Leviticus 23: Verse 17 Puts Leaven in the Pentecost Bread

Leviticus 23 puts the sabbath at the front of a list of feasts. Verse 2 says the Lord's feasts are to be proclaimed as holy convocations, and before a single date is given, verse 3 stops to say that "Six days shall work be done: but the seventh day is the sabbath of rest." Then verse 4 starts over with "These are the feasts of the Lord, even holy convocations, which ye shall proclaim in their seasons," and the calendar proper begins.

After that come Passover and Unleavened Bread (verses 5 to 8), the wave sheaf (9 to 14), the fifty-day count to Pentecost (15 to 21), one sentence about a farmer's field (22), the memorial of trumpets (23 to 25), the Day of Atonement (26 to 32) and Tabernacles (33 to 43). Verse 44 closes it. I'm going to pass over most of the offering lists, because a chapter this tight rewards slowing down on a few lines, and these are the ones that stopped me.

The sabbath comes first and "servile" keeps changing

Putting the weekly sabbath ahead of the annual feasts tells you how to read the rest. Every holy convocation in the chapter is another day of rest, set among the ordinary seventh days.

Now watch the wording. On the Passover days (verses 7 and 8), at Pentecost (21), at the memorial of trumpets (25) and at the first and eighth days of Tabernacles (35 and 36), the text says "ye shall do no servile work therein." On the weekly sabbath (3) and on the Day of Atonement (28 and 31) it says "ye shall do no work" and, in verse 31, "no manner of work." Two kinds of rest, then, and the chapter gives the heavier one to the sabbath and to the day of affliction.

The chapter never defines servile, and Exodus 12:16 words the first and seventh days of Unleavened Bread differently: "no manner of work shall be done in them, save that which every man must eat, that only may be done of you." Leviticus 23:7 says servile work and mentions no exception, so whatever was allowed for meals isn't stated here.

Why would the Pentecost loaves be baked with leaven?

Pentecost is the feast in the chapter you find by counting. Passover, the trumpets, the Day of Atonement and Tabernacles each have a day of the month attached. Pentecost hangs off the wave sheaf, which has no date of its own either: the priest waves it "on the morrow after the sabbath" (verse 11), then runs "seven sabbaths" and on to "the morrow after the seventh sabbath shall ye number fifty days" (verses 15 and 16). Verse 11 doesn't say which sabbath, and later readers disagreed about it. I'd leave that argument with them. What I notice is that the feast arrives when the count is done, which is why Luke can write in Acts 2:1 that "the day of Pentecost was fully come."

Then verse 17:

Ye shall bring out of your habitations two wave loaves of two tenth deals: they shall be of fine flour; they shall be baken with leaven; they are the firstfruits unto the Lord.

Anyone who has read the start of Leviticus will stop at "baken with leaven." Leviticus 2:11 says "No meat offering, which ye shall bring unto the Lord, shall be made with leaven: for ye shall burn no leaven, nor any honey, in any offering of the Lord made by fire." Here is a loaf, brought to the Lord, with leaven in it on purpose.

The next verse in chapter 2 may be the way through. Leviticus 2:12 says "As for the oblation of the firstfruits, ye shall offer them unto the Lord: but they shall not be burnt on the altar for a sweet savour." The loaves of 23:17 are named firstfruits, and nothing in verses 17 to 20 has them burned, so the leaven rule, which covers offerings made by fire, may simply not reach them. That is my fitting-together of two verses.

The other thing I'd point at is the first half of the verse. The loaves come "out of your habitations," from households. My guess is that this is the bread people were already baking, which was leavened bread. Paul does use leaven as a picture of malice in 1 Corinthians 5:8, but he's making his own point to the Corinthians, and nothing in Leviticus 23 asks you to carry that meaning back.

Verse 22 is a sentence about a field in the middle of the calendar

The Pentecost offerings end at verse 21. Then, before the trumpets, comes this:

And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not make clean riddance of the corners of thy field when thou reapest, neither shalt thou gather any gleaning of thy harvest: thou shalt leave them unto the poor, and to the stranger: I am the Lord your God.

I wrote about the same law in Leviticus 19 a couple of weeks ago, where verse 9 says not to "wholly reap the corners of thy field" and verse 10 ends with "I am the Lord your God" as well. Here it turns up again in the middle of the feast calendar, with no explanation attached.

Deuteronomy 16 helps a little with the placing, since in describing the feast of weeks verse 11 tells the household to rejoice "thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, and thy manservant, and thy maidservant, and the Levite that is within thy gates, and the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow." Verse 14 says the same list rejoices at Tabernacles. So the stranger and the widow are invited to both feasts, and Leviticus 23:22 sits between them, saying what is left in the field for them. Pairing those two chapters is mine, but it makes the verse look less like an interruption.

The Day of Atonement is the only day in the chapter with a penalty

Verses 27 to 32 give one day six verses, which is more than Passover gets. Verse 27 sets it on "the tenth day of this seventh month" and tells Israel to "afflict your souls." Verse 29 says that whoever is not afflicted that day "shall be cut off from among his people," and verse 30 says the soul that does any work "will I destroy from among his people." No other feast in the chapter carries a threat. Passover, Pentecost, Trumpets, Tabernacles and the weekly sabbath are all commanded, and none of them says what happens to the person who ignores it.

The timing is in verse 32, and I'd mark it in your copy:

It shall be unto you a sabbath of rest, and ye shall afflict your souls: in the ninth day of the month at even, from even unto even, shall ye celebrate your sabbath.

The tenth day starts on the evening of the ninth, and anyone waiting for sunrise to begin it is late.

"Afflict your souls" is used twice (verses 27 and 32) and the chapter never says how. Later Jewish practice read it as fasting, and that may well be right, but the word isn't in the verses. The chapter gives the day a name, "a day of atonement," and a purpose, "to make an atonement for you before the Lord your God" (verse 28), and then gives almost no procedure beyond an offering made by fire.

The chapter ends twice, and the second ending is about memory

Tabernacles gets its date in verse 34, the fifteenth day of the seventh month, which is five days after the Day of Atonement. The first and eighth days are holy convocations, and the eighth is called "a solemn assembly." Then verse 37 does what verse 4 did: "These are the feasts of the Lord, which ye shall proclaim to be holy convocations." Verse 38 adds that all of it is "beside the sabbaths of the Lord, and beside your gifts, and beside all your vows, and beside all your freewill offerings." Gifts and vows and freewill offerings are the same sorting I wrote about in Leviticus 22, and the feast days are said to come on top of them.

It reads like the end, but the next verse starts "Also in the fifteenth day of the seventh month," and goes back to Tabernacles as if something had been left out. What was left out is the part with people in it. They are to bring "the boughs of goodly trees, branches of palm trees, and the boughs of thick trees, and willows of the brook," and "rejoice before the Lord your God seven days" (verse 40). The occasion is "when ye have gathered in the fruit of the land" (verse 39). The garden here is pulled and the cages are stacked in the shop, so verse 39 describes a point in the year I'm standing in.

The reason comes last, and it's the part I'd read twice:

That your generations may know that I made the children of Israel to dwell in booths, when I brought them out of the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

Verse 42 tells all who are "Israelites born" to live in booths for seven days, and verse 43 gives the reason. Nobody is told to recite anything. They are told to sleep somewhere else for a week, and the later generations are meant to learn from the arrangement itself. It's the only place in the chapter where the Lord says what a practice is meant to teach those who come after.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Leviticus 23 say the Pentecost bread had leaven?

Yes, verse 17 says the two wave loaves "shall be baken with leaven." Leviticus 2:11 forbids leaven in offerings made by fire, so it looks like an exception. I'd read it together with Leviticus 2:12 on firstfruits.

What does "afflict your souls" mean on the Day of Atonement?

The chapter uses the phrase in verses 27 and 32 and doesn't say how it's done. Later Jewish practice took it as fasting. If you're going on the text alone, all you can say is that it's something done to oneself on the tenth day, and that skipping it is a serious matter in verse 29.

Do Latter-day Saints keep these feasts?

The Church doesn't ask members to. In 2 Nephi 25:24 Nephi says of his own people that "we keep the law of Moses, and look forward with steadfastness unto Christ, until the law shall be fulfilled." Alma 34:14 says "this is the whole meaning of the law, every whit pointing to that great and last sacrifice." How a given feast maps to a given event in Christ's life is left to the reader.

What is the memorial of trumpets for?

Verse 24 calls it "a memorial of blowing of trumpets" and verse 25 forbids servile work and requires an offering. Memorial of what, the chapter doesn't say. The name Rosh Hashanah comes from later Jewish practice, and nothing in the chapter uses it.

Much of this chapter is addressed to people who don't yet own a field. The sheaf law in verse 10 starts from a condition, "When ye be come into the land which I give unto you, and shall reap the harvest thereof," and the sheaf, the loaves, the corners and the ingathering all follow from that one condition. They are given a calendar of harvests before they have a harvest, and the one feast whose reason is given, the booths, has them remember the place they'd just left.

— D.