ḥag

This is the ordinary meaning of the word: a festival kept at a set time, marked by gathering, offerings, feasting, and joy in God's presence. In Israel's calendar it points especially to the three great pilgrimage festivals, when the people traveled to the central sanctuary: Unleavened Bread (tied to Passover), Weeks (later called Pentecost), and Booths (the autumn harvest celebration). The word is built on the idea of a procession or pilgrimage to the holy place, so a festival named by this word is not a private observance but a public, calendar-fixed event the whole community keeps together.

Because the word names the celebration itself, it also turns up wherever Israel's festivals are praised, abused, or condemned. The prophets use it for feasts God rejects when the worship is hollow, and it can even name a festival invented for false worship. The common thread is unchanged: a fixed, public day of religious celebration, whatever the worshipers make of it.

In a handful of places the word does not name the festival but the offering made at it. By a natural shift from the occasion to the gift that marks it, the word can stand for the festal victim itself, the animal sacrificed during the celebration.

This sense is rare and its limits are debated, but it is clearly required in at least one or two places where the text speaks of the fat or the remains of the offering rather than of a day on the calendar.