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The Ancient World Behind the Text: Ideas
The customs, offices and ideas a first reader knew without being told, what each meant then, and the nearest thing you already know.
Pentecost, the Festival of Weeks
The harvest feast fifty days after Passover, one of the three festivals that brought Jewish pilgrims to Jerusalem from across the world. Some Jews also tied it to the covenant at Sinai.
Every harvest weekend the town fills up, because everyone who moved away comes home for the thanksgiving service. Pentecost means fiftieth. The feast fell fifty days, seven weeks, after Passover, and thanked God for the first of the wheat harvest. It was one of the three feasts when Jews traveled to Jerusalem, so the city was crowded with visitors from far countries. Some Jews also connected the day with God's covenant at Sinai, though scholars disagree about how early that link was made.
The feast came seven weeks after Passover (Leviticus 23:15-16) and celebrated the first of the wheat harvest. As one of the three pilgrim feasts it filled Jerusalem. The ESV Study Bible calls it the second of the year's harvest festivals. Wright writes, "For a first-century Jew, Pentecost was the fiftieth day after Passover." It was the day, he says, when farmers brought the first sheaf of wheat to God, partly in thanks and partly as a prayer that the rest of the crop would come in safely. Keener thinks it was probably the least popular of the three pilgrim feasts. Josephus attests the crowds: "Now when that festival which we call Pentecost was at hand, all the places about the temple, and the whole city, was full of a multitude of people." Jews came to the three main feasts from all over the Roman and Parthian worlds. Because Pentecost fell only fifty days after Passover, some who had spent heavily on a rare pilgrimage stayed for both. The Dead Sea Scrolls kept it as a feast of covenant renewal, and some later Jewish texts celebrate it as the day the law was given at Sinai.
An analogy: a harvest homecoming when everyone who left the town comes back. The church is full, the square is full, and you hear the accents of every place they settled.
Because Pentecost filled Jerusalem with Jewish pilgrims from many lands, the crowd in Acts 2:5-11 is international before a word is preached. Paul plans his travels around the feast in 1 Corinthians 16:8, and the cultural backgrounds notes take that as a sign his Gentile readers knew the biblical festivals.
Not a family reunion. People at a homecoming return to the town they left. Pentecost pilgrims came from across the Roman and Parthian worlds to the temple, to thank God for the first of the wheat harvest. In Acts 2 it is still a Jewish feast.
Pentecost and Sinai. Wright reads the feast as remembering Israel's arrival at Sinai fifty days after the exodus. So Luke, in his reading, shows Jesus sending the Spirit as Moses brought down the law, and the CSB Study Bible says Pentecost commemorated the giving of the law. Keener grants that the Scrolls kept it as covenant renewal. He says the link with the law may be later than Luke and that little in Acts 2 suggests Luke draws it.
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- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, notes on Acts 2:1 and 1 Corinthians 16:8
- Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, on Acts 2:1 and 2:5
- N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone, Part One, comment on Acts 2:1-4
- Josephus, The Wars of the Jews 1.13.3, trans. William Whiston
- ESV Study Bible, study note on Acts 2:1
- CSB Study Bible, note on Acts 2:1-12
