If the feast of Pentecost stood without an organic connection with any other rites, we should have no certain warrant in the Old Testament for regarding it as more than the divinel}' appointed solemn thanks- giving for the j-early supply of the most useful sort of food. Every reference to its meaning seems to bear immediatel}' upon the com|)letion of the grain harvest. It might have been a Gentile festival, having no proper reference to the election of the chosen race. It might have taken a place in the religion of any people who merely felt that it is God who gives rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, and who fills our hearts with food and gladness (Acts xiv, 17). But it was, as we have seen, essentially linked to the Passover — that festi- val which, above all others, expressed the fact of a race chosen and separated from other nations. It was not an insulated day. It stood as the culminating point of the Pentecostal season. If the offering of the omer was a supplication for the divine blessing on the harvest which was just commencing, and the offering of the two loaves was a thanksgiving for its comple- tion, each rite was brought into a higher significance in consequence of the omer forming an integral part of the Passover. It was thus set forth that He who had delivered his people from Ei;vpt, who had raised VII.— N nn"
them from the condition of slaves to that of free men in immediate covenant with himself, was the same that was sustaining them with bread from year to year. The inspired teacher declared to God's chosen one, "He maketh peace in thy borders, he filleth thee with the finest of the wheat" (Psa. cxlvii, 14). If we thus regard the day of Pentecost as the solemn termi- nation of the consecrated period, intended, as the seasons came round, to teach this lesson to the peo- ple, we may see the fitness of the name by which the Jews have mostly called it, ri'llS", the concluding assembly.
As the two loaves were leavened, thej' could not be offered on the altar, like the unleavened sacrificial bread. Abrabanel (in Lev. xxiii) has proposed a reason for their being leavened which seems hardl}' to admit of a doubt. He thinks that they were in- tended to represent the best produce of the earth in the actual condition in which it ministers to the sup- port of human life. Thus they express, in the most significant manner, what is evidently the idea of the festival.
We need not suppose that the grain harvest in the Holy Land was in all years precisely completed be- tween the Passover and Pentecost. The period of seven weeks was evidently appointed in conformity with the Sabbatical number, which so frequently re- curs in the arrangements of the Mosaic law. See Feasts; Jubilee. Hence, probably, the prevailing use of the name, ''The Feast of Weeks," which might alwaj's have suggested the close religious connection in which the festival stood to the Passover.
It is not surprising that, without anj- direct author- ity in the 0. T., the coincidence of the day on which the festival was observed with that on which the law appears to have been given to Moses, should have strongly impressed the minds of Christians in the ear- ly ages of the Church. The divine Providence had ordained that the Holy Spirit should come down in a special manner, to give spiritual life and unit}' to the Church, on that very same day in the year on which the law had been bestowed on the children of Israel which gave to them national life and unity. They must have seen that, as the possession of the law had completed the deliverance of the Hebrew race wrought by the hand of ISIoscs, so the gift of the Spirit perfect- ed the work of Christ in the establishment of his king- dom upon earth.
It may have been on this account that Pentecost was the last Jewish festival (so far as we know) which the apostle Paul was anxious to observe (Acts xx, 16; 1 Cor. xvi, 8), and that Whitsuntide came to be the first annual festival instituted in the Christian Church (Hessey, Bampton Lectures, p. 88, 90). It was rightly regarded as the Church's birthday, and the Pentecos- tal season, the period between it and Easter, bearing as it does such a clear analogy to the fifty days of the old law, thus became the ordinary time for the bap- tism of converts (Tertullian, De Bapt. c. 19 ; Jerome, in Zech. xiv, 8). See Pentecostal Effusion.
V. Literature. — Mishna, Meiiachoth and Eilckurim ; Joseph. Ant. xiv, 13, 4 ; xvii, 12, 2 ; War, ii, 3, 1 ; ISIai- monides, lad Ha-Chezaht, Ililchoth Tamltlin U-Mosa- phin, c. viii; Abrabanel, Commentary on the Penta- teuch, p. 211 (ed. Hanau, 1710); ]\Ieyer, De Fest. Neb. ii, 13 ; Biihr, Symholik des Mosaischen Cultus, ii, 619 sq., 645 sq. ; Diedrich, in Ersch and Grulier's Encyklopddie, s. V. Pfingsten, sec. iii, vol. xx, p. 418-431 ; The Jew- ish Ritual called Dcrach Ha-Chajim (Vienna, 1859), p. 253 b, sq. ; The L'ituiilj'>r the Cycle of Festivals, enti- tled (mtmo) Machsor on (m"1='i") the Festival of Weeks ; Carpzov, App. Crit. iii, 5 ; Reland, Antiq. iv, 4 ; Lightfoot, Temple Service, sec. 3 ; Exercit. in Act. ii, 1 ; Spencer, De Leg. Jleb. I, ix, 2; III, viii, 2; Hupfeld, De Fest. Ileb. ii ; Ikcn, De Duobus Punibus Pentecost. (Brem. 1729) ; Drusius, Notce Majores in Lev. xxiii, 15,