Sinai, an event which took place fifty days after their departure from Egypt. To the Christian Church this has also been a high festival, for on that day took place the miraculous outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the Church at Jerusalem, as recorded in the Acts. And this is the Whitsunday of our own Calendar.
The third great festival, the Feast of Tabernacles, was entirely Jewish, and peculiar to themselves. As the Passover occurred in spring, Pentecost in summer, so the Feast of Tabernacles was held in the autumn. On some accounts, it was the most important of all their festivals; it fell during the seventh month of their ecclesiastical year, which commenced at the Passover; but this was also the first month of their civil year, answering to our October, and a period of peculiar importance for the number of religious observances which fell during its course. The first of this month was their New-Year's day, and kept by a very singular custom, the priests blowing a solemn blast on the trumpets, whence it was called the Feast of Trumpets, and they believed, on traditional authority, that the world was created at this season. Ten days after the Feast of Trumpets followed the great national fast, or day of atonement. But it was the third week of the same month that concluded the greater festivals of the year by the Feast of Tabernacles, one of their most peculiar and most joyous celebrations. They were enjoined to live in booths for a week, to remind them of the tents of their ancestors, wanderers in the wilderness for forty years. These booths, or tents, or tabernacles—for such is the import of the latter word—were ordered to be made of branches “with boughs of goodly trees, branches of palm-trees, and boughs of thick trees, and willows of the brook.” But while thus commemorating the poverty and hardships of
