Ezekiel’s Forgotten Festival

The Samaritan Jewish sect and Rabbinic Judaism have been engaged in a centuries-long bitter antagonism, with each claiming to be the genuine Jewish religion. The Samaritan sect, numbering only a few hundred people today, believes itself to be a small remnant left behind of cast-off lost Ephraim, the Ten Tribes of the House of Israel. They have their own Bible, with some significant differences from the Jewish Masoretic version, including the final chapter of the Prophet Joshua’s account. Joshua chapter 24 in the Samaritan Pentateuch includes some additional text not in the Masoretic Hebrew used in our English Bibles such as KJV. The Samaritan text in chapter 24 tells that Joshua built a temple on Mount Gerizim in Samaria as a place of worship and sacrifice.

The Jewish Encyclopedia says concerning this final chapter of Joshua in the Samaritan Bible, “Joshua assigns to the tribes their respective lots. He then founds the city of Samaria and builds a temple on Mount Gerizim.” 

The Samaritan sect believes that this mountain is the place the Lord ordained for the worship of the House of Israel, and still enjoins their followers to make yearly pilgrimages to the top of Mount Gerizim every year for the Festival of Pentecost, in biblical Hebrew called “Shavuot,” the Feast of Harvest.  This is so important to them that Samaritans who live a great distance from Gerizim often own a second home in the area, a necessity because their Pentecost is a seven-day event, not just one day as in Judaism and liturgical Christianity. Samaritans reject the city and temple of Jerusalem as a place of true worship for Ephraim-Israel.

The idea that Israel was to centralize their worship in a temple on Mt. Gerizim is interesting because the Prophet Ezekiel’s famous Temple prophecy in chapters 40 to 48 also locates his visionary religious complex, not at the city of Jerusalem, but instead in the center of the land of Canaan at the location of Shechem and nearby Mount Gerizim. (48:10) Jerusalem is not located near the central part of the land, but in Judea in the southern part of Palestine. Significantly, Ezekiel did not choose Jerusalem for his proposed temple, and he also demoted the Levites from a place of importance in his temple. (Ezk. 48:11) Such important facts are totally ignored by the modern Dispensationalists, who wrongly refer to the prophecy as “Ezekiel’s Millennial Jerusalem Temple,” with Levitical sacrifices. I discussed this more fully in my article titled, Misinterpreting Ezekiel’s Temple Vision, posted on CBIA’s migrations.info website. 

 Yet there is a further curiosity in the Prophet Ezekiel’s description of his visionary Temple’s Holy Days: there is no mention of a Pentecost-Shavuot Festival being kept at all. Ezekiel 45:21-25 tells us, “In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month, you are to have the Passover, a feast of seven days; unleavened bread is to be your food…In the seventh month, on the fifteenth day of the month, at the feast, he is to give the same for seven days…” By the calendar this is obviously the fall Festival of Tabernacles, the Hebrew Sukkot, although not stated by name.

 This is verified in the Believers Bible Commentary: “No mention is made of the Feast of Pentecost…” No reason is given. Matthew Henry says, “There is no mention of the feast of Pentecost, which came between that of the Passover and that of Tabernacles.” He also offers no explanation why. Several other commentaries avoid the issue completely and ignore the fact that Pentecost is missing!

It appears clear that Ezekiel had offered a wonderful prophecy of restoration to the exiles if they would repent and return to the true God, but they refused. Their unrepentant hearts led them to reject the offer, so the proposed restoration with a magnificent temple did not happen. They were allowed to return only after fully completing their seventy years of punishment for their sins (2 Chr. 36:21; Jer. 25:11; 29:10; Zech. 1:12), and the resulting “Second Temple” of Zerubbabel was much inferior and far reduced in size and grandeur.

The “forgotten festival” passage of chapter 45 is one of several proofs that Ezekiel’s Temple Prophecy is not a future Millennial event. Certainly, all three festivals would be kept in the Millennium if any of them were, not just two! I believe that the reason Pentecost is not mentioned is because Ezekiel’s prophecy was not for a future age but related specifically to his own day and the exile of that day, in which most of the expatriates were relocated to Babylonian cities and were not able to plant and grow grain. Therefore, keeping an agricultural festival was impractical if not impossible. Historians say the majority of the exiles lived in the cities and suburbs of Babylonia and worked as shopkeepers and similar professions. There was little or no opportunity for city dwellers to grow grain and keep an agricultural festival. Ezekiel himself lived in a house on the river Chebar (Ezk. 1:3), which Mideast scholars have determined was a man-made canal in the vicinity of the city of Nippur. Incidentally, this river Chebar is not the same as the river Chabowr (or Habor, 2 Ki. 17:6) to which the House of Israel was exiled, although the two are often confused due to the similarity of names. 

In addition, the Pentecost-Shavuot festival was based upon the agricultural seasons in the land of Canaan, which were much different from the hot arid climate of Babylon. It was therefore not a suitable agricultural festival-site for the Babylonian diaspora, nor were the Israelites allowed to return home at that time. The Palestinian Jews had a sixfold division of the agricultural year. Each division was held to last two months–seedtime, winter, spring, harvest, summer and the season of extreme heat. Little of this applied to those dwelling in Babylon. The fact that the very great majority of Biblical Commentaries refuse to address Ezekiel’s “forgotten festival” is because it disrupts the popular modern notion that the temple vision is a future Jewish Millennial event, with the unbelieving Jewish people reinstituting sacrifices for salvation three times each year as mandated in the Old Covenant. If there is no Millennial Jewish Shavuot, the core of the Dispensational-Futurist Levitical scheme crumbles.

As Christian believers, we (should!) realize that the Old Covenant has been replaced by the New Covenant, with salvation through faith in Christ, not a salvation dependent on sacrifices of animals or grain. Hebrews 8:6makes this clear: “But now hath he obtained a more excellent ministry, by how much also he is the mediator of a better covenant, which was established upon better promises.” (KJV) The Concordant Literal Version says, “…He is the Mediator, also, of a better covenant, which has been instituted on better promises.”Similarly, the Amplified Version makes this even clearer: “…He is the Mediator (the Arbiter, Agent) of a covenant that is superior and more excellent, [because] it is enacted and rests upon more important (sublimer, higher, and nobler) promises.”

In the New Testament, in John 4:23-24, Christ made it clear that under the New Covenant, the Lord requires a worship in the Spirit and not confined to a locality. Whether the Old Covenant temple was in Mount Gezerim in the House of Israel or Jerusalem in Judah makes little difference to us now, as our Lord’s prophecy makes clear: “…believe me, the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain [Gezerim], nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father…But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him.God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” (John 4:21, 23, 24)

Amen!