“So who did we defeat on Shavuot?” asked Ishay Rosen-Zvi’s daughter when she returned from kindergarten one day. Her question became the inspiration for her father’s book, “The Secret History of Jewish Holidays.” Shavuot is not a typical Jewish holiday — it doesn’t celebrate a miracle or military victory, and it didn’t originate as a way to commemorate an historic event. The Torah does not provide an exact date for its celebration, and for some obscure reason, it involves eating pashtidot (Israeli frittatas) and other dairy-rich dishes.
Originally, Shavuot, or the Feast of Weeks, was an agricultural festival, marking the beginning of the wheat harvest season. “You shall observe the Feast of Weeks, of the first fruits of the wheat harvest,” says the Torah (Exodus 34:22). Wheat was used to make bread, the staple food of ancient times, which became a generic name for food, livelihood, and life. Today, since most of us live a life detached from agriculture, in which wheat is available year-round and bread is a synonym for carbs and gluten, the wheat harvest has lost some of its meaning.
Shavuot was the second of the Three Pilgrimage Festivals, or Shalosh Regalim, when the Israelites made pilgrimages to Jerusalem with an offering from their harvest. In the Torah, it is called “Chag HaBikkurim,” the holiday of first fruits — in biblical times, this referred to the first fruits of the land in general, but Chazal (the collective body of Jewish sages and scholars from the Mishnaic and Talmudic periods) ruled that only the first fruits of the Seven Species may be brought to the Temple. As grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives, and dates only ripen in summer and autumn, on Shavuot, the Israelites mostly brought wheat to the Temple. The rest of the crops were brought between Shavuot and Sukkot.
On these three holidays of first fruits — Passover (grain), Shavuot (wheat) and Sukkot (fruit) — pilgrims would make their way to Jerusalem in jovial processions, carrying baskets, singing, and playing the flute. An ox with gold-coated horns led the way. When they neared Jerusalem, they would send a messenger to announce their arrival, and the priests would go out to welcome them and escort them to Jerusalem with ceremony, until they reached the Temple. There they would read Deuteronomy 26:5-9: “My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down into Egypt… and now I bring the first fruits of the soil that you, Lord, have given me.” Then they handed their basket over to the priests, who placed it at the foot of the altar.
Yet the major harvest was that of barley, the Omer. Barley ripens and is harvested on Passover, whereas wheat matures 50 days later, on Shavuot. The Torah forbids the eating of the new crop in any form, “bread, or roasted or new grain” until the Omer offering is brought to the temple. The offering should be made on Passover, “on the day after the Sabbath” (Leviticus 23:11). This was the cause of a deep rift between the Pharisees and the Sadducees: the Pharisees, the basis for Rabbinic Judaism, believed in the Oral Torah, and understood “after the Shabbat” as the first day of Chol Hamoed (the third day of Passover). The Sadducees, a sect that included the wealthier elements of society and the high priests and only accepted the Written Torah, understood it as referring to the first Shabbat that occurs during Chol Hamoed.
Finally, the Pharisees prevailed, and the Omer offering was celebrated after the holiday, in a southern field in the area of the Temple Mount. According to the description in the Mishna, the residents of the adjacent towns gathered near Jerusalem to wait for the sunset. Then, the court emissaries asked the crowd three times: Did the sun set? Shall I reap the sheaves with this sickle? Shall I place the gathered sheaves in this basket? And the crowd replied to each question three times “yes, yes, yes” to prove to the Sadducees that it supported the Pharisees.
After the priests waived the Omer sheaf according to the Torah’s instructions, it was carried in large baskets, called “kupot,” to the Temple. There, the grains were roasted in fire, dried, winnowed, parched, ground into coarse flour, sifted through 13 sieves, and finally offered to God. The Torah asks the people to bring their grain offering to the Temple: “If you bring a grain offering of first fruits to the Lord, offer crushed heads of new grain roasted in the fire” (Leviticus 2:14).
Signs of Spring
In Hebrew, the spring season is called “Aviv,” meaning green, newly-ripened wheat. Rashi says it is derived from the word “Eb,” young. In their first phase of ripening, the young grains are called carmel. The green-yellow ears have full, but still moist, grains. They cannot be ground into flour, but they may be eaten fresh. They can also be dried and made into groats. Roasting preserves their green color, helps fight off pests, and adds a unique smoked flavor. The Torah shows consideration for the farmer, who isn’t required to wait until the grains fully mature, as well as for geographical differences: if, for example, the wheat of Jericho has ripened, but in the Galilee, it is still green, both may be brought to the Temple.
Carmel was also an important everyday food. The bible tells us of a man from Baal Shalishah, who, in a year of hunger, brought prophet Elisha and his hundred followers “20 loaves of barley bread baked from the first ripe grain, along with some heads of new grain” (Kings 4:42). Elisha performed a miracle to make this amount satisfy his hungry followers, with leftovers. Baal Shalishah was a village in the proximity of Jericho, where wheat ripens early. We can assume this incident took place shortly after Passover, when barley was already made into “bread baked from the first ripe grain” and wheat was in its carmel stage.
The ancient Syriac translation of the bible translates the Hebrew “geresh carmel” (heads of new grain) as referring to the threshing or rubbing of wheat kernels. To this day, Arabs in Israel and the area make freekeh, or roasted green wheat, in a method used for thousands of years. The threshing method involves some financial loss, because the wheat kernels are not as plump and heavy as they are in a fully matured wheat.
Freekeh ripens in spring, immediately after Passover, and becomes fully mature wheat on Shavuot. The 50 days between the two holidays, marked by the Counting of the Omer, are a challenging time for farmers due to volatile weather. On the one hand, there is danger of khamsin, a hot dry wind named after this period (khamsin in Arabic means 50). If khamsin arrives too early, the wheat dries prematurely, and the kernels shrink. On the other hand, this is the end of the rainy season, and rain can destroy the wheat.
In biblical times, the results were devastating — no wheat meant hunger. Freekeh was used as an emergency food. This is also one of the reasons the Counting of the Omer is considered a time of mourning, in which celebrations are forbidden: the population of Eretz Yisrael was about 70 percent farmers, for whom this time was too stressful for festivities.
During the Second Temple period, carmel was called melilot, “rubbed,” as the wheat kernels are rubbed to remove the chaff. This was cause for the first rift between early Christianity and Judaism. The New Testaments tells us that one Shabbat, as Jesus was walking in the field with his disciples, the hungry disciples began to pick some heads of grains. The Pharisees protested, since this was considered a violation of Shabbat, but Jesus responded that when King David and his companions were hungry, they ate the consecrated bread in the Temple in the biblical city of Nob. “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath,” he said.
Most of the peoples of the area cooked dishes with green wheat, as well as with the legumes that also ripen around Shavuot. During the harvest celebrations, the Minoans offered their gods palikaria — a grain and seed mixture consisting of wheat, barley, fava, lentils, and millet — as a sign of gratitude for the success of the new crops. It was eaten in every Greek house during the celebrations. The early Christians ate palikaria on January 5th, the day before the Epiphany. They even shared it with their farm animals, and women scattered the mixture on rooftops for birds to eat. The day after Shavuot, the Samaritans eat a soup made of freekeh, fava beans, and lentils.
From Wheat to a Dairy Festival
The “Book of Jubilees,” written in the second century BCE, gave the holiday of Shavuot an additional meaning — celebrating the giving of the Torah. According to Prof. Rachel Elior, the book, parts of which were also found in the Qumran Caves, reflects the Sadducean calendar of the priests in the Temple. The priests may have wanted to distinguish Shavuot from the harvest holidays of other groups of the region, and give it a unique Jewish meaning. From the Torah itself, we learn that the Torah was given in the month of Sivan, but no exact date is specified. It was Chazal who associated the giving of the Torah with Shavuot, perhaps to give the holiday a more relevant meaning during exile, one that is not linked solely to the agriculture of Eretz Yisrael. Jews started to celebrate Shavuot with dairy dishes in France in the Middle Ages, inspired by the verse “Like honey and milk, it lies under your tongue” (Song of Songs 4:11). Chazal understood this image as referring to teachings of the Torah, which are as sweet as milk and honey. This was the origin of the custom of eating dairy food, common in Ashkenazi communities alone, as this connection between the giving of the Torah and milk was never made by Sephardic communities.