June 16, 2018: Day 63 – Leviticus 23

I’ll never forget in college where there was a week when students would go out on the grass and live in straw huts outside the dorms.  I knew them and they were friends of mine and they stayed in the huts because they were practicing their Jewish faith.  This chapter gives us a whole assortment of festivals, or holy days, that the people of Israel were to follow.  The main emphasis is on the Sabbath and how we are to take the Sabbath as a time unique and different from every other time of the week.  The emphasis seems to be that we are not to be involved in our occupations on that day.  

If you look at vs.39 and following you see the festival of booths and it is the same one that Jesus and his disciples would have encountered when he rode into Jerusalem.   The branches they would have taken from the huts and people would have been out in force because they were celebrating that festival.  We find in vs.44 Moses telling the people of Israel that these were actually festivals, and so they were instituted.