Within Judaism, Messianic Judaism, Jewish Roots, and every adjacent movement, it is universally accepted and taught without question that God gave the Torah to Israel on Shavuot. As such, it is widely held that our observance of Shavuot should also commemorate the receiving of the Torah because that momentous event occurred on the very same date as the Feast. But is it true? Was the Torah really given on Shavuot? Is such an assertion actually biblical? And if not, how should that effect our understanding and celebration of one of the major Feasts of Israel?

According to Judaism’s calendar, both the annual Feast of Shavuot—the “Feast of Weeks,” also referred to in Scripture as the Feast of the Harvest (Ex. 23:16) and the Day of the Firstfruits (Nu. 28:26)—and the giving of the Torah to Israel are both fixed on the same day: the 6th of Sivan. To be sure, both of these events occur in the same season and, in fact, the same month—the third month of the biblical year, which Judaism calls “Sivan.” The problem, however, is that Scripture does not set an explicit date for Shavuot. It is instead arrived at by counting a specific number of days from after Passover (Lev. 23:15ff). Unfortunately, since biblical months also do not have a fixed length, this counting therefore cannot establish Shavuot’s annual date. Biblically, this means that there is a possible range of dates (as early as the fifth day of the third month) upon which Shavuot can fall each year. But is the date of the giving of the Torah one of them?

The account of the giving of the Torah begins in Exodus 19. “On the third new moon after the Israelites had gone forth from the land of Egypt, on that very day, they entered the wilderness of Sinai…. and the LORD said to Moses, ‘Go to the people and warn them to stay pure today and tomorrow… for on the third day the LORD will come down, in the sight of all the people, on Mount Sinai….’ On the third day, as morning dawned, there was thunder, and lightning, and a dense cloud upon the mountain… and all the people who were in the camp trembled” (Exodus 19:1-16, JPS 1985).

A literal reading of the text, then, is clear. Israel arrived on the 1st day of the third month, they were told to stay pure “today and tomorrow”—the 1st and 2nd day of the month—and then Adonai came down to give Israel the Torah “on the third day”—the 3rd day of the month. How, then, does Judaism say that the Torah was given on the 6th day—a full three days later? They do it by artificially stretching out the events of Exodus 19. According to HaRav Yaakov Medan, the Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshivat Har Etzion (one the largest Yeshivas in Israel), the Talmudic sages “in their midrashim, address this difficulty, and ‘fill in’ the first three days of Sivan in various ways…. The question arises: Why did [they] find it necessary to stretch out the time until [the giving of the Torah]… (mentioned nowhere in the text)…? Why not just squeeze it all, as the literal text would suggest, into the first three days of Sivan?” (lttl.pw/shavuot1).

Why, indeed. Yet the answer is clear: they saw an opportunity to align the giving of the Torah with a major feast-day. Despite there being no way whatsoever from the biblical text to make the two events occur on the same day, they manipulated the calendar in order to satisfy Judaism’s undue veneration for the Torah. On the contrary, the true, biblical theme of Shavuot actually has nothing to do with the Torah at all, but harvest (as fulfilled in Acts 2).

The contrivance and forced interpretation of Shavuot as the anniversary of the giving of the Torah is a perfect example of how long-established tradition, willful blindness, and biblical laziness can lead us to an incorrect understanding of the plain, simple truth of Scripture. The fact that such an obvious and easily debunked assertion has been perpetuated and repeated as fact among Messianic believers for so long should cause us to reevaluate not only our trust in Judaism to explain the Torah to us, but the degree to which we adopt Judaism’s culture and explanations, as well as how much we allow it to influence the way we keep and understand the significance of God’s perfectly appointed times.

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