Biblion Bible Commentary
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Three Times a Year
Exodus 23:14-19
14 “You shall observe a feast to me three times a year. · WEB
The calendar of a farming nation is fixed around three appearances, and each is tied to a harvest and to a deliverance.
You shall observe a feast to me three times a year Exodus 23:14.
The festival calendar is stated here in its shortest form. Three occasions, each requiring every male to travel to wherever the sanctuary stands — which means three times a year the farms of Israel were left in the care of women, children and servants, and the whole nation moved.
You shall observe the feast of unleavened bread... at the time appointed in the month Abib (for in it you came out of Egypt) Exodus 23:15. The first is the spring festival already instituted, and its reason is historical. It commemorates the night of the exodus, and it falls at the barley harvest.
And the feast of harvest, the first fruits of your labors, which you sow in the field; and the feast of ingathering, at the end of the year, when you gather in your labors out of the field Exodus 23:16.
The second and third are agricultural, marking the wheat harvest seven weeks later and the final gathering of fruit and oil in the autumn. Taken together the three run from the first cutting of grain to the last pressing of olives, so the working year of an agrarian people is bracketed and interrupted by worship at exactly the points where the work is most urgent and the temptation to skip it is strongest.
The combination is deliberate and it is the chief thing this paragraph teaches. Israel's festivals are neither purely historical nor purely seasonal. Each one takes a moment when a farmer is counting his own increase and attaches it to something God did for him before he owned a field. The harvest is not detached from the exodus; it is celebrated as its continuation.
Three times in the year all your males shall appear before the Lord Yahweh Exodus 23:17. The verb is appear, and the obligation is to be present rather than to observe something at home. Whatever else these feasts were, they were the mechanism that held twelve scattered tribes together as one nation for a thousand years.
No one shall appear before me empty Exodus 23:15, and you shall bring the first of the first fruits of your ground into the house of Yahweh your God Exodus 23:19. First, not surplus. What is brought is taken off the top of a harvest whose full size is not yet known, which is why the requirement is a matter of trust rather than of accounting.
You shall not boil a young goat in its mother's milk Exodus 23:19.
The clause is attached to the festival laws without explanation and is repeated twice more in the Torah. Nothing in the text says why. What can be observed is the pattern it belongs to: the law repeatedly forbids using the source of a creature's life to prepare its death — an animal and its young are not to be killed on the same day, a bird's mother is not taken with the eggs. A people about to enter a land of fertility cults are being taught a certain restraint toward the processes of life itself.
held with reason What this mark means