March 1, 2020: Day 29 – Numbers 29

We have in this chapter one more round of sacrifices that are to be made on specific festival days.  Let’s lift up the festival of booths which begins in vs.12 and takes us all the way to the end of the chapter.  This is a religious celebration that was supposed to last 8 days, and each day had its own specific sacrifice that was to be made to commemorate the festival of booths.  Remember, this was a festival when they were to remember the time that they lived in the wilderness as wanderers in a foreign land.  The reference to this is also found in Leviticus 23.  But God commanded the people of Israel to live in booths during this time to remember their time in the wilderness.

It is interesting because Jesus’ ride into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday was right on the heels of the festival of booths and it is thought that the people were able to get the palms from the roofs of the booths that the people were living in during this festival.  But remember, these verses in Numbers would predate that event by millenia so the two are not related, except by the fact that in Jesus’ day they still celebrated this festival.

I remember when I was at Swarthmore that during this festival of booths time period there were students who would observe it and build their booths and spend time in them to meditate and pray and to remember that they were called by God to take the time in their Jewish heritage and faith to remember this time in their historical and religious background.  It always impressed me the faith and the willingness for these students to do something on campus which pointed directly at their faith even in the midst of an institution of higher learning which tended to be somewhat adversarial to any faith in general which demanded action that could be interpreted as defying reason.  But isn’t that the nature of faith in general?