What is Pentecost?

A harvest feast called “the fiftieth”

Pentecost began as a Jewish feast. The law of Moses tells Israel to count seven weeks from the day the first sheaf of the harvest is offered, and to celebrate on the next day.

The next day after the seventh Sabbath you shall count fifty days; and you shall offer a new meal offering to Yahweh.

In Hebrew it is Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, kept with “the first fruits of wheat harvest” (Exodus 34:22). Two loaves of new wheat bread, baked with yeast, were waved before God (Leviticus 23:17). It was one of the three feasts when every man was to appear before God at the sanctuary, with Unleavened Bread and Booths (Deuteronomy 16:16), so Jerusalem filled with pilgrims. Greek-speaking Jews called it Pentēkostē, the fiftieth; 2 Maccabees already speaks of “the feast called Pentecost” (2 Maccabees 12:32).

What happened in Acts 2

Acts, Luke’s second book, sets the coming of the Spirit on that feast, seven weeks after the Passover when Jesus died. His followers are gathered in one house in Jerusalem.

Suddenly there came from the sky a sound like the rushing of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. Tongues like fire appeared and were distributed to them, and one sat on each of them.

They begin to speak in other languages, and pilgrims from Parthia to Rome each hear them “in our own native language” (Acts 2:8). Some sneer that they are drunk. Peter answers that it is only nine in the morning, and that this is what the prophet Joel foretold: “I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh” (Acts 2:17). About three thousand are baptized that day (Acts 2:41). Many readers see Babel undone. There, one language broke into many and the people scattered (Genesis 11:9); here, many languages carry one message and a crowd gathers.

Shavuot today

Jews still keep Shavuot, on the sixth of the month of Sivan, one day in Israel and two elsewhere. In Jewish tradition the feast also marks the giving of the Torah at Sinai, which Exodus places in the third month after the escape from Egypt (Exodus 19:1). Many stay up all night studying, synagogues read the book of Ruth, a harvest story, and dairy dishes fill the table. Pentecost and Shavuot were one day in origin. They now fall on different calendars.

The Christian feast

For Christians, Pentecost is the fiftieth day of Easter, counting Easter Sunday as the first, so it always falls on the seventh Sunday after it; in Western churches, between May 10 and June 13. Churches call it the birthday of the church, and in the West its color is red, for the fire. In England it was Whitsunday, White Sunday, probably for the white clothes of the newly baptized.

In 1906 a revival on Azusa Street in Los Angeles, led by the preacher William J. Seymour, made speaking in tongues the sign of a new movement, and it took the feast’s name: Pentecostalism. Pentecostal and charismatic Christians now number in the hundreds of millions. Readers notice a difference between the two kinds of tongues in the New Testament. In 1 Corinthians 14 Paul describes speech that needs an interpreter; in Acts 2, the crowd understands every word.