Pentecost: the Jewish Feast of Weeks, the early-summer harvest festival held on the fiftieth day after Passover.
Pentecost is the Greek name for the Jewish Feast of Weeks, one of the three great pilgrimage festivals of Israel. It falls in early summer, fifty days after Passover, and marks the wheat harvest and the offering of its firstfruits.
The name comes straight from counting. The Law told Israel to count seven full weeks from the offering of the first grain and to keep the fiftieth day as a holy day (Leviticus 23:15 and 16). Greek-speaking Jews turned that count into a nickname, "the fiftieth," or in full "the fiftieth day." The Hebrew name looks at the same stretch of time from the other end and calls it the Feast of Weeks.
In the New Testament the word is simply a date on the calendar. Paul plans his travels around it (Acts 20:16; 1 Corinthians 16:8), which shows that the earliest churches, Gentile members included, still kept time by the Jewish festival year. Its most famous appearance is Acts 2:1, where the Spirit comes on the disciples when the day of Pentecost had fully come.
That setting has drawn centuries of discussion. Because the scene has wind, fire, and speech in many languages, many readers hear an echo of God meeting Israel at Mount Sinai. Others think Luke points instead to the prophet Joel, whom Peter quotes, and that the Sinai reading imports a later idea into the text. The word itself carries none of this weight; it names the festival, and the argument is about what Luke intends by placing the event on that particular day.
Whether Luke, by setting the coming of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost in Acts 2:1, means to present the event as a new Sinai, with the Spirit given as the Law was once given, or whether that reading imports a later Jewish tradition into the text.
- contestedThe scene deliberately echoes the covenant at Sinai: the wind, fire, and speech recall the theophany on the mountain, and in some Second Temple circles the Feast of Weeks was already the festival of covenant renewal.; Georg Kretschmar, 'Himmelfahrt und Pfingsten,' ZKG 66 (1954-55): 209-253; James C. VanderKam, 'The Festival of Weeks and the Story of Pentecost in Acts 2,' in From Prophecy to Testament, ed. C. A. Evans (Hendrickson, 2004), 185-205
- contestedReading Sinai and the giving of the Law into Acts 2 is anachronistic: the fixed identification of this festival with the day the Law was given is only firmly attested after AD 70, and Luke himself frames the event by Joel's prophecy rather than by Sinai.; I. Howard Marshall, 'The Significance of Pentecost,' SJT 30 (1977): 347-369; Eduard Lohse, 'πεντηκοστή,' TDNT VI (1968): 44-53
- contestedThe Sinai echoes are real but belong to the earlier tradition Luke inherited; Luke's own telling shows no awareness of the parallels and foregrounds Joel.; A. J. M. Wedderburn, 'Traditions and Redaction in Acts 2.1-13,' JSNT 55 (1995): 27-54; Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Acts of the Apostles, AB 31 (Doubleday, 1998), 232-239