The Appointed Times
Mo’edim
מוֹעֲדִים
The word in Leviticus 23 is not festival. It is appointment: a fixed time set in advance for a meeting. God put eight of them on the calendar, told his people when to show up, and called them my appointed times rather than theirs.
They are agricultural, historical, and, on a reading Christians have held since the first century, prophetic. Most readers today have met them only as background to somebody else’s holidays, which is a loss, because the Gospels are set inside this calendar and assume you know where you are standing in it.
Keep the appointed times and you walk the whole of Scripture in a year: creation and rest, slavery and rescue, harvest and provision, covenant and law, warning and judgment, wilderness and homecoming. It is a Bible-in-a-year plan in the form of a party, with the story told through food, shelter, silence, and a horn, to be tasted and slept out in rather than merely read.
Whatever you conclude about keeping them, they hold the overarching narrative of the Bible in one calendar, and that alone is worth the pause.
The shape of a calendar
A circle, not a list
These are appointments, and appointments recur. Each one comes round every year, and each one is read at more than one depth: something happened, something is happening, and something is still to come. Christians name that habit differently depending on tradition, as already and not yet, as type and antitype, as near and far fulfilment, but almost everyone does it, and the pattern has a name in the text itself. The one who was, and is, and is to come.
Read that way the calendar bends back on itself rather than running out. It opens in a garden where God walks with people, runs through a nation keeping the feasts in the wilderness and the land, turns at a life that meets them one by one, and ends in a city where the dwelling of God is with man and the nations are still going up to keep Tabernacles. Every feast page here sets out its three depths.
Every week
The appointment that comes around every seventh day, and the one Leviticus 23 names first.
The spring feasts
Passover, Unleavened Bread, and Firstfruits, falling within eight days of each other. Christians have read this cluster as answered at the first coming since the earliest preaching we have.
Passover
פֶּסַחThe night Israel left Egypt, kept every year afterward as a meal that retells it. One of the three pilgrimage feasts that brought the nation to Jerusalem.
14 Nisan, at twilight
Read it →Unleavened Bread
חַג הַמַּצּוֹתThe seven days following Passover, during which no leaven was to be found in the house. So closely joined to Passover that the New Testament often uses the two names for one season.
15 to 21 Nisan
Read it →Firstfruits
בִּכּוּרִיםalso called The wave sheaf, Reshit Katzir
The first sheaf of the barley harvest, lifted before God before any of the crop was eaten. The smallest of the appointed times and the one most easily missed.
The day after the Sabbath during Unleavened Bread
Read it →Fifty days later
Shavuot, counted rather than dated: seven weeks from the barley sheaf to the wheat harvest.
The autumn feasts
Trumpets, Atonement, and Booths, in the seventh month. Read by many Christians as still ahead: the announcement, the judgment, and the dwelling.
Yom Teruah
יוֹם תְּרוּעָהalso called The Feast of Trumpets, Rosh Hashanah
A day of blowing, opening the seventh month and the autumn feasts. The text gives it no explanation, which is unusual and has left a great deal of room.
1 Tishrei
Read it →Yom Kippur
יוֹם כִּפּוּרalso called The Day of Atonement
The one day in the year the high priest entered the innermost room, and the only fast the law commands. The most solemn day on the calendar.
10 Tishrei
Read it →Sukkot
סֻכּוֹתalso called The Feast of Tabernacles, Booths, The Feast of Ingathering, Z'man Simchateinu
Seven days living in temporary shelters, at the end of the harvest. The third pilgrimage feast, and the one the law twice commands you to be glad at.
15 to 21 Tishrei, with an eighth day
Read it →Christians differ about all of this
Whether believers should keep these days, commemorate them, or leave them alone is genuinely contested, and has been since the first generation. Colossians 2:16-17 tells a church to let nobody judge them about a festival or a new moon or a sabbath, calling these a shadow of what was to come. Acts 15 declines to place the law on Gentile believers. Zechariah 14 has the nations keeping Tabernacles. Paul keeps feasts himself and tells others not to be bound by them.
The pages here describe each appointed time fully, name the Christian reading of it as a reading, and say how different traditions actually keep it. What you do with that is properly yours.
Should Christians keep the feasts? Every view →Hebrew dates run sunset to sunset, so a feast begins the evening before the day it is listed under.