DIES PRIMITIVORUM, 'the day offirstfruits' (Num. xxviii. 26), because the first loaves made from the new corn were offered on it on the altar (Lev. xxiii. 17), for which reason Philo (Opp. ii. 294) calls it enpri; Irpwro-yevvnuctrwp. iv. It is also denominated in the post-canonical Jewish writings mypri an, the festival of conclusion, i. e., of the Passover simply nnyy (comp. ireprnrcoaribijp'Ef3paiot' Aoapb-& [=MINT, Chaldee] rcaXQ13s-e, crvatvet Se TOOTO Joseph. iii. to. 6 ; Mishna Bikkurim, i. 3, 7, to ; Rosh Ha-Shana, i. 2 ; Chagiga, ii. 4), because it completed what the Passover commenced ; and v. larrnn Inn iv, the time of the giving of our law, because the Jews be lieve that on this day the revelation of the decalogue took place.
2. The time at which this Festival was celebrated. -The time fixed for the celebration of Pentecost is the fiftieth day reckoning from ' the morrow after the Sabbath' (nzni nimn) of the Passover (Lev. xxiii. r, 15, 16). The precise meaning, however, of the word nne., in this connection, which deter mines the date for celebrating this festival, has been matter of dispute from time immemorial. The Boethusians and the Sadducees in the time of the second Temple (Mishna, 21fenachoth, x. 3), and the Karaites since the Sth century of the Christian era (comp. Jehudah Hedessi, Eshkol Ha Kopher, Alphab. 22I-224; ibid., p. 85 b), took nzu, in its literal and ordinary sense as denoting the seventh day of the week, or the Sabbath of creation, and maintained that the omer was offered on the day following this weekly Sabbath, which might happen to fall within the seven days of the Pass over, so that Pentecost would always be on the first day of the week. But against this it is urged that —i. Josh. v. i r, where novi rrinn* is used for navn rnrinn, shows that in Lev. xxiii.
denotes the first day of Passover, which was to be a day of rest. ii. The definite article in rizvri in Lev. xxiii. ir refers to one of the preceding festival days. iii. The expression is also used for the day of Atonement (Lev. xxiii. 32), and the plural nnmv is applied to the first and eighth days of Tabernacles (ibid., ver. 39) and the Feast of Trum pets (ibid., xxiii. 24), as well as to week (Lev. xxiii. 55 ; xxv. 8) ; hence this use of o-cfPfiarov in the N. T. (Mark xvi. 2, 9 ; Luke xviii. 12). iv. Ac cording to Lev. xxiii. 15 the seventh week, at the end of which Pentecost is to be celebrated, is to be reckoned from this Sabbath. Now, if this Sabbath were not fixed, but could happen on any one of the seven Passover days, possibly on the fifth or sixth day of the festival, the Passover would in the course of time be displaced from the fundamental position which it occupies in the order of the annual festivals. v. The Sabbatic idea which underlies all the festivals, and which is scrupulously observed in all of them, shows that the reckoning could not have been left to the fifth or sixth day of the festival, but must have fixedly begun on the i6th of Nisan. Thus, each Sabbath comes after six even periods '. the Sabbath of days, after six days ; 2. the Sab bath of months, after six months ; 3. the Sabbath of years, after six years ; 4. the Sabbath of Sab
batic years, after six Sabbatic years ; 5. the Sab bath of festivals= the Day of Atonement, after six festivals [FESTIVALS ; JUBILEE, THE YEAR OF] ; hence the Sabbath of weeks, i .e., Pentecost, must also be at the end of six common weeks after Pass over, which could be obtained only by reckoning from the 16th of Nisan, as this alone yields six common weeks ; for the first week during which the counting goes on belongs to the feast of Passover, and is not common ; and vi. The Sept. braoinov TijS irpthrnS), Josephus (rij Oeurgpct ruse Cii2%/A.WP Antiq. iii. to. 5. 6), Philo (Opp. ii. 294), Onkelos (NDU Nor nrizu), and the synagogue, have under stood it in this way and acted upon it, and most Christian commentators espouse and defend the traditional interpretation. Still more objectionable is the hypothesis of Hitzig (Ostern and pfingsten, Heidelberg 1837), defended by Hupfeld (De primit. et very festoram ap. Hebrceos ratione, ii. 3, sq.), and Knobel (Die Backer Exodus and Leviticus, Leipzig i857, p. 544), that the sacred or festival year of the Hebrews always began on the Sabbath, so that the 7th (i .e., the first day of Passover), the i4th (i.e., the last day of the festival), and the nst of Nisan, were always Sabbath days ; and that the omer was offered on the 22d day of the month, which was ' the morrow after the Sabbath' termi nating the festival, and from which the fifty days were reckoned (Hitzig, Hupfeld), or that the omer was offered on the 8th of the month, which was also ' the morrow after the Sabbath,' thus prevent ing it from being post festum (Knobel). It will be seen that this hypothesis, in order to obtain Sab baths for the r4th and 21st days of the month as the beginning and termination of Passover, is always obliged to make the religious new year begin on a Sabbath day, and hence has to assume a stereo typed form of the Jewish year, which as a rule terminated with an incomplete week. Now this assumption—i. Is utterly at variance with the un settled state of the Jewish calendar, which was con stantly regulated by the appearance of the disc of the new moon [NEW MOON, FESTIVAL OF THE]; ii. It rudely disturbs the weekly division, which is based upon the works of creation, and which the Jews regarded with the utmost sanctity ; and iii. It is inconceivable that the Mosaic law, which, as we have seen, regarded the Sabbatic division of time as so peculiarly sacred that it made it the basis of the whole cycle of festivals, would adopt a plan for fixing the time for celebrating the Passover whereby the last week of almost every expiring year is to be cut short, and the hebdomadal cycle, as well as the celebration of the Sabbath, be inter rupted (comp. Keil On Leviticus xxiii. 1'). It is therefore evident that the Jews, who during the second Temple kept Pentecost fifty days after the 16th of Nisan, rightly interpreted the injunction contained in Lev. xxiii. 15-22. The fiftieth day, or the feast of Pentecost, according to the Jewish canons, may fall on the 5th, 6th, or 7th of Sivan (jr0), the third month of the year from the new moon of May to the new moon of June (Rosh Ha Shana, 6 b ; Sabbath, S7 b).