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[[File:{{#setmainimage:Żydowski rok liturgiczny EN.png}}|thumb|upright=1.5|Agricultural and pastoral origins of Jewish holidays aligned with the months of Hebrew and Gregorian calendars]]
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 PentecostWhitsunday), 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.
Beginning of grape harvest was celebrated around the middle of summer. It's one of the minor Jewish holidays in modern times, but a joyous one, observed as a Day of Love (''Tu be'Av''), or a kind of Jewish Valentine's Day. At the onset of the autumn rainy season came an almost month-long period of major holidays: Jewish New Year (''Rosh ha'Shanah''), the fasting Day of Atonement (''Yom Kippur'') and the week-long Feast of Booths (''Sukkot''). During that period, the grape harvest was coming to an end, while other fruits were being gathered as well. To this day, apple and pomegranate are symbols of the New Year Day, while citron is associated with the Feast of Booths (the citron is a fruit that was hybridized with the lime to produce the lemon). The latter festival is also a relic of the times when the Jews' pastoral ancestors lived as nomads in their tents and sheds.
