The three great annual festivals of Hebraic religion are
Pesach (Passover) and the accompanying “feast” of Unleavened Bread; Shavuot
(Weeks), also called the feast of Harvest (or First Fruits); and Sukkot
(Booths), or the feast of Ingathering (end of harvest). The feasts of Unleavened Bread, Harvest, and
Ingathering are clearly agricultural in origin while Passover is pastoral,
welded onto the head of the agricultural festival.
The earliest text for the Shabbat mandate gives no religious
reason for its prescription. Rather, it
was to give servants and animals a break from their labors. Only later, after the captivities of the
elites of the northern kingdom of Samerina/Beth Omri in Nineveh and of the elites
of the southern kingdom of Yehud/Beth Dawid in Babylon that Shabbat took on a
religious significance (commemoration of
Yahweh’s rest on the seventh day of Creation Week) when those elites adopted the seven-day creation myths
of their captors.
Likewise, the three pilgrimage festivals took on new and
specifically religious myth meanings when the Hebrews adopted the foundation
myths found in Genesis and Exodus. The
dual festival of Pesach came to symbolize the exodus from Egypt. Shavuot came to symbolize the delivery of the
Torah at Mt. Sinai. Sukkot came to
symbolize the forty years of wandering in the desert of Sinai.
All of these commemorated events never actually happened,
but they are important to the foundation myths.
To cite an example with which I am familiar, it would be like the Irish
commemorating the flight of Scota, daughter of Pharaoh and her husband Goidel
Glas from Egypt, the landing of the Milesians at Inver Sceine in west Munster, and the defeat of the Tuatha De Danaan at
the Battle of Tailtiu and the subsequent exile of those foes underground as the
Daoine Sidhe.
Back in West Asia,
one of the midrashim about Shavuot is that when Yahweh gave the Torah to Moses,
he did so in all seventy-two languages spoken on Earth, at least according to
Hebrew tradition. In Canaanite mythology,
El, the supreme god, had seventy-two sons, each of them the god of their own
people of Earth, each of which spoke its own language. The story of Pentecost (the Greek name for
Shavuot) in The Acts of the Apostles
in which all present understand the words of the apostles regardless of their
language reflects this midrash.
As a time of
expectation (as well as inconvenience), Sukkot acquired religious significance
additional to the Wandering. It became a
time of looking for the Messiah, specifically the Messiah ben David as opposed
to the Messiah ben Joseph. This is the
aspect of Sukkot which ties into the Passion Story in all four gospels.
Jews, Galileans (in
the 1st and early 2nd centuries there was a difference),
and perhaps Samaritans converted to the new Way mythologizing the real events
of the life of the one to whom they claimed allegiance would have done so in
imagery drawn from their own culture.
Hence, the waving of palm branches and the Hosannas upon Jesus’ entry
into Jerusalem, because these two things are part of the anticipatory,
messianic-looking festival of Sukkot.
To have Jews,
Galileans, and other pilgrims waving palm branches and shouting “Hosanna!” at
Pesach would be like Christians erecting Christmas trees and singing carols in
Holy Week.
I suspect that the
myths surrounding Jesus of Nazareth and his death as a rebel at the hands of
the Roman state prior to the Great Jewish Revolt of 66-73 CE placed these
events at Sukkot, given its connection to messianic expectation and palm
branches and Hosannas, when Jesus was shrouded in purple to return as the
conquering King of the Jews. After the
epic fail of the chauvinist militants in the Siege of Jerusalem, Christians
sought to deemphasize those political aspects and moved the Passion Story to
Pesach, a time of intentional sacrifice.
Many of the sayings
of Jesus, if accurate, indicate that instead of the Messiah ben David, he saw
himself more as the Messiah ben Joseph, who would precede the former and die in
self-sacrifice.
Whoever put the
Passion stories of the various gospels into their current form, they clearly
were not Palestinian, even if they were Jews, Galileans, or Samaritans and not
Gentiles. One can understand, perhaps,
why they couldn’t let go of the imagery of the story of the triumphal entry
into Jerusalem, but it is out of place.
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