The Lord's Feasts

Abstract

This article analyzes festivity as a total human phenomenon, positioning specific celebrations within the biblical corpus as points of cleavage and re-signification of commensality practices in the Ancient Near East and the Classical world. Drawing on a comparative analysis with Sumerian, Mesopotamian, Greek, and Roman matrices—where the banquet functioned as a reinforcement of political hierarchies or an expression of civic pleasure—this study demonstrates how the biblical narrative operated an ontological transmutation: the conversion of nature’s biological cycle into a calendar of historical and ethical memory.

Through a phenomenological reading of Jewish and Christian festivities—ranging from the foundational rupture of Pesach and the normative granting of Shavuot, to the mechanisms of subjective purification in Yom Kippur and the cultural resistance of Hanukkah and Purim—it is argued that the biblical feast acts as a mechanism for the suspension of useful time and the affirmation of alterity. Within these contexts, elements such as wine and bread are analyzed as symbolic boundary markers and vectors of a sacred idleness that subverts the logic of productivity. The article concludes that Judeo-Christian identity is anchored in a ritualized commensality that proposes an alternative to social atomization, establishing an ethics of shared joy and a grammar of eschatological hope that remains a critical substrate in contemporary Western culture