This is the first of three special teachings on the Fall Festivals of the Bible that will all come out this week before they air on the radio because it’s important to understand the festivals before they happen so that we can celebrate them. This teaching will be about the festival that has a lot of descriptions in the Bible but no actual name! That’s why we call it different things but they all mean that we are going to celebrate and worship God our King and His Son Jesus, the King of kings.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel. Parents, most scripture this week will be from the Miss Tyler Version (the MTV) which is the Christian Standard Bible reworded a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the meaning.
Hey howdy hey, Bible fans, this is a special week because it is the beginning of the Fall Festivals! What are the Fall Festivals? I am so glad you asked and we will spend the next three weeks talking about them, and maybe your family even celebrates them. I started cooking last month when I made blueberry pies, and last weekend I made the best breakfast crumb cake with like an inch of streusel on top and raspberries, blueberries, strawberries and blackberries between the cake and the streusel. And parents, I will link to the recipes I used in the transcript, and I am making my famous smoked Pastrami Brisket (I have to affiliate link the whole book because this is where the recipe comes from)! Now, why would I go to all this trouble? For a few reasons. The first reason is that the first day of this new Biblical month is also the first day of the new agricultural year for the ancient Israelites. It’s the last day because the harvest is over and now it is time to celebrate before planting the next year’s barley crop before the end of the month—you see, that barley waits in the ground all winter before popping up so it can be harvested in the spring, when the year of festival months begins and the Passover is celebrated. We’ve talked about that before.
Another reason this day is very important is because it was the day that new kings would have their coronations. A coronation wasn’t the day that someone became the King (and nowadays there are Queens too), because they became the King on the day that their dad died, which is super sad for them even though they are getting to become the King. The coronation is the day that the celebration happened. Maybe you have been watching what is happening in England right now. Queen Elizabeth died this month, and her son Charles is the King now but no one wants to celebrate because the whole family is very sad. So, sometime next year, when everyone has finished mourning (which is what they call it when the family and friends of someone who has died are taking time out to be sad and to remember them, and to celebrate their life, because it is very hard to live a normal life when you are so sad)—but when a certain amount of time has passed, the entire country will celebrate having a new King and there will be big parties and people from all over the world will come. But right now, no one wants to celebrate. It was the same in ancient Israel too. Becoming the king meant that your dad had died. Having a party right away would be super messed up and so they would wait until the first day of the new harvest year when all of the fruit and veggies would be fresh and all the new animals who were born were old enough and fat enough to eat.
Of course, not every year would be a year where there would be a new king, and in fact it wouldn’t happen very often at all. There were just a few kings who reigned three years or less and quite a few who reigned for over forty years! One was even king for fifty-five years. Queen Elizabeth II was queen for over seventy years and so she is the only person most of the people of England would ever remember to be reigning over England. The word reign means to rule as a king or queen. You know who else the Bible says reigns over Israel? Over all of us? In Moses’s song, in Exodus 15, the shortest verse also says the most: “The Lord will reign forever and ever!” That’s right, the Lord, our God, is King over all of Israel—that’s what happened at Mt Sinai after God delivered His people from slavery in Egypt. He became their king! It wasn’t until after the time of the Judges that the people became so wicked that they demanded a king who was just a human being because they wanted to be like the other nations around them—the nations who needed human kings because their gods were useless. But, before that they celebrated on the first day of the Bible month of Tishri—it is called two things in the Bible, but it is never given a name like all the other festivals! So mysterious!
The Lord spoke to Moses: 24 “Tell the Israelites: In the seventh month (that’s called Tishri), on the first day of the month, you get to have a day where all you do is rest, remembering (the great works of God for you) with teruah (blowing on the shofarot which are animal horns)—a holy gathering (which means that you can’t treat it like just a normal day). 25 You must not do any of your normal daily work, but you must present a food offering to the Lord.”
What does that mean? A food offering to God? Does He eat? The Bible tells us all over the place that God is spirit and He has no need for food or sleep or anything like that so what gives? I am going to teach you a big phrase today but I will explain it and there won’t be a test later, thank goodness. That means if you don’t remember it tomorrow, it doesn’t even matter. That phrase is, brace yourselves, “cultural accommodation.” And it means that God would take something that meant something to people of the ancient world and He would use it to teach them something different about Him. Like, in other countries, the people actually thought their gods needed to eat because they were so totally pathetic that they would faint from hunger and even die if they didn’t get their sacrifices every day. But not our God, all He ever said was that the smell makes Him happy because His people are having a barbeque in His honor. The sacrifices that people brought for the festivals were very special. They weren’t all burnt to a crisp as a gift, because the people would give God the fat and the insides and they would eat the meat with their families—and the priests would get the animal skin, which could be turned into scrolls of the Bible books as they were written. Cool, eh? So, they were sharing the party with God—He was the guest of honor—even though He didn’t eat. But He could appreciate them coming to His party!
So, on this day, God was being celebrated as their King because they were remembering that day on Mt Sinai when He spoke from inside the dark cloud and His voice sounded like thunder and the people were so terrified that they told Moses to speak to God because they were way too scared to listen. When God gave them His commandments and they agreed to keep them, He became their king. And on the first day of the new agricultural year, they celebrated that. How do we know this was the first day of the agricultural year? Because God talked about that back in Exodus while Moses was carving the new tablets with the Ten Commandments! He gave these important instructions in Exodus 34:22: “Observe the Festival of Weeks with the firstfruits of the wheat harvest (that’s Pentecost or Shavuot, which was earlier this year), and the Festival of Ingathering at the turn of the agricultural year (which happened in the fall when there were three festivals in one month!).”
Because of these different descriptions of this important day, even though the Bible doesn’t give this holiday an official name, it is known by a couple different names. Some call it Yom Teruah, which means Day of Teruah, or shofar/trumpet blowing. And that is a perfectly fine name because it matches one of the descriptions—they were supposed to blow trumpets on that day so that they could remember what God had done for them in becoming their king and making them unique, special, and unlike any other group of people in the whole earth. But it has another name too, because that was the day when the new harvest year began and so that name is Rosh HaShanah, which means “head (or beginning) of the year.” And that was a weird time in the world for a new year celebration. The Egyptians had their new year in the summer when the Nile flooded. The Babylonians and Assyrians had their new year when the barley harvest happened in the Spring, it was called the Akitu festival (which means barley-cutting) and that was the time of year when they crowned their kings. So, when you hear Yom Teruah, Day of Trumpets, or Rosh Hashanah, they are all describing that same day—Tishri one, the first day of the seventh month, the beginning of the fall festival month! It was time to party!!
Just imagine all that farming work being done for the whole year—they had no tractors or sprinklers or anything like that. They had worked so hard and the harvest is in and they can celebrate because they have enough food to survive on for another year and who deserves all the credit? God, their king! Because of this, there is a very special focus on foods for this celebration. First of all, one of my favorite things is dipping apple slices in honey. Yesterday we went to the farmers market here in town and bought a big bag of fresh picked local honeycrisp apples and raw local honey. Just don’t eat too much or you might get sick! If you can’t get honey, you could do that with caramel sauce instead. I love that too. Remember that Israel was called the Land of milk and honey so of course celebrating the new year would involve eating honey! But what else did they eat?
This was the time of the year where they could eat all of what were called the “seven species” which the Bible talks about growing in the Land of Israel and specifically being a gift from God. Pay attention and see if you can figure out how many of these you have eaten. There’s barley, which I like to have in beef or vegetable stew, that’s a grain that the Israelites also made bread out of and especially if they were poor. How about wheat? We find wheat in most breads, and donuts, and tortillas and so many other things you see everyday. If you were wealthy in ancient Israel then you always ate wheat instead of barley but both were very important. Those are two of the seven species, but there were also many fruits! Have you ever had a fig? How about a Fig Newton? Those are my second favorite cookies after Nutter Butters, oh wait, there’s also coconut macaroons so Fig Newtons are my third favorite cookie. But if you cut open a fig, and they are extremely sweet, it looks pretty wild! That’s because a fig is actually an inside out flower, and a very yummy one! And their leaves are very itchy, some of them will give you a rash. Just ask Adam and Eve and they will tell you!
How about grapes? I bet you have had grapes and raisins too, because raisins are dried grapes. I love grape juice—how about you? Have you eaten pomegranate seeds or had a drink of pomegranate juice? It is very yummy and sweet but it is also tart. They can be a total mess though because the seeds are full of red juice that can stain your clothes. Still, if you are careful a pomegranate is a real treat. Dates are different, oh my goodness they are super sweet! You can’t even imagine how sweet they are, sweeter than cake frosting even. The last of the seven species is olives! I hated olives when I was a kid but now I love them, you can’t really eat them until you soak them in salt brine for a long time but once you do they are really awesome. But they can also be pressed to make oil out of for cooking but the olive oil was also used in the Temple to cook the bread offerings and for the Menorah lamp in the Temple. These were all very important in ancient Israel and they are still all grown there today!
But those aren’t the only things that people would eat for this holiday—they would also eat a lot of fish like sardines because the Sea of Galilee and the Mediterranean Sea both provided the Israelites with very yummy fish. And even when they were in Egypt, they would eat fish and we know from hieroglyphics, that’s the most ancient Egyptian written language, that the fish they were eating and even wanting when they were in the wilderness, was tilapia! Tilapia is actually the oldest fish that we know people ate because there are pictures of them carved into Egyptian temples and tombs. They still fish them out of ponds along the Nile four thousand years later! Most of the tilapia where I live are farmed in big tanks but they originally came from Africa. They were so popular that you can find them on every continent now, except in Antarctica. If they were there, they would be ice cubes!
Now, you might ask, “Miss Tyler, why on earth would we want to celebrate a Jewish festival today since Jesus has come and the Temple is gone and everything?” Well, that’s a great question and I am super glad you asked, you guys are just too smart. In the Bible, we are told to celebrate these festivals forever because we are the people of God. These festivals—Passover, Pentecost, the Feast of Trumpets (Yom Teruah or Rosh Hashannah), Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement which we will learn about next week), and Sukkot (The Feast of Tabernacles) aren’t called festivals of the Jews in the Bible but festivals of the Lord! So, they are His parties where we celebrate everything He has ever done for us and on this particular festival we celebrate because when we accept Jesus as our Savior, God becomes our king too and not only the King of the Jews.
But how does Jesus fit into all of this? Well, in a very big way, actually. We know from very early in the Bible that God is the king over all of the children of Israel and not just their God. The other nations on earth had great many gods and sometimes those gods were kings over the other gods but they had a king that they could see and who would lead them in times of war and defend them if they were attacked. But when Israel stopped obeying God, and bad things happened because of it, they decided that they needed a human king and that usually didn’t work out very well but God told them that one day, there would be a king like no other, a king who obeyed Him perfectly and would rule over them forever. So after they lost their Kingdom and didn’t have kings anymore, the very wise people who studied the Hebrew Bible (because that’s all they had before Jesus came and for quite a while after) began to look for someone called the Messiah who would be God’s perfect king over them. They had lots of ideas about what kind of king the Messiah would be. Some thought he would be a religious leader, like a priest, but most believed that he would be a mighty warrior, killing all of Israel’s enemies so that they could be a glorious kingdom again like when David, Solomon, and Hezekiah were kings.
18Jesus came close and said to them, “All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. 19 So go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teach them to do all the things I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matt 28)
24 Then (that’s after everyone who loves Jesus has come back to life) the end will happen, when Jesus hands over the kingdom to God the Father, when he abolishes all rule and all authority and power. 25 For he must be King until he puts all his enemies under his feet. 26 The last enemy to be gotten rid of is death. 27 For God has put everything under his feet. Now when it says “everything” is put under Jesus, it is obvious that God isn’t going to be included in that. 28 When everything and everyone has Jesus as their King, then Jesus himself will be obeying God, who made Jesus King, so that God may be all in all. (I Cor 15)
“These (really bad guys) will make war against the Lamb (Jesus), but the Lamb will conquer them because he is Lord of lords and King of kings.” (Rev 17:14)
And he (Jesus) has a name written on his robe and on his thigh: King of Kings and Lord of Lords. (Rev 19:16)
So then, on the first of Tishri, the Feast of Trumpets, Yom Teruah, Rosh Hashannah, the New Year, it is a day to celebrate the King and so although it might seem like sometimes we don’t have a king, the Bible says that we absolutely do! God made Jesus the King of the world (the king of us) when He rose from the dead and freed us from sin and death and made it possible for us to live the kind of lives where we can love people and love Him too! We have a King who isn’t just the King of Israel! He’s better than David and Solomon and Hezekiah and Josiah and all those guys combined! And so, what kind of celebration do you think we should have? Should there be costumes? Fancy clothes? Decorations? Your favorite foods? How about a parade and some music? The Bible talks about blowing horns but if you don’t have one you can sing songs and worship all day long!
In Bible times, they would have sung a lot of the Psalms, called Enthronement Psalms, that were written specially to honor God and the kings of Israel. Why not use pots and pans as drums and march through the house shouting Psalm 47? Clap your hands, all you peoples; shout to God with a jubilant cry. For the Lord, the Most High, is so awesome, a great King over the whole earth…God ascends among shouts of joy, the Lord, with the sound of a ram’s horn. Sing praise to God, sing praise; sing praise to our King, sing praise! Sing a song of wisdom, for God is King of the whole earth. God reigns over the nations; God is seated on his holy throne. The nobles of the peoples have assembled with the people of the God of Abraham. For the leaders of the earth belong to God; he is greatly exalted.
Psalm 95: Come, let’s shout joyfully to the Lord, shout triumphantly to the rock of our salvation!Let’s enter his presence with thanksgiving; let’s shout triumphantly to him in song. For the Lord is a great God, a great King above all gods. The depths of the earth are in his hand, and the mountain peaks are his.The sea is his; he made it. His hands formed the dry land.Come, let’s worship and bow down; let’s kneel before the Lord our Maker.For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, the sheep under his care.
Psalm 100: Let the whole earth shout triumphantly to the Lord! Serve the Lord with gladness; come before him with joyful songs. Acknowledge that the Lord is God. He made us, and we are his—his people, the sheep of his pasture. Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise. Give thanks to him and bless his name. For the Lord is good, and his faithful love endures forever; his faithfulness, through all generations.
So, you can shout too! You can celebrate that God is our King and that He put Jesus in charge of everything and everyone. What better reason for a party could there be? When my sons were little, they used to take the cardboard tube out of the paper towel roll (after it was empty) and when they would talk through it, it made their voice sound like a horn! Maybe you can play music all day and dance! Maybe you can learn more about our King Jesus. I know—maybe you can sit around as a family talking about what it will be like when Jesus is here with us, and He is in Jerusalem ruling as King of the world. That will be a cause for celebration for sure and I bet there have never been better parties ever. All the world will be singing and dancing in the streets because we have a King who will never be cruel, or unfair, and no one will be hungry or treated badly. And we won’t cry anymore! I want you to be excited about Jesus being the King of kings and Lord of lords!
The days after our holiday are important too. They are called the days of awe and lead up to the holiest day of the year—Yom Kippur. That’s the day where the Temple got cleaned up in a special way. For the days before Yom Kippur, we think about all that we have done over the past year that we shouldn’t have. We say sorry when we have done wrong and we stop doing those things. And if we have hurt someone, we need to make things better again. Next week, we’re going to talk about how special the day is. I love you guys.