if your window is narrow. The autumn three are given without dates or a timetable on purpose.
The rest of the Hebrew calendar
Three more observances sit around the seven, and two of them are not in Leviticus 23 at all. They are worth knowing because they turn up in the New Testament and in the shape of the Christian year.
| Observance | Hebrew | When | What it was | In Christ | Christian survival |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Weekly sabbath | Shabbat | every seventh day | The rest built into creation itself. | Christ is our rest, and Hebrews 4 says a rest remains. | The Lord's Day, kept from the first century on the day of the resurrection, not as a transferred sabbath but as its own thing. |
| New moons | Rosh Chodesh | monthly | The month begins; the calendar is lunar, so the feasts move against the solar year. | Named with the feasts in Colossians 2 as shadow. | The moving date of Easter is a survival of that lunar reckoning, which is why it wanders. |
| Dedication | Hanukkah | Kislev 25 | Not in Leviticus 23; it commemorates the temple's rededication after Antiochus. | Jesus was at the temple for it, in John 10, where the Good Shepherd discourse is set. | No counterpart, though the timing near Christmas has caused two thousand years of confusion. |
| Lots | Purim | Adar 14 | Not in Leviticus 23; from Esther. | Not typological. A deliverance remembered. | No counterpart. |
One structural note that explains a great deal. The Hebrew calendar is lunar with a leap month added to keep it in step with the seasons, which is why the feasts fall on different Western dates every year. Easter inherited that reckoning and still wanders for the same reason, while Christmas, which is not from this calendar, does not.
The years, and the year of release
The appointed times do not stop at days. There are appointed years, and they are the part of the calendar most Christians have never heard of.
Every seventh year the land itself rested: "But in the seventh year shall be a sabbath of rest unto the land, a sabbath for the LORD: thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard." (Leviticus 25:4). And in the same year the books were cleared. "At the end of every seven years thou shalt make a release. And this is the manner of the release: Every creditor that lendeth ought unto his neighbour shall release it; he shall not exact it of his neighbour, or of his brother; because it is called the LORD’s release." (Deuteronomy 15:1-2). Debt was not permitted to become permanent. It ran a maximum of seven years and then it was gone, and Scripture calls it the LORD's release rather than the creditor's generosity.
Then, after seven cycles of that, the fiftieth year. The trumpet sounds on the Day of Atonement itself: "Then shalt thou cause the trumpet of the jubile to sound on the tenth day of the seventh month, in the day of atonement shall ye make the trumpet sound throughout all your land." (Leviticus 25:9), and what follows is the sentence engraved on the Liberty Bell: "And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family." (Leviticus 25:10). Land returned to the family that had lost it. Slaves went home. A generation could not be permanently disinherited by its grandfather's bad decade.
And God gives the reason, which is the part that reframes everything: "The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me." (Leviticus 25:23). The land was never anyone's to keep, so it could not be permanently taken. All ownership in Israel was tenancy.
He also anticipated the obvious dodge, and named it as sin before anyone tried it: "Beware that there be not a thought in thy wicked heart, saying, The seventh year, the year of release, is at hand; and thine eye be evil against thy poor brother, and thou givest him nought; and he cry unto the LORD against thee, and it be sin unto thee." (Deuteronomy 15:9). Do not stop lending as the release year approaches. He legislated against the loophole in the same paragraph as the law.
What Christ did with it
He claimed it. In the synagogue at Nazareth He read from Isaiah and stopped mid-sentence: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, To preach the acceptable year of the Lord." (Luke 4:18-19). The acceptable year of the Lord is Jubilee language, liberty proclaimed and captives released. Then He closed the book and said: "And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears." (Luke 4:21).
He also stopped one clause early. Isaiah's next words are "and the day of vengeance of our God" (Isaiah 61:2), and He did not read them. The release came first, and the reckoning is not cancelled, only not yet.
So the debt language in His teaching is not decoration. Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. The servant forgiven an unpayable sum who seized a colleague over a small one. He was speaking to people who knew that debts were supposed to expire, and telling them the release had arrived in person.
A caution about counting
People have long tried to count the sabbath years and the Jubilees forward and to predict things from the result. Books get written, dates get named, and the dates arrive and pass. That habit is not new and it is not going away, and it deserves a plain word here rather than a silence someone can fill in for us.
This page makes no prediction from these years and offers no forecast of any kind. The counting itself is contested, the original start points cannot be recovered with confidence, and Scripture never asks anyone to compute from them. What it asks is much simpler and much harder: that debts not be made permanent, that the poor not be quietly written off as a release year approaches, and that nobody treat as his own forever what God says was only ever held in tenancy.
The principle keeps. The predictions expire.
Shadow and body
Paul settles the question of obligation in one sentence, and it applies to both sides. "Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ." (Colossians 2:16-17).
A shadow is not a lie. It is cast by something real, and it is shaped like the thing casting it. Paul does not say the feasts were meaningless; he says they were the outline and Christ is the body that made the outline. So nobody may impose them, and nobody may sneer at them either. The judging he forbids runs in both directions.
The church kept them anyway
Here is the part that surprises people who think this is a fringe subject. Most of the Christian year is the Jewish calendar, converted.
Easter is Passover; the older churches still call it Pascha, the same word, and the second-century argument over its date was an argument about which day of the Jewish month to use. Pentecost is Pentecost, kept under its own Greek name, fifty days after, the same feast. The three-day structure of Good Friday, the tomb, and the resurrection is Passover, Unleavened Bread, and Firstfruits in order.
Even the arguments are old. The churches of Asia kept Pascha on the fourteenth day, following John; Rome kept it on the following Sunday, and the dispute nearly split the church in the 190s until Irenaeus told the bishop of Rome to stand down over a matter of dating. Nobody in that fight thought the feast was optional. They thought it was theirs.
Where this lands
The feasts are not a burden reimposed and they are not a curiosity. They are God's own schedule, kept in public for fifteen hundred years before anyone could see what the dates were for, and then kept in a different form by the church that inherited them.
A Christian is free to observe them and free not to. What no one should do is read Leviticus 23 as archaeology. It is the appointment book of the God who keeps appointments, and four of the entries have already been kept to the day.
Related: The Passover (Exodus 12), Pentecost (Acts 2), The Lord's Table, The Resurrection, The Temple, The Bible in the Order It Happened, The End Times in the Prophets and the Apostles, and The Church, One Story. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of Christ are marked in purple and the words of God in gold. The Quartodeciman dispute and Irenaeus's letter to Victor are recorded in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History V.23-24. No date is set here for the autumn feasts, and none should be inferred.