In the religion of ancient Israel and its neighbors the connection between time and divine worship is rooted in humankind’s need for temporal guidelines to maintain a proper schedule of offerings. According to ancient Near Eastern literature, including the Hebrew Bible, these guidelines were provided with the creation of celestial bodies that ensured the accurate division of time. The Babylonian myth Enuma Elish, for example, intertwines Marduk’s fashioning of the stars and moon with his creation of the year, months, and days (Tablet 5, lines 1–22), and according to the Priestly creation story of the Hebrew Bible the lights in the sky mark the seasons, days, and years (Gen 1:14). The division of time indicated by these celestial bodies made possible a festival calendar that provided consistency and regularity to the worship of gods, and some rituals continue to reflect the originating connection between sacred time and creation. For example, the Enuma Elish was recited at the annual Babylonian Akitu (New Year’s) Festival, an eleven-day event, originally coinciding with the equinoxes, that celebrated the renewal of creation, and in ancient Israel God’s rest on the seventh day (Heb. šabbāt) was an organizing principle for parts of its cultic life. These examples represent a widespread assumption in the ancient Near East that time was sacred because it was created by god(s) and that humans participate in this sacred time through worship. This worship follows a calendar whose units of time were established at creation and correspond to other parts of the created order.
The present essay explores these and other aspects of sacred time in ancient Israel and its Near Eastern neighbors. After this introduction, the essay will proceed in three sections. The first provides a theoretical framework for the subsequent overview of ritual times in ancient Israel. Drawing on Mircea Eliade’s approach to sacred time, especially his views on sacred time’s orientation to the past and its blending of the mythical and historical, I will argue that both views are relevant to the ancient Israelite context, even if they require some revision. The next section provides an overview of the sacred times of the year in ancient Israel, as they are presented in the ritual calendars of the Hebrew Bible (e.g., Exod 23, 34; Lev 23; Num 28–29; Deut 16). Although this section will follow the calendrical order of Israel festivals, we will also consider how ritual times correspond to agricultural seasons and to the human life cycle. The final section will highlight three features of sacred time in ancient Israel that can be drawn from the preceding overview.
No discussion of sacred time in antiquity can avoid the influence of Mircea Eliade. His ideas on the subject are most fully developed in his book Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (1959), in which he argues that sacred time differs from profane time by its repetition of primordial, mythical archetypes. According to Eliade, profane time, linear and meaningless, is punctuated by irruptions of sacred time, which regenerate the eternal time that was established at creation. This view of sacred time has been criticized for its lack of attention to the social and political contexts that produce sacred time (Smith 1972; Brown 1981). Whereas Eliade saw a sharp distinction between sacred and profane time and regarded the former an autonomous reality that exists outside of sociopolitical frameworks, most historians of ancient religion now argue that such frameworks play a vital role in the construction of sacred time. Evidence of their impact in ancient Israel and Judah can be seen, for example, in the changes Jeroboam made to the cultic calendar (1 Kgs 12:32–33; Talmon 1958) or in references in Daniel to the Seleucid proscription of Jews’ schedule of offerings (VanderKam 1981).
Despite the limitations of Eliade’s approach, however, his treatment of sacred time remains a valuable starting point for a discussion of this topic in ancient Israelite ritual and worship. Even (or, perhaps, especially) in points of disagreement with Eliade, his presentation of the topic provides a heuristic framework for exploring the concept of sacred time in ancient Israel. The first point to underline is his emphasis on sacred time’s orientation to the past. Eliade himself expresses this aspect with much stronger language, speaking of sacred time’s ability to repeat mythical events that took place at creation; for him such time is a regeneration of creation that transcends, and ultimately abolishes, profane time. His prime example of this phenomenon is the Babylonian Akitu (New Year’s) Festival, whose Israelite counterpart he finds in the new year’s enthronement festival theorized by Sigmund Mowinckel and others (Eliade 1959: 55–62). For Eliade, the sacred time of this and other festivals effected “the regeneration of the world and life through repetition of the cosmogony” (Eliade 1959: 62).
To some extent, the biblical evidence supports this understanding of sacred time. After all, the Israelite worldview, like most of the ancient Near East, was oriented toward the past. Often the same root underlies Semitic words for “past” and “front/face” (Heb. qdm; Akk. pānum), and the same is true for words denoting “future” and “behind” (Heb. ‘ḥr; Akk. [w]arkatu[m]; Maul 2008). It is reasonable to assume that Israelite worship shared this orientation to the past, and this assumption is borne out in specific examples, such as the Sabbath. The fourth commandment of the Decalogue instructs the Israelites to keep the Sabbath day holy as an imitation of the rest God took after six days of creation (Exod 20:8–11; cf. Gen 2:2–3). God’s transformation of chaos into ordered creation is not a one-off event but one that is regularly renewed through Jewish cult. In this way, the sacred time of worship looks back to creation and helps maintain the divine order established in the beginning (Levenson 1988: 121–127).
The same could be said for the Jewish celebration of Passover, which commemorates God’s deliverance of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt and their beginning as a people. The observance of Passover realizes God’s past victory for present worshipers. This power of ritual remembrance to connect different generations across time is clear from the covenant renewal ceremony, in which Joshua addresses his present audience as if they participated in the Exodus alongside their ancestors (Josh 24:5–7; cf. Deut 5:1–5). Thus Eliade’s theory that sacred time repeats and renews sacred beginnings finds purchase in the biblical evidence, especially in rituals that look back to the Priestly creation story and Exodus story. The relevance of this theory deepens further when one considers that these two foundational events participate in the same dynamic: the separation of waters and the emergence of dry land at the Red Sea establish the Exodus as a regeneration of that same process that took place at creation (Clifford 1985).
The main problem with Eliade’s theory of regenerating creation, besides his inattention to social and political factors mentioned earlier, is the opposition he sets up between sacred time and profane time. Instead of suspending or abolishing profane time, the sacred times of Israel’s past are often called forth into the present, not as a rote reenactment of a sacred beginning but as a new event that integrates past divine victory with present circumstance. This nuance is expressed poetically by Second Isaiah who challenged exiled Jews’ understanding of the Exodus by telling them to “recount not the former things…here I am doing a new thing” (Isa 43:18–19). The prophet warns against seeing the Exodus as a past experience that is inaccessible to subsequent generations, except as a liturgical recital. Instead they should open their eyes to God’s saving presence in the midst of their exile. The purpose of ritual time is not to escape from the profane realities of everyday life but to transform those realities by interpreting them through the lens of the sacred past. The Israelites believed in a God who enters into human history and human affairs; the temporal analogue of this theology is a belief that God’s past actions can be reprised in new circumstances. The ritual recital of sacred beginnings does not transcend profane time, let alone abolish it, but provides a hermeneutic for discerning God’s active presence within history.
Moreover, this hermeneutic was operative not only at the level of national stories of redemption but also at the level of family history. As we will see, some profane moments in the lives of ancient Israelites, most especially birth and death, were imbued with religious significance. These moments became sacred time within Israelite families, which they commemorated with various rituals. While Eliade recognized the interplay between historical/profane time and mythical/sacred time (1958: 396; 1959: 106–112), his emphasis on repetition of the latter and the abolition of the former does not leave enough room for the complexity of the interplay found in the Hebrew Bible’s application to sacred time to new historical moments at different levels of society.1
In sum, Eliade’s approach to sacred time, especially his theory of the sacred return, is helpful for understanding sacred time in ancient Israel but also requires further nuance. Undoubtedly, the creation of the cosmos in the beginning and, later, the creation of Israel in the Exodus were foundational for Israel’s worship, as they often provided the backdrop against which rituals took place. Such rituals effectively renewed the processes and outcomes of these foundational events. But rituals also took place within a matrix of social and political factors that cannot be ignored. The impact of these factors is especially apparent in how ritual times changed over the course of Israel’s history. New historical circumstances affected how rituals were celebrated and even how sacred time as a concept was understood. As we now turn our attention to particular sacred times and calendars of ancient Israel, I will attend to these diverse aspects of sacred time.
This section will explore the festivals themselves—their origins, their later developments, and their place in the annual cycle of worship. In addition to the major public festivals, I will also discuss the sacred times of family religion, i.e., ritual occasions that are milestones in the life cycle of the family rather than national holidays. Before we look at these festivals, however, two general remarks on the calendar are in order. First, as in other ancient Near Eastern cultures, the festival calendar was one of several calendars used by ancient Israelites—the others being agricultural, civil, and regnal (Miano 2010: 29–46; cf. Rosh Hash. 1:1). As we shall see, the calendars overlapped often but were not uniform in their reckoning of time (Cooley 2013: 263–85). For example, although the festival calendar is rooted in the cycle of agricultural seasons and the biblical authors sometimes describe festivals according to the phases of the moon, at other times they take for granted the solar civil calendar.
Second, the biblical evidence for the festival calendar in ancient Israel is mixed. The various calendars, including the Covenant Code (Exod 23:14–17), the Ritual Decalogue (Exod 34:18–26), the Deuteronomic Code (Deut 16:1–17), the Priestly Code (Num 28–29), the Holiness Code (Lev 23) and the calendar in Ezekiel 45, were written at different times and vary in details and emphases. The following section will discuss some of these differences but is not a systematic treatment of the calendars’ redactional history (see Wagenaar 2005; Babcock 2014). Instead our purpose is to provide an overview of the cultic celebrations themselves, though I should note that I consider the material from Exodus to be our oldest traditions and the Priestly material to be our latest sources.
a. Passover (Heb. pesaḥ; Exod 12:1–13, 21–27; Lev 23:5; Num 28:16; Deut 16:1–2, 5–7). Our fullest account of the Passover festival comes from Exodus 12, where it is associated with the tenth plague against Egypt. The chapter is a mix of two or more traditions, one of them Priestly. This account is set in speeches given by YHWH (vv. 1–13) and Moses (vv. 21–27), in which they instruct the people on how to perform the paschal sacrifice. It is also here that we encounter the etymology of the festival name: YHWH will “pass over” (psḥ in vv. 13, 23, 27) the Israelite houses marked with lambs’ blood. There are different theories about the origin of this sacrificial meal, but most see it as an apotropaic ritual among pastoral-nomads, perhaps related to the movement of flocks to summer pasture (Loewenstamm 1992: 195–196).
According to Exodus 12, the Passover was to be prepared on the tenth day and celebrated on the fourteenth day of “this month” (vv. 3, 6), which in 13:4 is identified as “the month of the new grain (Heb. hā’ābîb).” This springtime month corresponds to the month of Nisan (around March-April) in the Babylonian calendar, which the Jews adopted during the Exile. Nisan is the month named in a late fifth-century letter instructing the Jews at Elephantine in Egypt on how to observe Passover (COS §3.46), and it remains for Jews today the month for celebrating Passover. Moreover, this month is declared “the head of months” (v. 2), a phrase signifying the beginning of the new year as well as the month’s importance. Some interpreters read this declaration as a Priestly innovation to the Israelite calendar, which had featured an autumnal New Year inherited from the Canaanites (to be discussed further), but there is no reason that there could not have been two New Years (Sarna 1986: 84). Finally, it is noteworthy that the Passover sacrifice takes place at night, beginning at twilight (12:6) and concluding before morning (12:10). This nighttime setting is significant since the fourteenth day more or less coincided with the full moon of the lunar month, depending on when one considers a new moon to have begun (Propp 1998: 383), though in the narrative setting of Exodus, the evening setting corresponds to the time of the Israelites’ departure from Egypt (Deut 16:6).
Noting that the Priestly creation story establishes the day, the week, and the year (Gen 1:14–18), but not the month, Propp (1998: 384) has suggested that the institution of Passover (and Unleavened Bread) in the “head of months” may signal the completion of that creative process. In addition to this theological significance, we have already noted how shifting social realities affected the festival. Though Passover likely began as a seasonal ritual among pastoral-nomads, it later became fixed within particular months of the calendar, first the Hebrew month of “new grain” and later the Babylonian month of Nisan. Other important changes to the festival, which will be discussed further, include its connection to the Festival of Unleavened Bread and its shift in Deuteronomy from a domestic celebration to a festival at the Jerusalem temple.
b. Unleavened Bread (Heb. maṣṣōt; Exod 12:14–20; 13:3–10; 23:15; 34:18; Lev 23:6–8; Num 28:17–25; Deut 16:3–4, 8). The Festival of Unleavened Bread lasts for seven days, from the fifteenth of Abib/Nisan to the twenty-first. As with the Festival of Passover, our most detailed account of the festival comes from Exodus 12–13, where its celebration is connected to the Israelites’ flight from Egypt. Here the elimination of leaven commemorates the haste with which the Israelites fled; they had no time to leaven their dough (vv. 34, 39). But also like the Passover, Unleavened Bread seems to have its origins in a seasonal ritual, most likely an agricultural festival coinciding with the barley harvest. It is not clear why such a festival would require the prohibition of leaven; many assume the prohibition is related to the impurity surrounding fermentation (cf. the prohibition of leaven from sacrificial offerings: Exod 23:18; Lev 2:11; 6:9–10).
Most agree that Unleavened Bread was originally celebrated independent of the Passover and that the two were joined sometime later in Israel’s history. We can only speculate how, when, and why these festivals were joined. While it may be tempting to associate each festival with a different way of life—one pastoral, the other agricultural—and to see in their combination the merging of the two cultures and populations, there is no evidence to support this reconstruction. The biblical evidence assumes their connection, even as it offers hints of their independent origins. Of the two festivals only Unleavened Bread was one of the three Israelite pilgrimages (Heb. ḥaggîm) that required attendance at the Temple.2 Passover, by contrast, was a family celebration that took place in the home (Exod 12:3–4). This arrangement was not fixed, however, as the book of Deuteronomy demonstrates. The Deuteronomic calendar effectively reverses the two festivals: its requirement that the Passover sacrifice be made at the Temple left Unleavened Bread to be observed in the household (Deut 16:1–17; see Levinson 1997: 79–80).
Alongside these changes to where Unleavened Bread was celebrated were changes to the day of its celebration. All biblical sources agree that the Israelites must cut off leaven for seven days, but there is disagreement over which of these seven days is the actual festival. The earliest source seems to be Exodus 13:4 which puts the pilgrimage on the seventh day, while later sources refer to the first day as the date of the festival (Exod 12:14; Lev 23:6; Num 28:17). Still later sources claim all seven days as festival days (Ezra 6:22; 2 Chr 30:21; 35:17). The migration of the day of pilgrimage likely reflects Passover’s shift from the home to a sanctuary. As long as Passover is celebrated at home, the Festival of Unleavened Bread requires only a single trip to the sanctuary, but after Passover shifts to the sanctuary, a festival on the seventh day of Unleavened Bread would require a second trip. Changing the festival date of Unleavened Bread from the seventh to the first day allowed a pilgrim to meet the ritual requirements of both holidays in one visit to the sanctuary. The shift is especially clear in the book of Deuteronomy, which in addition to centralizing Passover, downplays the requirement of pilgrimage for Unleavened Bread, replacing it with simply a local “sacred assembly” (Levinson 1997: 89).3 Finally, the lack of a Temple in the post-exilic period meant that the “festival” came to refer to all seven days of Unleavened Bread rather than a pilgrimage on a specific day.
Another subtle change in the timing of Unleavened Bread can also be explained by its fusion to Passover. Whereas multiple sources cite the fifteenth as the festival’s beginning date (Lev 23:6; Num 28:17; and the fifth-century bce letter from Elephantine [COS §3.46]), Exodus 12:18 mentions the evening of the fourteenth as the start of the festival.4 Some have taken this apparent discrepancy as evidence of a shift from solar to lunar reckoning of days (Talmon 1994; Propp 1998: 405–406), but it is more likely that the reference in Exodus 12:18 to “the evening of the fourteenth” was necessary to join the end of Passover and the beginning of Unleavened Bread (Milgrom 2000: 1967–1968). Starting on the evening of the fourteenth avoided any interval between the festivals.
Thus the Festival of Unleavened Bread, like Passover, was adapted to new circumstances. This flexibility is especially clear in the ritual times of the festival, as the day(s) of its ḥag migrated, contracted, and expanded over time. But this adaptation should not diminish the sacredness of the festival’s ritual time, or its participation in Israel’s sacred past. The latter is obvious for the Exodus, which is explicitly commemorated in the biblical tradition of Unleavened Bread, but the former is also clear from the repeated commandment to abstain from work at the beginning and end of the festival (Lev 23:7–8; Num 28:18, 25). In this way, Unleavened Bread represents a sacred and holy time that is set apart from the profane time before and after its celebration.
c. Weeks (Heb. šābū’ôt; Exod 23:16; 34:22; Lev 23:15–21; Num 28:26–31; Deut 16:9–12). The Festival of Weeks is another pilgrimage festival rooted in the cycle of agricultural seasons, but unlike Unleavened Bread (and Passover), Weeks was never historicized as part of Israel’s national story but has remained a spring harvest festival. It is not the only spring harvest mentioned in the Hebrew Bible,5 but its designation as a ḥag makes this festival of the first wheat the most important. It should be noted, however, that ḥag šābū’ôt is a phrase that only occurs in Deuteronomic sources (Deut 16:10, 16; Exod 34:22; cf. Jer 5:24). An early reference calls it the “Festival of the Harvest” (ḥag haqqāṣîr [Exod 23:16]), and a later Priestly source calls it the “Day of First Fruits” (yôm habbikkûrîm [Num 28:26]), though this same verse also refers to “your [Festival of] Weeks” (bĕšābū’ōtêkem). The Holiness Code, which is where we find the fullest treatment of this festival, likewise describes it in terms of “first fruits” (Lev 23:17, 20) and “weeks” (Lev 23:15–16). In later Greek sources, both Jewish (Tob 2:1; 2 Macc 12:31–32) and Christian (Acts 2:1), the festival is called Pentecost, which denotes the “fiftieth day” after the seven weeks that lead up to it. Thus there is clear evidence for an Israelite festival celebrating the wheat harvest, but the evidence for its name and its status as a ḥag is mixed.
In terms of ritual time, the most remarkable aspect of the festival is the eponymous counting of seven weeks, which is made explicit only in the Holiness Code. According to it, the Festival of Weeks comes seven weeks after the presentation of barley, which itself took place on the first day after the concluding Sabbath of Unleavened Bread (Lev 23:15). The total of these days puts the festival sometime in the Babylonian Jewish month of Sivan (May/June). The emphasis on the number seven—seven weeks equal seven times seven-days—calls to mind its significance as a number of perfection in other biblical texts, most notably the seven days of creation in the Priestly account (Gen 1:1–2:3).6 This creation account is further evoked by the use of Sabbath as the benchmark for counting the weeks (23:16), including the unusual use of šabbāt instead of šābū’ôt to denote “week,” and perhaps also by the command to abstain from all work on the day of the offering (23:21; also Num 28:26).
d. Booths (Heb. sukkôt; Exod 23:16; Lev 23:34–36, 39–43; Num 29:12–34; Deut 16:13–15; Neh 8:14). The last of the three principal ḥaggîm was the Festival of Booths, which began on the fifteenth day of the seventh month (Sept–Oct). This month is named ‘ētānîm (“constantly flowing”) in 1 Kings 8:2, since only perennial streams still had water at that time of year, but after the exile it is called Tishri after its corresponding Babylonian month (Akk. tašrītu). The seven-day celebration of Booths coincided with the autumn harvest. As with the Festival of Weeks, the biblical evidence includes different names for this autumn festival. Our oldest source calls it the Festival of Ingathering (‘āsīp; Exod 23:16), and only in Deuteronomic (Deut 16:13, 16; cf. 31:10) and the Holiness Codes (Lev 23:34) do we find it called the Festival of Booths (ḥag hassukkôt), as we also find in post-exilic sources (Zech 14:16, 18, 19; Ezra 3:4). Interestingly, the Priestly source avoids any particular name, simply calling the autumn festival the ḥag laYHWH (Num 29:12).
Its association with the last harvest of the agricultural cycle gave Booths a special prominence after the Deuteronomic centralization. The interval before the start of the sowing season meant that more farmers had time to make the pilgrimage the Temple. Hence, Booths became known as “the festival” (1 Kgs 8:2, 65; 12:32) until the Second Temple period when the popularity of Passover surpassed it (Milgrom 2000: 2027–2028). The prominence of Booths may also explain its association with temple dedications. Solomon dedicated the Jerusalem temple in the seventh month (1 Kgs 8:2), and although his dedication is not explicitly linked to Booths, interpreters as early as Josephus have noted the coincidence (Ant. 8.4.1 [100]; see also Goudoever 1961: 30–35). Moreover, Jeroboam’s dedication of temples at Dan and Bethel includes a festival on the fifteenth day of the eighth month (1 Kgs 12:32–33). Again the link to Booths is not explicit, and the peculiar “eighth month” has given rise to various explanations; still it is worth noting that such timing coincides with the fall harvest. The connection between temple dedication and Booths is finally explicit in Ezra’s account of the founding of the Second Temple (Ezra 3:3–4).
Our fullest account of the character of Booths comes from the Deuteronomy 16:13–15 and from a short passage added to the festival’s mention in the Holiness Code (Lev 23:40). Interestingly, both passages mention the spirit of joy that should pervade the celebration of the festival (cf. Neh 8:17). A distinctive feature of the Deuteronomic text is its note that the festival should begin after the produce has been gathered from the threshing floor and the wine press (v. 13). The mention of a threshing floor may seem out of place since there was a separate festival for the wheat harvest, but “in a good year . . . threshing and grape picking overlapped” (Borowski 1987: 62, 111; see also Joel 2:24). The passage from the Holiness Code (Lev 23:39–42) is found with the code’s festival calendar but is clearly a later addendum that is separated from the rest of the calendar by a summary statement (vv. 37–38). Of all the references to Booths, this passage is the only one that historicizes the festival. Here the Israelites are commanded to dwell in booths as their ancestors did when YHWH brought them out of Egypt (v. 43). Thus, like other festivals discussed in this section, Booths originated as an agricultural festival and was later historicized, perhaps to ensure its importance during the exile when pilgrimage to the temple was no longer possible.
In terms of sacred time, this festival is interesting for two phrases that mark Booths as a turning point in the year. Exodus 23:16 locates the Festival of Ingathering “at the going-out of the year” (bĕṣē’t haššānâ), and Exodus 34:22 describes it as “the turning point of the year” (tĕqûpat haššānâ). Both phrases suggest that this celebration of the fall harvest served as a New Year’s festival in addition to (or instead of) the spring festival(s) discussed previously. Evidence in support of an autumnal New Year includes the tenth-century bce Gezer Calendar, which records monthly agricultural activities (Borowski 1987: 32–38). This almanac begins with “two months of ingathering (olives)” (yrḥw ‘sp) and ends with “a month of ingathering summer fruit” (yrḥ qṣ). It is also worth noting that the month name Tishri comes from the Babylonian month tašrītu, which means “beginning.” More tenuous evidence is Leviticus 23:24 designates the first day of the seventh month as a holy day to be signaled by a trumpet blast. Although this verse later became the basis for the contemporary Jewish celebration of Rosh Hashanah (see Rosh Hash. 1:16a-b; 4:29b; 4:33b–34a), there is nothing in the verse itself that suggests a New Year’s celebration.
Nonetheless, the Gezer Calendar and the verses from Exodus strongly suggest that the seventh month marked an important transition in the year. The most likely explanation for this array of evidence is the use of more than one calendar. As already mentioned, multiple calendars were commonplace in the ancient Near East as they are in modern times, in which different dates mark the beginnings of the civil year (Jan 1), the fiscal year (Jul 1), and the liturgical year (e.g., First of Tishri; First Sunday of Advent). Thus it is no surprise to find biblical evidence for more than one calendar. Based on Exodus 12:2, we can suppose that the festival calendar began in the spring with Passover and Unleavened Bread,7 while the agricultural calendar began in the autumn.
e. Day of Atonement (Heb. yôm kippûr; Exod 30:10; Lev 16; 23:26–32; 25:9; Num 29:7–11). Yom Kippur entailed the purgation of the Tabernacle/Temple from the impurities that had polluted its sanctity. In the Hebrew Bible this ritual is mentioned only in priestly traditions, though the purification of sanctuaries is attested throughout the ancient Near East (Wright 1987). According to Leviticus 16, this purgation is achieved through sin offerings, blood sprinkling, and the banishment of a scapegoat. Although these rituals made atonement for the Israelites, the people themselves did not participate in the event, at least not at first. The chief priest alone performs the rituals. At a later stage in its development, represented by an addendum to Leviticus 16 (vv. 29–34), Yom Kippur included the people’s fasting and abstention from work (cf. Num 29:7–11; Lev 23:26–32).
This later stage in the development of Yom Kippur is especially relevant to the topic of sacred times, because here more attention is given to the temporal framework of the rites. Sometimes this attention connects the holy day to the larger Priestly concept of sacred time. For example, the addendum to Leviticus 16 includes the designation of Yom Kippur as “a sabbath of complete rest” (šabbat šabbātôn). This expression occurs only six times in the Hebrew Bible to describe the weekly complete rest of Sabbath (Exod 31:15; 35:2; Lev 23:3), the annual complete rest of Yom Kippur (Lev 16:31; 23:32), and the septennial complete rest of the Sabbatical year (Lev 25:4). In this way Yom Kippur fits into the concentric circles of Sabbath rest in the Priestly corpus.
In other ways, however, we find that, as with the other holidays discussed in this chapter, the sacred times of Yom Kippur could be adapted to new circumstances. For example, only in later texts is Yom Kippur fixed as an annual event on the tenth day of the seventh month (Lev 16:29, 34; 23:27; Num 29:7). Previously, the purification seems to have taken place at the discretion of the chief priest (Milgrom 1991: 1012–1013). Thus we can discern a shift from an occasional cultic event to one that was fixed annually. Another interesting detail is an apparent discrepancy regarding the date of Yom Kippur: both the tenth day (Lev 16:29; 23:27) and the ninth evening (Lev 23:32) of the seventh month are cited as the holy day. Some have argued that this difference reflects the transition away from solar to lunar reckoning of days (Talmon 1994), but Milgrom (2000: 2025–2026) has argued that the latter verse is an exceptional accommodation for a holy day that spans “from evening to evening” (23:32). Without the specification of the ninth evening as the start of Yom Kippur, the public fasting would have lasted well over twenty-four hours.
f. Sacred Times in the Life Cycle. The preceding festivals dominate most discussions of ritual time in ancient Israel, but this tendency should not keep us from appreciating occasional cultic events which were not celebrated perennially and whose dates were not fixed. Whereas national festivals had their origins in the cycle of agricultural seasons, these occasional celebrations were rooted in the human life cycle. They included birth, circumcision, weaning, the onset of puberty, betrothal, marriage, pregnancy, death, etc. (Zevit 2001: 665).
The biblical evidence suggests that the beginning and the end of the human life cycle—that is, birth and death—were especially important ritual times. The motif of the barren woman who prays for a child (Gen 25:21; 1 Sam 1:10–11) or receives a birth oracle (Gen 18:10, 14; Judg 13:3, 5) shows that rituals associated with childbirth took place even before the pregnancy itself. We have no information on rites associated with the birth itself, unless we read Ezekiel 16:4 as indirect evidence that the occasion included the cutting of the umbilical cord, bathing and anointing the newborn, and rubbing salt over the baby (Meyers 2010: 127; Albertz and Schmitt 2012: 391).
Among the rituals that took place shortly after birth, the circumcision of boys on the eighth day after their birth is the best-attested (Gen 17:12; 21:4; Lev 12:3). It has also been argued that the reintegration of a mother and her newborn into the household after a period of separation during and after childbirth (Lev 12:1-5; cf. Jer 20:15) would have been marked with ceremony, perhaps a rite of naming (Albertz and Schmitt 2012: 247). This proposal is based on later evidence for a naming ritual (e.g., Luke 1:59–66; 2:21) and on the large number of personal names that are in some way related to the birth process—nearly one-third of names in both epigraphic and biblical sources (Albertz and Schmitt 2012: 252–253). Altogether this evidence indicates that the birth of a child was an important ritual times in the lives of ancient Israelite families.
Other milestones in a person’s lifetime that may have been celebrated with a cultic ceremony are a child’s weaning (1 Sam 1:24; see Davis 2013: 103–104 n. 87) and marriage (Tob 7:13–14; see van der Toorn 1994: 60–62), but the evidence for both is meager. The only other time in the life cycle that compares to the ritual significance of birth is death, which received considerable cultic attention. Ritualized behavior that is associated in the Bible with death and burial includes the rending of garments, the wearing of sackcloth, fasting, rolling in ashes, and singing dirges (2 Sam 1:11–12; 3:31; Isa 15:3; Jer 6:26; 9:17–20). Other actions such as head-shaving or self-laceration are forbidden in biblical law (Deut 14:1; cf. Lev 21:5), but the prohibitions themselves are evidence that such mourning rituals were prevalent (see Isa 15:2; Mic 1:16). Along with this textual evidence are archaeological remains that attest to the adornment of corpses and the dedication of various objects during burial, such as lamps, vessels, figurines, scarabs, and seals (Bloch-Smith 1992: 148–151). These funerary rites are distinct from the regular veneration of deceased ancestors; whereas the latter was an ongoing cultic duty in Israelite households, the former consists of rituals specific to the occasion of death. The glimpses of cultic activity from biblical and archaeological sources indicate that a person’s death and burial were an important occasion for ritual.
Although discussions of ritual times in ancient Israel tend to focus on appointed festivals of the cultic calendar, this section has demonstrated the importance of the sacred times that punctuated human life. Among the milestones of life that were occasions for cultic ritual, birth and death seem to have been especially significant.
Having examined religious milestones in the festival calendar and in the human life cycle, we can conclude by highlighting some key aspects of sacred and ritual times in ancient Israel. First, the religious year breaks into two halves divided by the first and seventh months.8 All but one of the major festivals take place in these two months. Although any number of occasional festivals could be celebrated in the intervening months, the first and seventh months stand out in the festival calendar as especially prominent.
Second, ritual time was closely connected to the natural world. In Israel’s festival calendar this connection is apparent in the agricultural roots of most festivals, but it is also clear from the way that the exigencies of agricultural work affected the festival times. The migration of the date for Unleavened Bread, for example, shows the influence that agrarian concerns exerted on the timing of the festivals. The connection between ritual time and the natural world can also be observed in the sacred times of family life. Of the various milestones in the human life cycle that were marked with ritual activity, the two most prominent were natural processes, namely, childbirth and death.
Third, sacred times were not permanently fixed but could be adapted to new circumstances. These times did not exist in a vacuum but were shaped by the social and political realities of different periods in Israel’s history. New contexts brought new meaning to the rituals, as when agricultural festivals were historicized and connected to Israel’s national story, and sometimes changes were made to the festivals’ times and places. Examples of such changes include the shifting dates of Unleavened Bread and the Day of Atonement and the different locations prescribed for Passover and Unleavened Bread.