What Does Exodus 23:6 Mean?

"Pay attention to all that I have said to you, and make no mention of the names of other gods, nor let it be heard on your lips. Three times in the year you shall keep a feast to me." The three annual feasts are the Covenant Code's liturgical calendar in its most condensed form: three times per year, the covenant community gathers for pilgrimage feasts before YHWH.

The pilgrimage-feast structure creates the covenant community's annual rhythm of YHWH-encounter: three times per year, everything stops, the community travels to the sanctuary, and Israel stands together before YHWH in celebration, remembrance, and thanksgiving. The agricultural calendar and the covenant calendar are one: harvest festivals become covenant encounters.

The three feasts are: the Feast of Unleavened Bread (Matzot/Passover, first month, remembering the Exodus), the Feast of Harvest/Weeks (Shavuot/Pentecost, fifty days after Passover, celebrating the firstfruits of the Wheat harvest), and the Feast of Ingathering (Sukkot/Tabernacles, seventh month: celebrating the final harvest).

The three together cover the agricultural year from spring to autumn and the theological year from Exodus-remembrance through covenant-formation to wilderness-dwelling (Sukkot's booths remember the wilderness shelter). The agricultural, historical, and theological dimensions of Israel's year are all bound together in the three-feast structure.

The New Testament's use of the three feasts is complete: Jesus dies at Passover (John 19, the Passover Lamb's sacrifice), the Spirit descends at Pentecost/Shavuot (Acts 2, the firstfruits of the new covenant community), and the eschatological ingathering harvest is anticipated at Sukkot (Revelation 7:9-10, the great multitude holding palm branches, Sukkot's symbol, before the throne).

The three feasts structure that YHWH commanded at Sinai is the liturgical skeleton that the gospel fills with eschatological fulfillment: Exodus 23's annual agricultural feast cycle is the type of which the New Testament's redemptive-historical events are the antitype.