Exodus 23:14-17 - Ellicott's Commentary On The Whole Bible

(14-17) The first great festival — the Passover festival — had been already instituted (Exodus 12:3-20; Exodus 13:3-10). It pleased the Divine Legislator at this time to add to that festival two others, and to make all three equally obligatory. There is some reason to suppose that, in germ, the “feast of harvest” and the “feast of ingathering” already existed. All nations, from the earliest time to which history reaches back, had festival seasons of a religious character; and no seasons are more suitable for such festivities than the conclusion of the grain-harvest, and the final completion of the entire harvest of the year. At any rate, whatever the previous practice, these three festival-seasons were now laid down as essential parts of the Law, and continued — supplemented by two others — the national festivals so long as Israel was a nation. In other countries such seasons were more common. Herodotus says that the Egyptians had six great yearly festival-times (ii. 59); and in Greece and Rome there was never a month without some notable religious festivity. Such institutions exerted a political as well as a religious influence, and helped towards national unity. This was more especially the case when, as in the present instance, they were expressly made gatherings of the whole nation to a single centre. What the great Greek panegyries, Olympic, Pythian, &c., were to Hellas, that the three great annual gatherings to the place where God had fixed His name were to Israel — a means of drawing closer the national bond, and counteracting those separatist tendencies which a nation split into tribes almost necessarily developed.