Let us go back to Leviticus 23. We were here a few times today already. I was not kidding when I said I would take David's notes and basically give the same thing.
I am just going to preface this whole paragraph or so with, as David said this morning, actually, James said it too, Martin, you may have said it too - except for the offerings to be given on this holy day in Numbers 29:35-38, this is the totality of scriptural instruction about the Eighth Day. It is very rare in the Bible for any kind of instruction to be given about this day in particular. There is also a passing reference to it in Nehemiah 8:18. We will not go there. It just basically says that they kept this day. And in the New Testament, before you understand the symbolism and everything of this, using the time markers in John 7, chapters 8 through 10, about halfway through chapter 10 may have occurred on the Eighth Day in the last Feast of Tabernacles of Jesus' life. So that gives us some things to talk about, what happens in John 8, 9, and the first half of chapter 10 before the Feast of Dedication is spoken about there.
But that is it. That is basically all we have to go on about the Eighth Day unless you begin to start putting things together, and I think God has revealed some of these things to us in the last few years so that we can understand more about this particular holy day. It is not readily apparent what the Eighth Day is all about just from a straight through reading of the text. Because the way it is in the texts, most people just say that it is just a continuation of the Feast of Tabernacles. That is how it is presented in Leviticus 23. There is the first day you have a holy convocation. You keep the feast on the Eighth Day, you have a holy convocation, a sacred assembly, a Sabbath rest.
That is what it seems, but what we have been finding is that that particular understanding is, to me, a severe oversimplification of what this day is all about.
Now, last year on this same day, David Grabbe gave a sermonette. He called it The Sacred Assemblies, and we published it this past August as a two-part CGG Weekly, and he used some of it in his offertory sermonette today. He found something in Scripture and did a bit of corresponding word study that was to me at the time completely new. I had never heard it explained before. And it revolves around what is said in verse 36 about the Eighth Day. Let us just jump in the middle.
It is the phrase sacred assembly that was the big aha! phrase for us. Because the sacred assembly, we thought, was just the same thing as a holy convocation, but when you dig into it, you find out that it is other. There is more there. So only the Eighth Day of the Feast of Tabernacles and the Last Day of Unleavened Bread are sacred assemblies. And like I said, it is different from a holy convocation. It is a holy convocation. It is a Sabbath rest. It is a holy day, but it is also designated specifically as a sacred assembly.
Now the word study deals with the Hebrew word underlying sacred assembly and as he mentioned this morning, it is atzeret. It is Strong's number 6116. I found that actually to be interesting because that is a numerical palindrome, makes it easy to remember: 61-16. A palindrome is something like a word or a phrase or even numbers that are the same backwards and forwards. So atzeret is 6116.
And as David said today, a sacred assembly, an atzeret, is a holy convocation with a special purpose. It makes the Last Day of Unleavened Bread and the Eighth Day of the Feast different, special. Both of these obviously end week-long feasts. A sacred assembly occurs at the end of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, a week-long festival, and also on the Eighth Day after the seven days of the Feast of Tabernacles.
Now atzeret's root is atsar. It is Strong's number 6113. And as he mentioned this morning, it contains the ideas of closing, stopping, restraining, and retaining. And understanding … . . .