Leviticus 23:1-44
The Lord commanded the people of Israel to have three religious holidays each year.
The first was called the Passover. This celebration was to remind everyone about the night they came out of Egypt, for it was a great victory over the Egyptians. On the night each year when this event was celebrated, the people ate a lamb during the night, just as they had done that first time. Then for seven days afterward they ate bread made without yeast. God wanted the people to have this celebration each year so that they would always remember how God had punished Pharaoh until he finally set the people of Israel free, even though he was determined not to let them go.
Seven weeks after the Passover, there was the Harvest Festival. This lasted only one day and came after the grain had been gathered into the barns. It was like our Thanksgiving Day. The people thanked God for sending the rain and the sunshine that made their crops grow out in the fields and for giving them food enough for another year. The Lord told them to be glad and to rejoice on this special day.
At the end of the year, there was the Tabernacle Festival. This celebration lasted seven days. During those seven days all the people of Israel moved out of their homes and lived in huts made from branches of trees because the Israelis lived like that for forty years while they were traveling through the deserts. The Lord wanted them to remember this when they arrived in Canaan and were living in houses again.
At each of these three celebrations every man of Israel was to come to the Tabernacle and bring a offering to the Lord.
One kind of gift God told Moses to tell the people to bring was olive oil for the lamps in the Tabernacle. Olives are a fruit that grow in Canaan. When the olives are pressed, a very pure vegetable oil runs out of them. It was this oil that the people were to bring to burn in the seven lamps that were in the gold lampstand. The Lord told Aaron and his sons to clean the lamps every day so that the lights could burn all night in the Tabernacle. Only the priests were allowed to trim them.
God told Moses to take finely ground flour and to bake twelve loaves of bread with it. These were to be placed on the gold table which stood in the Tabernacle near the gold candlestick. He was to put them there on the Sabbath Day and leave them a whole week until the next Sabbath. Then a priest took them away and put fresh loaves in their place. Aaron and his sons could eat the bread after it was taken away, but they must eat it in the Tabernacle because it was Holy bread; they could not take it home, for it had been set on the gold table before the Lord.
There was a man in the camp whose father was an Egyptian, but his mother was and Israeli. He quarreled with another Israeli, and in anger blasphemed God’s name; that is, he spoke evil of God.
The people brought him to Moses and put him in jail until the Lord told Moses what his punishment should be. The Lord told Moses to command the people to take him out of the camp and stone him. The Lord said that whoever blasphemed God’s name, whether it was an Israeli or a foreigner living there with them, must stone him until he was dead. So they took the man out of the camp and killed him, as the Lord had commanded.
Questions:
What were the names of the three National Holidays of the Israelis?
What very wrong thing did the man in this story do?
What happen to him?
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