In recent weeks, I have been contacted privately by numerous sincere people asking the same question: Should I continue to observe the biblical feast days? The question comes after Ross and I completed the third season of Torah Pearls. This year-long journey through the weekly Torah portions differed in approach from the previous two seasons. This past year, we analysed the Torah portions in light of the maligned Shapira Scroll and critical scholarship. As I mentioned several times during this series, I learned a great deal more about the authorship of the Torah and its evolution via this approach.

It is no secret that I have become convinced that, not only is the Shapira Scroll authentic, but that it more closely presents, perhaps accurately, the original scroll of the Torah of Moses. In other words, it is a proto-biblical document containing a distilled form of the Decalogue, together with its corresponding blessings and curses. In this form, Elohim announces the sanctification of Shabbat as the 2nd Word, making no mention of any other “holy day”. As discussed throughout our recent series of Torah Pearls, the evolution of the canonical text overwhelmingly reveals that Passover, Unleavened Bread, and Shavuot were added later. Yom Teruah and Yom Kippur were even later still. Chanukkah is no secret, anchored to the Maccabean narrative. Yet, while it is not commanded in the Tanakh, it is afforded a divine origin in rabbinic institutions, a status Karaites object to.

It is for this reason that when I am asked about whether or not one should observe these additional canonical feasts, I reference the Karaite’s view of Chanukkah.

“The Karaites recognize as binding precepts for religious and moral conduct only those which can be deduced from the Bible by means of an accurate exposition of the literal sense according to usage and context. …The introduction of new laws and the recognition of those which are non-Biblical are forbidden, and the Karaites, therefore, do not celebrate the Feast of Lights (Ḥanukkah).”¹

In other words, Karaites will not attribute to God that which has no basis, in what they consider to be the sacred texts, of being divinely imparted. In keeping with this integrity, having refined my sacred text to the Shapira Scroll, and in light of the 7th Word as it appears in its Decalogue, I no longer observe or give lip service to the canonical feast days. Rather, I concur with critical scholarship that these texts are post-Mosaic. Not only did these additional “holy days” evolve later, but they also incorporate incompatible aspects with the Shapira Scroll, such as the sacrificial system.²

The 7th Word in the Shapira Scroll’s Decalogue reads as follows:

“You shall not swear in My Name to deceive. For I will envy the iniquity³ of fathers upon sons to a third and to a fourth, for lifting My Name to deceive.”

1. Samuel Macauley Jackson, ed., The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (New York; London: Funk & Wagnalls, 1908–1914), 299. ↩︎
2. See Jeremiah 7:21-23 ↩︎
3. I will envy the iniquity: For an example of this being implemented, see Jeremiah 29:21-23. The names of the false prophets, who spoke in God’s Name false words, are named and shamed, becoming the subject of a curse among the diaspora community, the subsequent generations, and even preserved for all time in this text. Jeremiah 29:23 connects specifically on several points, including this commandment (see Dershowitz pg 76). It might be interpreted that Elohim desires to see the iniquity retributed, so that, while they sought to defame God through the misuse of His Name, He has defamed them by making their names into a curse employed by their successive generations. Thus, “I will envy the iniquity of fathers unto sons…”
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