While South Arabian inscriptions are begin ning to clear up the history of the peninsula be fore Mohammed (see MIN-EAlsts; SAILEANS ) , we are still dependent upon Islamic writers for our knowledge of the festivals that were kept in that period. In spite of their misapprehensions, it is possible to discern the fact that the great festi vals of the Muslim calendar are adaptations of pagan feasts, and even the manner of celebration is certainly a continuation of the old traditions. The great feast of ancient Arabia was in the spring, in the month called Rajah, during which, on account of this festival, cessation of hostilities between the tribes was ordained. This sacred season was originally fixed at the beginning of the summer, hut the ignorance of astronomy in the earliest time, and the insistence upon a lunar year. caused the months to recede from year to year. At this time the firstlings were offered. Muharram was the first winter month, and its beginning marked the New Year with a festival at the autumnal equinox. The first ten days of the month are considered sacred by the Shiites and observed in commemoration of the martyr dom of Hosein. (See MOHAM IEDAN SECTS; TIASAN AND I1OSEIN. ) The tenth of the month is generally observed throughout the Muslim world. The birthday of the Prophet in the third month is kept, and the 27th of the seventh month in commemoration of his supposed miraculous ascent to heaven. The first three days of Sha wual, the tenth month, constitute the 'minor fes tival.' It follows immediately upon the end of the fast of Ramadan (the ninth month). and is a time of general rejoieing after the rigors of this season. (See RAMADAN. ) On the tenth of Dhu'l Ilijjah (the day of the sacrifice at Meeva ; see II A ) begins the 'great festival.' lasting three or four days. The departure and return of the pilgrimage are also occasions of aereinony and rejoieing. 'Many other days have a local observance in honor of some great man or event. The method of keeping a Mohammedan holiday varies greatly. Public prneessions are often a prominent feature. Friday (el-.1umali) is fre quently called the Mohammedan Sunday. It is the great day for public gathering at the mosque. but has no other point of resemblance to the Christian holy day.
Before their invasion of Palestine, the Hebrew tribes seem to have had one important annual festival, the Passover (q.v.). This Pesach, or leap-feast, so called probably from the gamboling of the young, was celebrated about the time of the vernal equinox, apparently by each household offering the firstlings of its flocks and herds. The recipients of these sacrifices may have been the household gods (Elohint), as even after the set tlement in Palestine, when the people lived in houses and no longer in tents, they seem to have smeared the blood upon the threshold and the door-posts, where these guardian spirits were conceived to have their abode. It is probable that the festival of the new moon was also celebrated in this period; and the Feast of Sheep-Shearing may be of equal antiquity (I. Sam. xxv., 2; II. Sam. xiii. 23). When the different tribes had settled down to agriculture, they naturally learned of their new neighbors how to celebrate properly the harvest feasts, until then unknown to them. The great agricultural feasts were three in number. At the Feast of Unleavened Bread (called Hag ham-niazzoth, from hag, a dance, a pilgrimage, a festival, and matzoth, cakes) the first-fruits of the barley harvest were presented to the local Baal or to Jehovah. Seven weeks later the Feast of Weeks was observed (Hag shableoth or Hag haq-qasir; shabu'oth, weeks; qasir, harvest) when the wheat crop had been gathered in. The time between these two feasts was a single festive season. In the autumn the Feast of Tabernacles came (Hag has-sukkoth or Hag asiph ; sukkoth, booths, tents; asiph, gather ing, harvest ), "the ingatheriug at the year's end." This was on the occasion of the vintage and the olive-gathering. Its name was derived from the custom of living in groves and gardens in huts made of boughs. These booths were the scene of much merriment. Sacred dances were an impor
tant feature. At Shiloh the young maidens per formed choral dances in the vineyards (Judges xxi., 19 sqq.). Eli's suspicion of Hannah shows how freely the wine was used even by women on these occasions (I. Sam. i. 14). The denuncia tions of the pre-exilic prophets reveal the essen tially Dionysiac and licentious character of these festivals at the great shrines. To such an extent were drunken orgies and sexual indulgences char acteristic features of these feasts, that men like Amos and Hosea. Isaiah and Jeremiah declared the sacrificial system and the temple cult con trary to the will of Jehovah. Concerning sonic early festivals our information is very scanty. Thus the Jephthah festival in Gilead, at which a virgin apparent ly was sacrificed, may have been either in honor of a virgin goddess, or more prob ably of the divinity who opens the womb, in order to insure the fertility of the tribe (Judges xi. 40). The centralization of the cult in Jerusalem and the attempted abolition of all sanctuaries outside of the capital in the reign of Josiah (MC. (137-608) had a tendency at once to enchauce the importance of the great festivals and to check the moral abuses assoeiated with the rural feasts. But the destruction of Jerusalem and the end of the independent statehood of Judah naturally caused a revival of the local cults. That even some of the features most vehemently denounced by the prophets still continued in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. is evident from Isaiah lvi. lxvi. Having no temples. the exiles naturally put the more emphasis upon the keeping of the Sab bath, which was possible even in a foreign land; and it is significant that the insistence upon reform in the observance of the Sabbath was first made in Jerusalem by men born in Persia, such as Nehemiah and Ezra. All festivals are in this period given a historic significance. The ecclesiastical legislation did not recognize them as nature feasts, but as celebrations of lsrael's deliverance from Egypt. New feasts appeared in the Rosh hash-shanah, or New Year's Day, and the Yam Kippur, or the day of Atonement, on the 1st and IOth of the seventh month respec tively. In the Maccablean period, the Dedication Feast was introduced to celebrate the reconse cration of the temple of Jehovah, on the 25th of Chis s.c. 165, after it had been for three years a Jupiter sanctuary (I. Macc. iv. 59). It is not likely to be an accident, however, that this event was celebrated at the time of the winter solstice. The recovery of the temple about that time of the year rendered it possible to dedicate to Jehovah a festival widely celebrated by pagan neighbors and probably also by emancipated Jews. Simi larly the feast of Nicanor on the 13th of Adar, in celebration of the victory of Judas Maccabteus at Beth-boron in s.c. HI, was apparently an adaptation of an earlier festival in honor of the dead (1. Mace. vii. 49; II. Mace. xv. 36). Sub sequently the Purim feast absorbed this Nicanor festival. The former seems to have been origi nally an Ishtar feast, celebrating the victory of this goddess and Marduk over the Elamitish di vinity. Rumba, conceived as a demon represent ing the nether world. in the Hebrew story told to commend the festival the names of the combat ants in the Babylonian myth have been thinly disguised as Esther. Mordecai, and Haman. while in the actual celebration the ornamenting of the graves is most unimpeachable testimony to the worship of the dead once connected with it. As the Greek translation, according to the colo phon, appears to have been made and brought to Egypt to introduce the Purim feast for the first time among the Jews living there in the year s.c. 45, the book of Esther and the institution of the festival among orthodox Jews in Palestine cannot have been much older. Whether the feast of the capture of the Akra (I. Mace. xiii. 50-52), no longer celebrated in the time of Josephus, likewise grew out of a nature festival cannot be determined. Equally unknown is the origin of the Feast of Wood-bringing (Josephus, Bel. Jud. ii. 17, 6) and of the Feast of the Rejoicing of the Law.