Passover, Unleavened Bread, and the First Sheaf

Many of us carry a simple picture of the days between the cross and the empty tomb. Yeshua died, a sabbath came, and when the sabbath was over, He rose. The picture has one sabbath in it, and the resurrection morning comes after it.

The last two chapters have shown that the word sabbaton σάββατον sab'-bat-on was larger than that. It belonged to the seventh day, and it belonged just as much to every appointed day of holy convocation. Now we set that word on the calendar of the Passover week in which Yeshua died. What we find there is not one sabbath but three, standing one after another.

The Day of Preparation

The count begins with the day before the first of them. John names it more than once, and at the judgment seat he calls it “the preparation day for the Passover” (John 19:14), as we saw in Chapter 24. The Greek word is paraskeue παρασκευή par-ask-yoo-ay', preparation. This was the daytime of Nisan 13, the day on which Yeshua was nailed to the cross at the third hour and died at the ninth. It was a day on which every household made ready for what was coming, and the appointed days began with the evening that came when its daytime ended.

The First: hap-Pesach, the Fourteenth

The first of the three is the Passover itself, hap-Pesach in Hebrew, “the Passover.” The Torah fixes it on the fourteenth: “In the first month, on the fourteenth of the month, between the evenings, is a Passover to the LORD” (Leviticus 23:5). This is the day John calls a high day: “for that sabbaton(referring to every Moed of Leviticus 23) was a high day” (John 19:31). It began when the daytime of the day of preparation ended and evening came, and by then the body of Yeshua had already been laid in the tomb, the burial finished by late afternoon.

The Second: ham-Matzot, the Fifteenth

The second follows at once. Ham-Matzot means “the unleavened bread,” and the Torah gives it to the fifteenth, in the verses we read in Chapter 34 (Leviticus 23:6-7). Its first day is a holy convocation, a day on which “any work of service (avodah עֲבֹדָה ab-o-daw') you shall not do” (Leviticus 23:7). This is the great sabbath of Unleavened Bread. It came on the next evening, and all through it Yeshua lay in the tomb.

The Third: Omer Reshit, the Sixteenth

The third is the day of the first sheaf. Omer (עֹמֶר) means a sheaf, and reshit רֵאשִׁית ray-sheeth' means the first or the beginning. The Torah commands that the first sheaf of the harvest be brought to the priest, and that he wave it “on the morrow after the Shabbat” (Leviticus 23:11). The sabbath meant here is the great sabbath of the fifteenth, the day of the feast (chag חַג khag) of unleavened bread, which that year was also the weekly seventh-day Sabbath. Its morrow is the sixteenth. Chapter 41 looks closely at this verse and at what Paul says about the first fruits. For now it is enough to see where the day stands. It is the sixteenth, the day after the great sabbath, one of the LORD’s appointed days within the Feast of Unleavened Bread, beginning on the third evening after Yeshua died.

The Three in a Row

Laid out in order, the week takes this shape:

After the day of preparation come three sabbatons in a row: hap-Pesach, ham-Matzot, and Omer Reshit. They are not a single day but a run of days, each of them an appointed time of the LORD.

Each of the three began when the daytime before it ended and evening came, in the way the biblical day always begins, as Chapter 3 showed. So the Passover began just after Yeshua had been laid in the tomb. The great sabbath began with the next evening, and Omer Reshit with the evening after that.

The LORD calls all such days “My appointed times (moadim מוֹעֵד mo-ade')” (Leviticus 23:2), and the three sabbatons of that week were among them. In that week, the moedim did not come one at a time with ordinary days between them. They stood shoulder to shoulder, and Yeshua lay in the tomb through the first two of them and rose on the third.

The Year

Three sabbatons back to back do not come every year. In the year of the cross the fifteenth, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, was also the weekly seventh-day Sabbath, so that the Passover, the great sabbath, and Omer Reshit, offered in the morning of the sixteenth, stood one after another without a break. Such a year is rare, coming only a few times in a decade. Calculated by the calendar almost all Jews use, and set together with Yeshua’s birth and His age, that year is AD 33. By the civil calendar, the disciples prepared the supper in the daytime of March 30 and ate it that evening; Yeshua died in the daytime of March 31; and He rose very early on the morning of April 3.

These civil dates follow the AD and BC calendar calculation now in use. If that method of calculation were found to be wrong, the civil dates would have to be recalculated to match. What does not move is the biblical order itself: Nisan 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16, three sabbatons in a row, and three days and three nights.

On Which of Them He Rose

The resurrection, then, did not come after a single sabbath, on an ordinary morning. It came very early on the sixteenth, at first light, before the sheaf was waved in the morning. Yeshua rose on the third of three sabbatons in a row, the day of the first sheaf, the day after the great sabbath.

This changes nothing in the joy of that morning. It puts the morning back where the Gospels put it, inside the appointed times of the LORD. The day He died was the day the Passover was being made ready. The day that followed, as He lay in the tomb, was the Passover itself, the high day. The great sabbath of Unleavened Bread passed while He rested there. And on the day when the first of the harvest was to be lifted up before the LORD, He came up from the dead.

After the resurrection, the day of the wave offering went on as the Torah required, and the Feast of Unleavened Bread continued for the rest of its seven days. The morning He rose was not the end of the feast. It was a day in the middle of it.

Why the Gospels Speak in the Plural

If you count only one sabbath in that week, the way the Gospel writers speak of it will seem strange. As Chapters 37 and 39 will show, each of them, when it tells of the women coming to the tomb, writes sabbaton in the plural. Matthew even writes the word twice in one verse, both times in the plural.

Set their words beside this calendar and the plural becomes plain. It is not a figure of speech but a count, and the chart shows that count: three sabbatons, hap-Pesach, ham-Matzot, and Omer Reshit, with the resurrection very early, at first light, on the last of them.

The Gospels tell us when that dawn came, and they tell us in a phrase that English readers know well. All four writers, when they tell of the women coming to the tomb, write the word sabbaton in the plural, and two of them, Luke and John, use exactly the same words, which Luke uses again in Acts. The next chapter takes that phrase as it stands: one of the sabbatons.