From First Fruits to the Giving of the Torah

Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, is kept on the sixth of Sivan, and it is defined by counting: it falls at the end of the Omer, the seven weeks (fifty days) counted from Passover, so that its date is set not independently but by its distance from the Exodus. Its older, biblical meaning is agricultural, the wheat harvest and the offering of the first fruits (bikkurim) in Jerusalem, and it is one of the three pilgrim festivals.

Its more prominent meaning in later Judaism is historical and covenantal: Shavuot became the anniversary of the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, the moment Israel received the Law and, in the tradition's understanding, became a covenant people. The link is drawn from the chronology of Exodus, which places the arrival at Sinai in the third month. This gives the festival a strongly intellectual and devotional character quite unlike the harvest feast it began as, and it is now above all the festival of revelation, of Torah received and to be received anew each year.