Carmine Di Sante

The Character of Jewish Feasts in Biblical Worship

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The three major Jewish feasts are associated with three annual harvests; historically each involved the return of a portion of the harvest to the Lord. These offerings symbolized the reasons for the feast itself: God is the source of the fruits of the earth; God’s gifts of produce are for the sustenance and comfort of the people; and because God gives freely, the worshipers must do the same, sharing their benefits with the needy.

The three principal Jewish feasts (Passover, Pentecost, and Booths) had an agricultural origin, and their meaning as such did not differ greatly from the meaning of “feast” as just described. The three feasts were connected with the most important harvests in the three productive seasons of the year, and they expressed the deep joy of a people that was led and nourished by its God. Passover celebrated the barley harvest in the spring, Pentecost the wheat harvest in the summer, and Booths the fruit harvest in the fall. In keeping with an almost universally known and attested religious custom, the heart of each feast consisted in the offering of part of the harvest to the divinity. The book of Deuteronomy makes explicit reference to this practice in the cases of Pentecost and Booths, two feasts that, unlike Passover, which has been reread and historicized to a greater degree, allow us to glimpse their original agricultural basis:

Celebrate the Feast of Weeks [Pentecost] to the Lord your God by giving a freewill offering in proportion to the blessings the Lord your God has given you.… Celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles for seven days after you have gathered the produce of your threshing floor and your winepress.… No man should appear before the Lord empty-handed: Each of you must bring a gift in proportion to the way the Lord your God has blessed you. (Deut. 16:10, 13, 16–17)

What is the meaning of such an offering, which is both the expression and the basis of feasts and their joy? To offer God the produce of the earth is not an act of self-deprivation (renouncing something in order to give it to God) but is an act of self-definition and acknowledgment that the fruits of the earth belong to the Lord and that human beings may use them only as his beneficiaries. This simple action sums up in a symbolic way three basic concepts and attitudes: (1) the produce gathered belongs to God, who is its master and owner; (2) the produce is given as a gift to meet the needs of and to comfort humans; and (3) the fruits of the earth are to be enjoyed not according to the logic of possession and hoarding but according to the divine intention that brings them into existence.

When Israel offered to the Lord part of its harvests in the three important seasons of the year, it was reaffirming this pattern of conviction and choice. Israel professed its belief that the “bread” and “wine” of the Promised Land were not the result of the people’s efforts or of magical practices, but were due to the creative goodwill of God, and Israel renewed its commitment to share these things with others. This accounts for the biblical insistence that on these festival days no one should be in want but all should have and fully enjoy: “Be joyful at your Feast—you, your sons and daughters, your menservants and maidservants, and the Levites, the aliens, the fatherless and the widows who live in your towns” (Deut. 16:14). This emphasis on feeding the poor reflects a theological rather than a sociological concern: God intends the fruits of the earth for the enjoyment of all; if the poor, as well as the rich, enjoy them, God’s reign is being brought to pass, and his will is being fulfilled in a concrete way.

Sharing the fruits of the earth is not simply an imperative of social ethics, but is the very heart of the theological directive: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deut. 6:5); here, to “love the Lord” means to obey his will by accepting and doing it within history.

The sacrifice of animals, which had a privileged place in the worship offered in the Jerusalem temple, had at bottom the same twofold meaning as the offering of firstfruits: it was an acknowledgment of God’s lordship over the animal world and a readiness to take nourishment from that world in a spirit of sharing and not of hoarding, that is, as gifts intended for all and not as a privilege of a few.

Israel derived the three agricultural feasts from the surrounding Semitic world. However, it did not make them its own in a purely passive way; it turned them into original creations by enriching them with its own specific spiritual outlook. The name usually given to this process of reinterpretation is “historicization.” By this is meant that the focus of the feast was shifted from events of the natural world to special historical events: the deliverance from Egypt in the Feast of Passover, the gift of the Torah in the Feast of Pentecost, and the enjoyment of the Torah’s fruits in the Feast of Booths.

It is true that Israel “historicized” the agricultural feasts. It is necessary, however, to understand this process correctly: the process took the form not of contrasting the new with the old or ignoring the old, but of further explaining the original meaning and reaching down to its root.

The central event of Jewish history is the Exodus from slavery in Egypt, a single action with three stages: departure from Egypt, the gift of the Torah (or covenant), and entrance into the Promised Land. Israel was liberated from slavery and brought into the “good and spacious land” of Canaan, but the entrance was neither automatic nor taken for granted, for between departure and entrance was Mount Sinai, the place of the covenant where the Torah was offered and accepted. Here is the epicenter and secret of all Jewish history and Jewish originality: the discovery that the land, their own land, would produce “milk and honey” in abundance (Exod. 3:8, 17; Num. 13:27; Deut. 6:3; 11:9), not spontaneously, however, but only if and to the extent that Israel would be faithful to the covenant. This connection between the fertility of the soil and obedience to the Torah is clearly expressed in Leviticus 26:3–6, which is bewildering because the fruits of which it speaks are not the fruits of some special world but the normal production of the trees of any part of our world. Yet if these fruits are truly to bring joy to all and become a sign of communion instead of destruction, a precise, divine condition must be met: they must be cultivated and eaten according to the logic of the covenant, that is, Jews must acknowledge them to be gifts and must consent to their universal destination.

This “historicity” is peculiar to the Jewish situation, but clearly, it does not contradict the meaning of “feast”; rather, it further clarifies that meaning by getting to the root of one of its fundamental aspects. When early human beings offered God part of their seasonal produce, they were recognizing his fatherhood and accepting the produce as his gift. Israel accepted this logic but had a better grasp of its dynamic and its requirement. It realized that if the fruits of the earth are truly to be a gift and a blessing, it is not enough simply to accept them; rather they must be shared through a way of life-based on justice and responsibility. Justice and the fruitfulness of the land are partners in an “indissoluble marriage” in which the two shed light on one another. Israel’s originality lies in its having transcended a purely “natural” view of nature and having connected the abundance of the land’s fruits with its own free choices.

The Purpose of Jewish Feasts in Biblical Worship

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A feast celebrates the positive character of existence. In the face of evil and pain, feasts proclaim the goodness of creation and the freedom to enjoy the world because God made it.

A feast is a statement that the world is a good place because human beings can enjoy it and because God made it. Unwittingly, and prior to any reflection on the point, the celebrants of a feast relate their activity to independent but interrelated poles: human beings, the world, and God — human beings as subjects who are good, the world as an object that is good, and the divinity as the foundation of the two goodnesses. A feast brings out the fact that the world is good and human beings can dwell in it as their native place because it is willed by and founded on the sacred. Here is the heart and secret of every feast; in the celebration of a feast, we reappropriate, beyond and despite appearance, the positive character of existence as a space filled with fruition and making.

Feasts As Rejection of the Negative

As an interpretation of meaning, a feast can be seen as having three moments or phases. First, it is a rejection of negativity and death. The lives of individuals and groups are marked by pain and privation, poverty and injustices, violence and absurdity. Instead of displaying the original harmony, life seems to be under a constant threat that frustrates all efforts and undertakings. Instead of being drawn by a beneficent telos (purpose), it seems driven by a maleficent demon that has donned the hands and eyes of thanatos, or death. A feast represents a suspension of this entire order of things, a profession of faith that this world, in its present form, is not the true world (kosmos) but is negation (chaos) or counterfeit; it is not a home for human beings but an unrewarding wilderness. A feast challenges the primacy of evil and its claim to be ultimate reality; it is a rebellion against evil’s perverse power and its claim to have the final say; it is a sign—that turns into a certainty—that evil can be dethroned and overcome. Therefore feasts are the greatest wealth of a people, especially the poorest among them, for feasts with their myths and rites preserve in concentrated form the most fruitful seeds of hope and struggle that human history contains. As long as people are able to celebrate feasts, they will also be capable of life and commitment.

Feasts As Rejoicing and Sharing

Second, a feast asserts the quality of life and defines its positive side. But what is this “quality” that a feast expresses, not conceptually but in a concrete, corporeal way? Many terms are used to describe this quality, but one seems especially important: you. “You shall rejoice in your feast” (Deut. 16:14 NASB). But the rejoicing here is something other than what is usually understood by the term in our affluent societies. The passage in Deuteronomy continues: “ … you and your son and your daughter and your male and female servants and the Levite and the stranger and the orphan and the widow who are in your towns.” Rabbi Elie Munk comments on this passage as follows:

People should eat meat and drink wine because it is these things, especially that contribute to their gladness. But when we eat and drink, it is our duty to provide the necessities for the foreigner, the widow, and the orphan, that is, for all who are in need. Those who double-lock their doors and eat only with their own families, without helping the unfortunate, will not experience the joy of the mitzvah but “only the satisfaction is given by their meal.” This is why the prophet Hosea [Hos. 9:4 rsv] says: “They shall not please him with their sacrifices. Their bread shall be like mourners’ bread; all who eat of it shall be defiled; for their bread shall be for their hunger only.” (E. Munk, Le monde des prières [1970], 295)

This passage summarizes the two basic aspects of the joy a feast proclaims and bestows: the enjoyment of things (“eating and drinking”) and fraternal sharing (“providing the necessities for the foreigner”). Instead of understanding joy in a purely psychological or pseudospiritual way, a feast emphasizes its corporeal element and its necessary connection with the fruits of the earth; instead of making this joy something self-centered, a feast asserts its comprehensive and nonexclusive character. True joy is born of two encounters: with the fruits of the earth and with our brothers and sisters. Where one of these two is missing, a feast changes from being an end to being a means; it ceases to be an expression of life and becomes a means of obtaining satisfaction. The joy proper to feast is, in reality, the plenitude of being that is in harmony with the things of this world and with this world’s inhabitants; it is the fruit produced by a recovered Eden, in which the original Adam and Eve, representatives of men and women of every age, live reconciled with each other, with the garden, and with God.

Feasts As Affirmation of a Higher Order

The third and most important aspect of a feast is that it is an assertion of that which is the ontological foundation of the goodness and meaning of the human person. Are the rebellion against the power of evil and the proclamation of the victory of the positive over the negative simply an expression of impotent and deceptive desire, or are they an echo of the truth that conquers falsehood and triumphs over self-deception? A feast reveals its full depth when understood as the assertion of the second alternative: human life has meaning, beyond all its historical failures and despite all its privations, not because it is subjectively given meaning by each individual, but because it is objectively founded by and on the sacred.

A feast thus asserts the existence of meaning and at the same time sets the conditions for the attainment of this meaning, meaning that grows and flourishes because it is located within a different horizon—the horizon of the divine, the sacred—which transcends that of the profane. By means of its mythical narratives and re-actualizing rites, a feast calls to mind and makes present again this foundational root; by returning to this root, human behavior overcomes fragmentation, conquering chaos and recovering kosmos, that is, order, strength, motivation, the human ideal. A feast indeed abolishes the established order (we need think only of the violations of standard norms that are to be seen in every feast), but it does so not for the sake of libertinism and chaos but in obedience to a higher order that is closer and more faithful to the divine intention. A feast overturns the world and re-creates it according to the divine model.

An Introduction to Jewish Feasts in Biblical Worship

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A feast is a sign of the divine in history. Israel celebrated three kinds of feasts: pilgrimage feasts, solemn or repentance feasts, and lesser feasts not mandated by the Torah. All of these commemorated God’s action in the life and history of the community.

Like all peoples and all religions, Israel introduces rhythms into the cycle of time by means of recurring feasts. These include feasts in the full and proper sense, the “pilgrimage feasts” (pesaḥ, shavu‘ot, and sukkot), the solemn, that is, sober or austere feasts (ro’sh hashshanah and yom kippur), and the lesser feasts (ḥanukkah and purim).

The differences between the three kinds of feasts are in their degree of theological density or weight. The pilgrimage feasts (the only ones that merit the appellation ḥag, “feast”) celebrate and actualize the great three-fold saving event in Israel’s history: the Exodus, the Mosaic covenant, and the entrance into the Promised Land. They are therefore the most important of all the feasts; they are called “pilgrimage” (regalim) feasts because in biblical times they were marked by a great influx of visitors to the temple in Jerusalem, the Holy City.

The “austere” feasts celebrate not the divine event but the human outcome of freedom’s failure; they recall the infidelity of human beings in response to God’s faithfulness, and they are days of great repentance and profound conversion. They are “austere” because the prevailing mood is not joy but a critical facing up to self and to God.

The lesser feasts are so-called because they are not commanded by the Torah and are concerned with secondary events of Jewish history. Though enriched with a variety of elements, chiefly folkloristic and popular, they cannot be put on the same level as the first two types that provide the structure of the Jewish liturgical year.

A feast is a sign of the divine initiative in history; it is a “word” that rescues history from its failures and allows us to glimpse luminous meaning through, and beyond, the absurdity and monotony of historical time. Some authors make a richly meaningful suggestion regarding the origin of the word feast: they say it derives from phainomai, a Greek verb meaning “to show oneself” or “to appear,” for a feast allows a new horizon of values and meanings to manifest itself, without which life and hope would become impossible. Jewish feasts have the same function as feasts everywhere, but they have a different, more explicit, and radical meaning in light of the religious experience this people has had of the God of the Exodus and the covenant.

The Our Father (Lord’s Prayer) in Light of Jewish Bƒrekah

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Jesus gave his disciples a model to follow in the Lord’s Prayer. In this prayer, Jesus brings to a clear focus many expressions and elements already present in first-century Jewish synagogue worship.

The Our Father, of which we have two versions (Luke 11:2–4; Matt. 6:9–13), also reflects to an important degree the liturgy of the synagogue. Contrary to the claims of apologetes who like to emphasize the radical originality of the Our Father, a careful analysis shows that this prayer has deep roots in Judaism.

This statement applies first to the very structure of the Our Father. This reflects the ideal structure of Jewish prayer, as seen, for example, in biblical prayers such as that of David (1 Chron. 29:10–20); an opening bƒrakhah, or petitions, and a final, summarizing bƒrakhah. For this reason, it is improbable that the Lord’s Prayer ended with the words “but deliver us from evil.” The ending in some codices of Matthew’s gospel would seem closer to the original: “For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.”

When we turn from the structure to an analysis of the several parts of the Our Father, the connections with Jewish prayer become even clearer.

Our Father

The description of God as a “father” recurs in Jewish prayer. The practice is attested first in the Bible itself. In Deuteronomy 32:6 and Isaiah 63:16, for example, God is called the father of Israel, and Israelites are called his children. The name is attested above all, however, in the Jewish liturgy.

In the ‘Amidah, or Eighteen Benedictions, for example, the title occurs twice: “Cause us to return, O our Father, unto thy Torah; draw us near, O our King, unto they service … ” (fifth benediction); “Forgive us, O our Father, for we have sinned; pardon us, O our King, for we have transgressed” (sixth benediction). We also find it in the second benediction before the Shƒma‘: “O our Father, our King, for our fathers’ sake, who trusted in thee, and whom thou didst teach the statutes of life, be also gracious unto us and teach us. O our Father, ever compassionate, have mercy on us.”

The name “Father” is also widely used in the liturgy of the celebrations of the new year and of Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), where the phrases “Father of mercy” and “O our Father” occurs with some frequency. “Father” emphasizes the trust of the people in the mercy of God, while the plural “our” underscores the solidarity of the community that is gathered for prayer.

If these similarities are taken seriously, then the opposition theologians and exegetes like to see between the Jewish conception of God and that of Jesus becomes at least questionable. Although Jesus and the early Christians addressed God as ’Abba’, the difference between ’ab (father) and ’abba’ (papa) should not be exaggerated. It may be true that the use of ’abba’ is predominantly Christian, but it should not be contrasted with the use of ’ab; ’abba’ represents at most a nuance of feeling.

Who Art in Heaven

This expression likewise occurs frequently in the Jewish liturgy. It occurs in the morning service: “Thou are the Lord our God in heaven and on earth.” In the treatise, ’Avot, the oldest and most important in the Mishnah, one passage reads: “Be courageous and do the will of your Father who is in heaven” (’Avot. 5, 23). The words are obviously meant to be metaphorical, not geographical. They express God’s transcendence, his “otherness” in relation to human beings. If the word Father expresses God’s closeness to humanity, the expression “who is in heaven” reminds us of the irreducible difference between him and us.

Hallowed Be Thy Name

The expression immediately reminds us of the qaddish, one of the oldest Jewish prayers, used at the end of the reading and study of the Torah and, later, in the synagogue service. “Magnified and sanctified be his great Name in the world which he hath created according to his will.” The expression also occurs in the qƒdushah, the third benediction of the Tƒfillah: “We will sanctify thy Name in the world even as they sanctify it in the highest heaven.”

The parallel between these texts of the Jewish liturgy and the Our Father becomes even more startling in light of the meaning of the words “sanctify the name of God.” The teachers ask: “How can human beings sanctify the name of God?” They answer: “By their words but above all by their lives.” Those who are faithful to God’s will and prefer it to their own “sanctify his Name.” The true “sanctification of the Name” (qiddush hashshem) consists in the gift of one’s life; it consists in martyrdom.

We can now understand better what Jesus is referring to when he says “hallowed be thy name”; the words express his conception of God, but above all, they express the gift of his life, which is “sacrificed” for all (Matt. 26:24; Luke 22:19). By his death on the cross in obedience to the Father’s will, Jesus “sanctified the Name.” The same thread runs through history from Jesus dying on the cross to the thousands of Jews who called on God and glorified him as they entered the gas chambers; they as well as Jesus “sanctified the Name.”

Thy Kingdom Come

These words are likewise to be found in the qaddish: “May he establish his kingdom during your life and during your days and during the life of all the house of Israel.” This is clearly a kingdom to be established not in some metahistorical realm but in our present history. The kingdom of God is to become a reality in this world and not just in the next. When Jesus calls for the coming of the kingdom of God he is thinking of a humanized world in which human beings can live in fruitful peace as brothers and sisters.

Thy Will Be Done

These words also occur in 1 Maccabees: “It is better for us to die in battle than to see the misfortunes of our nation and of the sanctuary. But as his will in heaven may be, so he will do” (1 Macc. 3:59–60). The same attitude of abandonment to God’s will finds expression in the prayer which Jews utter as they feel death drawing near: “May it be thy will to send me perfect healing. Yet if my death be fully determined by thee, I will in love to accept it at thy hand.”

Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

The preceding invocations focused on God; this and the following invocations focus on human needs. The petition for “bread” is part of the ninth benediction of the tƒfillah: “Bless this year unto us, O Lord our God, together with every kind of the produce thereof, for our welfare; give a blessing upon the face of the earth. Oh satisfy us with thy goodness, and bless our year like other good years. Blessed art thou, O Lord, who blesses the years.”

Some commentators liked to see in this Jewish blessing an allusion to the manna in the wilderness. Not without reason, some fathers of the church liked to see in the “daily bread” of the Our Father an allusion to the Eucharist. Thus the Our Father is linked to the Jewish liturgy not only textually but even hermeneutically. The allusion to the manna may also shed light on the difficult Greek adjective epiousion (translated in Matt. 6:11 as “daily bread”); just as the Israelites were to gather the manna “as much as he needed” (Exod. 16:21) because any surplus gathered “was full of maggots and began to smell” (Exod. 16:20), so the bread we ask of God is bread that is enough for each day and frees us of any worry about the future and any hoarding. The same thought is expressed in Proverbs 30:8: “Give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread.”

Forgive Us Our Debts As We Forgive Our Debtors

The idea of forgiveness finds expression in the sixth benediction of the Tƒfillah: “Forgive us, O our Father, for we have sinned; pardon us, O our King, for we have transgressed; for thou dost pardon and forgive. Blessed art thou, O Lord, who is gracious, and dost abundantly forgive.” Even the thought in “as we forgive our debtors” has its origin in the synagogue and the Old Testament. We find it in the Yom Kippur liturgy and the Old Testament apocryphal book of Sirach: “Forgive your neighbor the wrong he has done, and then your sins will be pardoned when you pray” (28:2 RSV). The same doctrine is found in the majority of the rabbis, who teach that “if you forgive your neighbor, the One will forgive you; but if you do not forgive your neighbor, no one will have mercy on you” (Midrash Tanhuma Genesi).

Lead Us Not into Temptation But Deliver Us from Evil

This idea of deliverance (redemption) is found in the seventh benediction of the tƒfillah: “Look upon our affliction and plead our cause, and redeem us speedily for thy Name’s sake; for thou art a mighty Redeemer. Blessed art thou, O Lord, the Redeemer of Israel.” There is an even closer resemblance in the Talmud, b. Ber. 50b: “Do not abandon me to the power of sin or to the power of guilt or to the power of temptation or to the power of shame.” The Talmud was composed centuries after Christ, but many of its materials go back to a far distant period, even prior to the time of Christ.

Jesus called on the same God as did his Jewish brothers and sisters and used the same turns of phrase they did. His originality consisted in bringing to fulfillment what the biblical and liturgical texts proclaimed and expressed: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matt. 5:17). The prayer Jesus gave us is not opposed to the prayers of the Jews but brings them to fulfillment.

The Bƒrakhah or Blessing

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The bƒrakhah, blessing or benediction, is the chief form of prayer in Jewish worship. The New Testament provides numerous examples of the use of this form of prayer by Jesus and the apostles.

The bƒrakhah (translated in the Christian Scriptures aseucharistia [thanksgiving] or eulogia [blessing] and in the Latin Bible as benedictio [blessing] or gratiarum actio [thanksgiving]) was and is the chief form of prayer in Jewish liturgy and spirituality. It is the chief form of prayer because it determines the meaning and context of all prayer, as well as the dynamic movement and horizon of all liturgy and all the feasts. The bƒrakhah consists in an attitude and formula of wonder, praise, thanksgiving, and acknowledgment of the unmerited divine benevolence that provides for God’s children and gladdens them with the fruits of the earth and every kind of blessing. In the course of time the mark of the bƒrakhah came to be the set, standardized words with which every prayer began and ended: “Blessed be you, Lord, our God.” At times, the passive form (“Blessed be you … ”) might be replaced by the active form: “I bless you.… ”

The New Testament tells us of many bƒrakhot, some explicit, others—the majority—implicit. Among the best known is the one in which Jesus thanks the Father for having chosen “babes” as the recipients of his revelation:

I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure. All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. (Matt. 11:25–27; cf. Luke 10:21–22)

The most famous of the implicit bƒrakhot is the one to which all the synoptic evangelists refer in the account of “the institution of the Eucharist”:

While they were eating, Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take it; this is my body.” Then he took the cup, and gave thanks, and offered it to them, and they all drank from it. “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many,” he said to them. (Mark 14:22–24)

Another testimony to Jesus’ use of the bƒrakhah form is in Mark 6:41, where the influence of the Eucharist is undeniable: “Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves … ” (a similar passage occurs again in Mark 8:6–7). Other references to blessings are in Mark 10:16, where Jesus took the children in his arms and “blessed them,” that is, said a bƒrakhah over them, and in John, where Jesus utters a bƒrakhah to the Father for the raising of Lazarus: “Jesus looked up and said, ‘Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me … ’ ” (John 11:41–42).

Other New Testament writings besides the Gospels present many other pieces of evidence. Colossians 3:17 serves as an example: “And whatever [pan] you do, whether in word or deed, do it all [panta] in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” According to the rabbinical tradition, the devout Jew ought to recite over one hundred bƒrakhot daily. We cannot fail to see the same sensibility at work in Paul’s exhortation to “do everything” to the accompaniment of thanksgiving. In all things (panta), nothing excluded, Christians, like Jews, should utter a bƒrakhah. The only difference is that Christians are to do this “in the name of the Lord Jesus” or “through him,” that is, with the same intention and the same fullness of commitment he had.

Ephesians 5 is also meaningful: “Be filled with the Spirit. Speak to one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks [eucharistountes pantote huper pantōn] to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Eph. 5:18–20). Christians should offer bƒrakhot at all times (pantote) and for everything (huper pantōn).

The Pauline letters not only show the importance of the bƒrakhah; they also tell us the motives that give rise to it. These can be summed up under two headings: the existence of the new Christian communities and, above all, the event that is Jesus, now acknowledged and proclaimed as Messiah and Son of God. If Christians ought to utter a bƒrakhah in every situation and every event, then certainly this response is called for in face of the two main events of early Christianity: the multiplication of communities by the hundreds and the experience of the dead and risen Jesus (1 Cor. 1:4–9; Col. 1:3–5; Eph. 1:3–14).