The agricultural origins of Shavuot

A celebration of the land

While Shavuot is primarily known today for commemorating the giving of the Torah at Sinai, this aspect of the holiday is only about 2,000 years old. Nearly all of its many names, Hag-ha-Katzir (feast of the harvest), Yom ha-Bikkurim (day of first fruits), Hag-ha-Shavuot and Pentecost (feast of weeks) refer to its origins as an agricultural festival.

As various passages in the Torah make clear — Exodus 23:14-19, Leviticus 23:9-22, Numbers 28:6, and Deuteronomy 16:9-12 and 26:1-11 — Shavuot was one of the three great agricultural pilgrimage festivals to Jerusalem. The others are Pesach and Sukkot, and the Torah ties both of these holidays to historical events in Israel’s history: Pesach to the Exodus from Egypt, and Sukkot to the wilderness years. But Shavuot is only seen in the Torah as an agricultural festival, and it would take centuries for it to be reinterpreted otherwise.

Shavuot is mentioned many times in the postbiblical writings, from the Book of Jubilees, Second Maccabees, and the historian Josephus. The longest and most vivid description of what the pilgrimage to Jerusalem was like, however, is preserved in the Mishnah (Bikkurim 1:1-3, 3:1-8), compiled around the second century CE: Directions are given for selecting first fruits from the seven specified species of wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives and dates; it is said that those who lived near Jerusalem brought fresh figs and grapes, while those coming from farther away necessarily brought dried figs and raisins; leading each group into Jerusalem, and accompanied by music from a flute, was “an ox with horns bedecked with gold and with an olive crown on its head”; and when each group of pilgrims reached the Temple, “All the skilled artisans of Jerusalem would stand up before them and greet them, ‘Brethren, men of such and such a place, we are delighted to welcome you.’”

Seen in this way, we might understand why Shavuot’s focus remained for so long only on the gathering and offering of first fruits. The day seems to have been joyous and full enough. One of the most human details of all concerns those pilgrims who stopped coming because they were unable to read the Hebrew from the required profession at Deuteronomy 26:3-10. The Mishnah tells us that, as a result, it became acceptable to repeat the words after the priest.

In the century or so before the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 CE, disagreements arose between the priestly caste of the Sadducees and the more Torah-centered Pharisees. Summing up a complex topic, it seemed strange that while festivals commemorated the Exodus and the wilderness years, the same was not done for the giving of the Torah. Given Shavuot’s proximity to Pesach, it was eventually recognized as Zeman Mattan ToratenuA , Season of the Giving of Our Law. Since the loaves of bread brought with the first fruit offering were symbolic of our collaboration with God in creation and sustenance, the act of Torah study and interpretation became its spiritual equivalent. And just in time, since without this additional layer of meaning, Shavuot may well have disappeared entirely after 70 CE, now that pilgrimage, sacrifice and offerings were no longer possible.

There is also an even older and unrecoverable aspect to Shavuot. “When you enter the land that I am giving to you and you reap its harvest,” Leviticus 23:9 says, “you shall bring the first sheaf of your harvest to the priest.” Exodus 23:19 says that these “choice first fruits of your soil” should be brought “to the house of the eternal your God.” Numbers 28:26 reminds the Israelites that this Feast of Weeks should be observed as “a sacred occasion: you shall not work at your occupations.”

In other words, even the earliest mentions of Shavuot presuppose a settled life in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and the centralization of sacrifice at the Temple in Jerusalem. It also assumes the kind of economic stability that would allow for pilgrimages and food offerings of this kind. But as tradition holds that the First Temple was built by Solomon around the 10th century BCE, we are left to imagine an even earlier time — that huge swathe covered by the books of Judges and 1 Samuel — without a Temple or centralized worship.

Was there something like Shavuot then? Were offerings of first fruits brought to the earliest local shrines, like the one at Shiloh mentioned at the beginning of Samuel? Did something like the long proclamation required with the offering and preserved in Deuteronomy 26:3-10 (“My father was a fugitive Aramean. He went down to Egypt with meager numbers and sojourned there; but there he became a great and very populous nation….”) originate in places and moments like these?

When I think of Shavuot, this is what I think of.

Of course, from the Middle Ages forward, and from Britain to Spain, and Russia to the Middle East, one of the most tired clichés of antisemitism said that Jews hated manual labor of all kinds. As late as the 19th century, the British journalist William Cobbett challenged anyone to “produce a Jew who ever dug, who went to the plough.” When I think about the agricultural origins of Shavuot I think about people like Cobbett, too, and the restrictions that kept Jews from owning (let alone farming) land for so long in pre-modern Europe and elsewhere.

I also think of the earliest European Jews to leave the continent for Palestine. In 1882, around 200 Romanian Jews founded a village later named Zikhron Ya’akov, and David Vital writes that for these Jews and those that followed them, “They were alert … to the historic and emotive virtues of the Land, [and] it was central to their outlook that these were indissoluble from the moral and social virtues of agriculture. Life in one and labor in the other were, they thought, the twin keys to the regeneration of the Jewish people.” Barely 70 years later, following the Shoah and the founding of Israel, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote that the early kibbutzniks, “secular Israelis, re-appropriated Shavuot precisely as a celebration of the land.”

In ways that ancient Israel’s farmers and Temple priests could not have imagined, something like the earliest meaning of Shavuot had been found again. PJC

Tim Miller is a poet and writer living in Pittsburgh. He is online at wordandsilence.com.