Leviticus 23:17
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Bring two loaves of bread from your dwellings as a wave offering, each made from two-tenths of an ephah of fine flour, baked with leaven, as the firstfruits to the LORD.
Commentaries
Excerpts gathered from published commentaries to ground the reading.
This chapter does not contain a "calendar of feasts," or a summary and completion of the directions previously given in a scattered form concerning the festal times of Israel, but simply a list of those festal days and periods of the year at which holy meetings were to be held. This is most clearly stated in the heading (Lev 23:2): "the festal times of Jehovah, which ye shall call out as holy meetings, these are they, My feasts," i.e., those which are to be regarded as My feasts, sanctified to Me. The festal seasons and days were called "feasts of Jehovah," times appointed and fixed by Jehovah (see Gen 1:14), not because the feasts belonged to fixed times regulated by the course of the moon (Knobel), but because Jehovah had appointed them as days, or times, which were to be sanctified to Him. Hence the expression is not only used with reference to the Sabbath, the new moon, and the other yearly feasts; but in Num 28:2 and Num 29:39 it is extended so as to include the times of the daily morning and evening sacrifice. (On the "holy convocation" see Exo 12:16.)
Open source ↗Hitherto the levitical law had been chiefly conversant about holy persons, holy things, and holy places; in this chapter we have the institution of holy times, many of which had been mentioned occasionally before, but here they are all put together, only the new moons are not mentioned. All the rest of the feasts of the Lord are, I. The weekly feast of the sabbath (Lev 23:3). II. The yearly feasts, 1. The passover, and the feast of unleavened bread (Lev 23:4-8), to which was annexed the offering of the sheaf of firstfruits (Lev 23:9-14). 2. Pentecost (Lev 23:15-22). 3. The solemnities of the seventh month. The feast of trumpets on the first day (Lev 23:23-25), the day of atonement on the tenth day (Lev 23:26-32), and the feast of tabernacles on the fifteenth (Lev 23:33, etc.).
Open source ↗Original language
The Hebrew and Greek words behind this passage, with Strong's numbers — from openscriptures (CC BY-SA).
Cross-references
Other passages the community most often connects to this one. Tap to read.
“Speak to the Israelites and say, ‘When you enter the land that I am giving you and you reap its harvest, you are to bring to the priest a sheaf of the firstfruits of your harvest.
Bring the best of the firstfruits of your soil to the house of the LORD your God. You must not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk.
And you are to celebrate the Feast of Weeks with the firstfruits of the wheat harvest, and the Feast of Ingathering at the turn of the year.
Bring the best of the firstfruits of your soil to the house of the LORD your God. You must not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk.”
Along with his peace offering of thanksgiving he is to present an offering with cakes of leavened bread.
On the day of firstfruits, when you present an offering of new grain to the LORD during the Feast of Weeks, you are to hold a sacred assembly; you must not do any regular work.
But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.
You may bring them to the LORD as an offering of firstfruits, but they are not to be offered on the altar as a pleasing aroma.
He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we would be a kind of firstfruits of His creation.
You must not hold back offerings from your granaries or vats. You are to give Me the firstborn of your sons.