THE literature of the secessionist priesthood attaches paramount importance to Shavuot (the Festival of Weeks/Oaths), understood both as the time the Covenant was concluded with the patriarchs and as a celebration of the renewal of the oath and the acceptance of the Covenant, emulating the angels who celebrate the festival in heaven as a testimony to the tradition of covenants and oaths. In addition, the festival is also a sacred, basic model for the seven-week harvest and crop cycles and the pentecostal pilgrimage axis of the solar calendar observed in the Temple in the first seven months of each year. The priestly courses entrusted with its safekeeping, each serving out its appointed week, celebrated the appointed times (festivals) once every seven weeks from the first month to the seventh month, adhering to the continuous sevenfold cultic and liturgical calendar. The crucial significance of the festival is obvious in light of the great number of times the third month and the festival itself, which symbolize the continuity and renewal of the Covenant, are referred to in Jubilees, in different contexts—Covenant, cult, angels, and oaths. Further evidence is provided by the Community Rule and the Damascus Document, in their accounts of the acceptance of the Covenant and the accompanying pronouncement of blessings upon the adherents of the solar calendar and the heavenly tablets, curses being heaped upon those who dare to violate them.

However, there are two further contexts with which Shavuot is implicitly associated; one assumes significance in relation to the biblical past and the origins of mystical tradition, the other—in relation to the later mythical mystical tradition.