These two celebrations share roots in the Feast of Weeks, a Jewish harvest festival which took place seven weeks (or roughly 50 days) after Passover.
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In is used as an alternate name for the Jewish holiday of Shavuot. The NABRE translation of this passage reads: "on our festival of Pentecost, the holy feast of Weeks".
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Zohar Bereishis 91b Also, according to the Talmud Yerushalmi, David was born and died on the Jewish holiday of Shavuot (Feast of Weeks). His piety was said to be so great that his prayers could bring down things from Heaven.
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Cold borscht blended with sour cream is also popular on Shavuot (Feast of Weeks), a holiday customarily associated with dairy foods, observed in late May or early June. Seudah Shlishit, or the third meal of the Shabbat, often includes borscht as well.
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The church celebrates the seven feasts described in Leviticus 23: Passover, Unleavened Bread, First Fruits, Feast of Weeks, Feast of Trumpets, Day of Atonement, and Feast of Tabernacles. The church believes that they observe these feasts according to the New Covenant established by Jesus, by distinguishing from the feasts kept in the Old Testament.
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The services for the three festivals of Pesach ("Passover"), Shavuot ("Feast of Weeks" or "Pentecost"), and Sukkot ("Feast of Tabernacles") are alike, except for interpolated references and readings for each individual festival. The preliminaries and conclusions of the prayers are the same as on Shabbat. The Amidah on these festivals only contains seven benedictions, with Attah Bechartanu as the main one. Hallel (communal recitation of Psalms -) follows.
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The term Pentecostal is derived from Pentecost, or the Jewish Feast of Weeks, which commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the followers of Jesus Christ (Esho Mshexa in Assyrian Neo-Aramaic) as described in the Book of Acts, Chapter . Thus, the Church's name originates from the biblical passages contained within the Acts of the Apostles which refers to the day of Pentecost.
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The seven festivals do not necessarily occur on weekly Shabbat (seventh-day Sabbath) and are called by the name miqra ("called assembly") in Hebrew (). They are observed by Jews and a minority of Christians. Two of the shabbath (holy assemblies) occur in spring on the first and last day of the Feast of unleavened bread (Matstsah). One occurs in the summer, this is the Feast of Weeks (Shavuot).
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In the evenings four cups of wine were drunk, to symbolize the four world- kingdoms.Talmud Yerushalmi Pesachim 37c; Midrash Gen. Rabbah lxxx People eating during the Passover meal reclined, in the style of free rich aristocrats, to represent their liberation from slavery. A discussion of the meaning of Shavuot (the Feast of Weeks) and of Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles, is found in the entries on those subjects.
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Josephus, Antiquities, 18:1, § 4 While it stood, the Second Temple remained the center of Jewish ritual life. According to the Torah, Jews were required to travel to Jerusalem and offer sacrifices at the Temple three times a year: Pesach (Passover), Shavuot (the Feast of Weeks), and Sukkot (the Feast of Tabernacles). The Pharisees, like the Sadducees, were politically quiescent, and studied, taught, and worshiped in their own way. At this time serious theological differences emerged between the Sadducees and Pharisees.
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In the Greek it is name for the Jewish Feast of Weeks. Like other forms of evangelical Protestantism, Pentecostalism adheres to the inerrancy of the Bible and the necessity of 'accepting Jesus Christ as personal Lord and Savior'. It is distinguished by belief in the "baptism in the Holy Spirit" that enables a Christian to "live a Spirit-filled and empowered life". This empowerment includes the use of spiritual gifts such as speaking in tongues and divine healing—two other defining characteristics of Pentecostalism.
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The term Pentecost comes from the Greek () meaning "fiftieth". It refers to the festival celebrated on the fiftieth day after Passover, also known as the "Feast of Weeks" and the "Feast of 50 days" in rabbinic tradition. The Septuagint uses the term to refer to the "Feast of Pentecost" only twice, in the deuterocanonical Book of Tobit and 2 Maccabees. The Septuagint writers also used the word in two other senses: to signify the year of Jubilee (), an event which occurs every 50th year, and in several passages of chronology as an ordinal number.
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In Judaism the Festival of Weeks ( Shavuot) is a harvest festival that is celebrated seven weeks and one day after the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread in or seven weeks and one day after the Sabbath referred to in . The Festival of Weeks is also called the feast of Harvest in and the day of first fruits in . In it is called the "firstfruits of the wheat harvest." The date for the "Feast of Weeks" originally came the day after seven full weeks following the first harvest of grain.
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Old ritual items became fashionable again, as were ceremonies, such as ablution. The liturgy, once abridged and containing much English, had more Hebrew and traditional formulae restored, though not due to theological concerns. In contrast with "Classical", "New Reform" abandoned the drive to equate religious expression with one's actual belief. Confirmation ceremonies in which the young were examined to prove knowledge in the faith, once ubiquitous, were mostly replaced by Bar and Bat Mitzvah, yet many adolescents still undergo Confirmation (often at the Feast of Weeks) between the ages of fourteen and eighteen.
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These soon spread outside the movement, though many of a more traditional leaning rejected the name "confirmation". In the "New Reform", Bar Mitzvah largely replaced it as part of the re-traditionalization, but many young congregants in the United States still perform one, often at the Feast of Weeks. Confirmation for girls eventually developed into the Bat Mitzvah, now popular among all except strictly Orthodox Jews. Some branches of Reform, while subscribing to its differentiation between ritual and ethics, chose to maintain a considerable degree of practical observance, especially in areas where a conservative Jewish majority had to be accommodated.
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Military campaigns clustered round Ramadan, when the summer heat had dissipated, and all fighting was forbidden during Rajab, at the height of summer. The invasion of Tabak in Rajab AH 9 was hampered by "too much hot weather" and "drought". In AH 1 Muhammad noted the Jews of Yathrib observing a festival when he arrived on Monday, 8 Rabi'I. Rabi'I is the third month and if it coincided with the third month of the Jewish calendar the festival would have been the Feast of Weeks, which is observed on the 6th and 7th days of that month.
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As the chapter opens, Jesus goes again to Jerusalem for "a feast". Because the gospel records Jesus' visit to Jerusalem for the Passover in , and another Passover was mentioned in , some commentators have speculated whether also referred to a Passover (implying that the events of John 2-6 took place over at least three years), or whether a different feast is indicated. According to , "Three times a year all your males shall appear before the Lord your God in the place which He chooses (i.e. Jerusalem): at the Feast of Unleavened Bread, at the Feast of Weeks (Shavuot, or Pentecost), and at the Feast of Tabernacles".
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The Christian holiday of Pentecost, which is celebrated the 50th day (the seventh Sunday) after Easter Sunday, commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles and other followers of Jesus Christ while they were in Jerusalem celebrating the Feast of Weeks, as described in the Acts of the Apostles (). The holiday is also called "White Sunday" or "Whitsunday" or "Whitsun", especially in the United Kingdom, where traditionally the next day, Whit Monday, was also a public holiday (since 1971 fixed by statute on the last Monday in May). The Monday after Pentecost is a legal holiday in many European countries. In Eastern Christianity, Pentecost can also refer to the entire fifty days of Easter through Pentecost inclusive; hence the book containing the liturgical texts is called the "Pentecostarion".
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In order to settle the religious laws he compiled a code entitled Aderet Eliyahu (The Mantle of Elijah). This code, which contained both the mandatory and prohibitory precepts, is rightly regarded by the Karaites as the greatest authority on those matters. In it Bashyazi displays a remarkable knowledge, not only of the earliest Karaite writings, but also of all the more important rabbinical works, including those of Saadia Gaon, Abraham ibn Ezra, and Maimonides, whose opinions he discusses. The "Aderet" is divided into subjects and these again are subdivided into chapters. The subjects treated are: (1) the fixation of the months (42 chapters); (2) the Sabbath (22 chaps.); (3) Passover (10 chaps.); (4) matzah (7 chaps.); (5) the Feast of Weeks (10 chaps.); (6) Rosh Hashannah (2 chaps.); (7) Yom Kippur (5 chaps.); (8) Sukkot (5 chaps.); (9) prayer.
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The Sacred Name Movement consists of several small and contrasting groups (such as Yahweh's Assembly in Messiah, and Yahweh's Assembly in Yahshua, etc.), unified by the use of the name Yahweh and for the most part, a Hebraic-based form Yahshua for the name of God's son. Angelo Traina, a disciple of Dodd, undertook the translation of a Sacred Name edition of the Bible, publishing the Holy Name New Testament in 1950 (see Tetragrammaton in the New Testament) and the Holy Name Bible in 1962, both based upon the King James Version, but changing some names and words in the text to Hebrew-based forms, such as "God" to "Elohim", "LORD" to "Yahweh" and "Jesus" to "Yahshua". Most groups within the Sacred Name Movement use a Sacred Name Bible, others having been produced since Traina's. The SNM rejects Easter and Christmas as pagan in origin and instead observes the holy days of Leviticus 23 such as Passover and the Feast of Weeks.
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Not long after this, the Partho-Babylonian country was trodden by the army of a Jewish prince; the Syrian king, Antiochus VII Sidetes, marched, in company with Hyrcanus I, against the Parthians; and when the allied armies defeated the Parthians (129 BC) at the Great Zab (Lycus), the king ordered a halt of two days on account of the Jewish Sabbath and Feast of Weeks. In 40 BC. the Jewish puppet-king, Hyrcanus II, fell into the hands of the Parthians, who, according to their custom, cut off his ears in order to render him unfit for rulership. The Jews of Babylonia, it seems, had the intention of founding a high-priesthood for the exiled Hyrcanus, which they would have made quite independent of Judea. But the reverse was to come about: the Judeans received a Babylonian, Ananel by name, as their high priest which indicates the importance enjoyed by the Jews of Babylonia.
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Not long after this, the Partho-Babylonian country was trodden by the army of a Jewish prince; the Syrian king, Antiochus Sidetes, marched, in company with Hyrcanus I., against the Parthians; and when the allied armies defeated the Parthians (129 BCE) at the Great Zab (Lycus), the king ordered a halt of two days on account of the Jewish Sabbath and Feast of Weeks. In 40 BCE the Jewish puppet-king, Hyrcanus II., fell into the hands of the Parthians, who, according to their custom, cut off his ears in order to render him unfit for rulership. The Jews of Babylonia, it seems, had the intention of founding a high-priesthood for the exiled Hyrcanus, which they would have made quite independent of the Land of Israel. But the reverse was to come about: the Judeans received a Babylonian, Ananel by name, as their high priest which indicates the importance enjoyed by the Jews of Babylonia.
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In 1822 the first class of boys and girls was confirmed at the Hamburg Temple, and in 1831 Rabbi Samuel Egers, a prominent traditional rabbi of his time, began to confirm boys and girls at the synagogue of Brunswick. While in the beginning some Shabbat, frequently during Chanukah or Passover, was selected for confirmation, it became increasingly customary, following the example of Egers, to perform the ceremony during the biblical festival of Shavuot ("Feast of Weeks"). It was felt that Shavuot was well suited for the rite, as it celebrated the occasion when the Israelites on Mount Sinai declared their intention to accept the yoke of God's Law, so those of every new generation should follow the ancient example and declare their willingness to be faithful to the Sinaitic covenant transmitted by their ancestors. Confirmation was introduced in Denmark as early as 1817, in Hamburg 1818, and in Hessen and Saxony in 1835.
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Counting of the Omer (, Sefirat HaOmer, sometimes abbreviated as Sefira or the Omer) is an important verbal counting of each of the forty-nine days starting with the Sunday Wave Offering of a sheaf of ripe grain with a sacrifice immediately following the commencement (Hebrew: , reishit) of the grain harvest, and the First Fruits festival celebrating the end of the grain harvest, known as Feast of Weeks/Shavuot/Pentecost in Mosaic Law (Hebrew Bible: , ); or in the varying current Jewish holidays traditions, the period between the Passover or Feast of Unleavened Bread, and Shavuot. This is the second of the three annual Mosaic Law feast periods. This mitzvah ("commandment") derives from the Torah commandment to count forty-nine days beginning from the day on which the Omer, a sacrifice containing an omer- measure of barley, was offered in the Temple in Jerusalem, up until the day before an offering of wheat was brought to the Temple on Shavuot. The Counting of the Omer begins on the second day of Passover (the 16th of Nisan) for Rabbinic Jews (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform), and after the weekly Shabbat during Passover for Karaite Jews, and ends the day before the holiday of Shavuot, the 'fiftieth day.
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