Many people don’t want to have children. And those who do often don’t know what to do with them or how to raise them, so they end up in the hands of strangers or in the educational and social systems.
What Does Shavuot Mean?
The word bikurim was popularized in the Messianic movement in the wake of, “Yom haBikurim,” the day ‘after Shabbat’
The word—or more accurately, the words—for “first fruits” in this passage are reshit k’tzirchem, literally, “the beginning of your harvest.”
What may surprise many readers is that only a few verses later in the same chapter, the word bikurim appears, now in connection with another appointed time: Shavuot.
Bring from your dwellings for a wave offering two loaves of bread of two-tenths of an ephah of fine flour; they shall be baked with leaven, as first fruits (bikurim) to Yehovah.
— Leviticus 23:17
Then, in verse 20, the expression lechem haBikurim—“bread of the first fruits”—is used, and in Numbers 28:26 the Feast of Shavuot is explicitly called Yom haBikurim, “the Day of First Fruits.”
So, have we misunderstood something? Not exactly.
Thematically speaking, the “beginning of the harvest”—the barley offering presented during the week of Chag haMatzot(the Feast of Unleavened Bread), from which the counting of the fifty days toward Shavuot begins—may also be associated with the concept of bikurim.
However, if we want to define the biblical terms carefully and accurately, it is important to recognize that the Torah never calls the Day of the Wave Offering Yom haBikurim. In fact, the day specifically given that title is Shavuot, as we have already seen.
Finally, it is worth considering the meaning of the word itself. Bikurim is the plural form of bikur, literally meaning “first” in relation to agricultural and living produce such as fruits, grain, animals, and other organic increase.
The term is also related to the Hebrew root bakar/bechor, connected to the idea of the “firstborn.” In Egypt, for example, the tenth plague is called Makat haBechorot—“the plague of the firstborn.”
Biblically speaking, the first “fruit of the womb” and the first fruits of the earth are linguistically and conceptually connected. Both represent what is first, set apart, and belonging to Yehovah.
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Many people don’t want to have children. And those who do often don’t know what to do with them or how to raise them, so they end up in the hands of strangers or in the educational and social systems.