What does the holiday of Shavuot (Pentecost) symbolize? There’s no clear answer because its “meaning” has undergone change over time. The Israelites received the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, and we commemorate this on Shavuot based on counting the days from Passover. However, in practice Shavuot started out as an agricultural holiday – Chag Ha’Bikkurim, the holiday of reaping the produce (which is why we read the Book of Ruth with its agricultural setting). It is only at some later point in Jewish history that the emphasis was placed on the spiritual element of “receiving the Torah.”

Even that last sentence is problematic because at Mount Sinai the Israelites received only the Ten Commandments; they obviously could not have received the rest of the Torah (certainly not from the Book of Numbers onwards) because that history was still in their future! The question, then is this: when did they start hearing the full Torah (“5 Books of Moses”)? An even more relevant question: how did they hear it? Was it in one long hearing? Or over the course of a year? Or some other reading-out-loud cycle?

Throughout all of biblical history, there is no evidence that the majority of the Jews could read or write. First, in Deuteronomy each new King was ordered to write a new Sefer Torah by himself (Deuteronomy 18: 17), but there is no mention whatsoever of any non-Levite or King reading anything, let alone the common Jew. Indeed, we are all aware of the Torah’s injunction read every day in the Shma Yisrael prayer – “thou shall teach your children [the commandments]” – but there........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)