Three Feasts
Durch New Christian Bible Study Staff
The Children of Israel were told to keep three feasts each year - the feast of unleavened bread, the feast of first fruits, and the feast of ingathering. Should we still do that?
In Exodus 23:14-16, Moses receives the instructions about these feasts. Those three verses in Exodus comprise our brief story. Their inner meaning is explained in Arcana Coelestia 9286-9296.
There are three feasts. In the Word, the number three represents a completeness, a sense of things being covered from beginning to end. Our thankfulness to the Lord is supposed to keep going - to endure.
The first feast, of unleavened bread, stands for worship, for our thankfulness for the Lord's action in our minds to get rid of false ideas. That enables us to start to receive good loves.
The second feast, of first fruits, relates to the planting of true ideas in that "soil" of initial loves for doing good.
The third feast, of harvest, or ingathering, stands for the time when, by applying our true ideas, we receive real good - loves of the neighbor and of the Lord - that become the middle of our lives. This is the state of rebirth, where we have - by working through the year (our lives), and enduring in thankfulness, allowed the Lord to get rid of our false ideas, and push our evil loves to the periphery, so that good can work, and be fruitful.
These feasts, then, represent the progress of our spiritual lives. In some manner, we need to keep them.
Deuteronomy 21:1-9
1
If one be found slain in the land which Yahweh your God gives you to possess it, lying in the field, and it isn't known who has struck him;
2
then your elders and your judges shall come forth, and they shall measure to the cities which are around him who is slain:
3
and it shall be, that the city which is nearest to the slain man, even the elders of that city shall take a heifer of the herd, which hasn't been worked with, and which has not drawn in the yoke;
4
and the elders of that city shall bring down the heifer to a valley with running water, which is neither plowed nor sown, and shall break the heifer's neck there in the valley.
5
The priests the sons of Levi shall come near; for them Yahweh your God has chosen to minister to him, and to bless in the name of Yahweh; and according to their word shall every controversy and every stroke be.
6
All the elders of that city, who are nearest to the slain man, shall wash their hands over the heifer whose neck was broken in the valley;
7
and they shall answer and say, "Our hands have not shed this blood, neither have our eyes seen it.
8
Forgive, Yahweh, your people Israel, whom you have redeemed, and don't allow innocent blood [to remain] in the midst of your people Israel." The blood shall be forgiven them.
9
So you shall put away the innocent blood from the midst of you, when you shall do that which is right in the eyes of Yahweh.
