Three national festivals were celebrated yearly in the temple: Passover, the Feast of Weeks, and the Feast of Booths.
Three times a year all adult men went to the temple to celebrate the national festivals (Exod. 23:17; Deut. 16:16): Passover (in April), the Feast of Weeks (in May), and the Feast of Booths (in October). When possible the whole family accompanied the men. But if they lived a long way from Jerusalem, they would only go up for one of the festivals (1 Sam. 1:3; Luke 2:41).
These festivals were tremendous occasions. Hundreds of thousands of people converged on Jerusalem. They would stay with relatives or camp in tents outside the city. The temple courts would be thronged with worshipers. The temple choirs sang psalms appropriate for the festival, while the priests and Levites offered hundreds, and at Passover thousands, of animals in sacrifice. The festivals were marked by colorful processions led by leaders of the tribes, accompanied by festive dance and the beat of tambourines (Ps. 68:24–27). The victory shout and the sound of the trumpet proclaimed the Lord’s presence with his people, amid the singing of his praises (Ps. 47:5–7).
Joy was the keynote of the major festivals, for the worshipers celebrated the deliverance of Israel from Egypt. At Passover, each family ate roasted lamb and bitter herbs to reenact the last meal their forefathers ate before leaving Egypt (Exod. 12). At the Feast of Booths, they built shelters of tree branches and lived in them for a week, as a reminder that the Israelites camped in tents during the forty years of wandering in the wilderness (Lev. 23:39–43). These great festivals served as reminders of how God had delivered them from slavery in Egypt and had given them the land of Canaan as he had promised to Abraham.
Each of these festivals lasted a week, but one day of the year was totally different: the Day of Atonement when everyone fasted and mourned his sins. On this day the high priest confessed the nation’s sins as he pressed his hand on the head of a goat. Then the goat was led away into the wilderness, symbolizing the removal of sin from the people (Lev. 16).