“And you shall count for yourselves from the day after the Sabbath, from the day that you brought the sheaf of the wave offering; seven Sabbaths shall be completed. Count fifty days to the day after the seventh Sabbath; then you shall offer a new grain offering to the Lord” [Lev. 23:15-16]. First mentioned in Acts 2:1 as Pentecost, this is the Feast of Weeks [Shavuot in Hebrew], referring to the seven complete Sabbaths. (Since in that particular year Yeshua rose from the dead on a Sunday, the Church opted for Sunday as the Lord’s Day, rather than follow the biblical calendar of Leviticus 23.)
It is interesting to note that the term Shavuot per se does not appear in the Hebrew original of Lev. 23, which speaks rather of sheva shabbatot (tmimot) [“seven (complete) sabbaths”] and maharat ha-shabbat ha-shvi’it [“the morrow (after) the seventh sabbath]. In this context, “sabbath” obviously stands for a week – from which we derive the “Feast of Weeks.” The name Shavuot, in the meaning of the Feast, first occurs in Ex. 34:22 – and again...
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