Changes

}}</ref> But agricultural and pastoral festivals that happened to fall around the same time of the year would be eventually merged and linked to past events (either historical or legendary) to forge a common Jewish national identity.

In the early spring (around the time of the Christian Easter), Proto-Jewish farmers celebrated the beginning of barley harvest, while sheep herders rejoiced because their ewes were having lambs. The former marked the occasion by eating unleavened bread from freshly harvested and ground barley, while the latter feasted on roast lamb. These two traditions were later combined into a week-long holiday called Passover (''Pesah'') or the Feast of Unleavened Bread, memorializing the legendary escape of the Jews from slavery in Egypt (according to the Biblical account, the fugitives used lamb blood as an identification marker and ate unleavened bread because they had no time to wait for the dough to rise). Seven weeks later (around the time of the Christian Pentecost), Jews observe the Feast of Weeks (''Shavuot''), which they mark, as I mentioned in my [[Of This Ye Shall Not Eat for It Is an Abomination#Meat and Dairy|previous post]], by consuming dairy dishes. Originally, it was an agricultural festival of the beginning of wheat harvest coupled with a pastoral festival of calving cows, which was eventually given a new meaning as a memento of Moses receiving the Pentateuch.