Feast of Firstfruits Script, Playlist, and Omer Counters

We have never done a script for the Feast of Firstfruits before like we do for Passover, but I find the one we do at Passover so meaningful that I decided I wanted to create one this year for our celebration of the Feast of Firstfruits. Our house fellowship was game to be my guinea pigs, so I wrote this intending for it to be read as the weekly Shabbat during the weeklong Feast of Unleavened Bread is coming to a close and the Feast of Firstfruits is about to begin because that’s when we’ll be meeting. For that reason, you’ll see references in it to it being the eve of the Feast of Firstfruits and the feast itself being “tomorrow.” If you want to use it on the actual Feast of Firstfruits, it should be easy for you to make the necessary adjustments even without using the editable scripts.

A note on the timing of the Feast of Firstfruits. In modern Judaism, not much is done on this day anymore, and it is really just the day they begin the Counting of the Omer, which is what they call the counting of the fifty days to Shavuot/Pentecost commanded in Leviticus 23. There is some controversy over when that counting begins, i.e. which day is the Feast of Firstfruits. Greater minds than mine have argued about this for centuries. Here’s a good summary of the three predominant views if you’re interested.

Our family and house fellowship follow the Karaite tradition on this one because it seems to us to more closely follow the commands of Leviticus 23, so we start our count on the day after the weekly Shabbat of the week of Unleavened Bread. That’s the only way I can see for Shavuot to always fall on the day after the seventh Shabbat as it says it should in Leviticus. To my mind, the Sadducees had it right on this one even though they were wrong about a lot of other things. And since they were the ruling majority of the Sanhedrin during Yeshua’s time, I think that’s how they would have been counting it during His time. I also like that it always puts Firstfruits on the first day of the week. I think it’s a nice touch that on the year He died, Firstfruits fell exactly 3 days and 3 nights after Passover. You can see my thoughts on the whole timeline in my post on Seudah Maphsehket.

If you, however, fall into a different camp on this one, I think you will still be able to use this script – you may just have to make a few minor adjustments at the beginning when I talk about the timing.

I’ve included a Host and Readers 1-16 in this one. Feel free to divvy those out however it works best for you. If you have more than sixteen people, two can share a reader role. If you have less, one person can do more than one part. I’ve also included some suggestions for songs to sing. Here’s a YouTube playlist of lyric videos with those songs to make it easy for you to find them. As always, feel free to make it your own and change the songs or the wording or anything else you want. This is to serve you, not something for you to serve! After I made this, I kind of wished I had included my song Reversals because I love how it highlights Yah’s ability to turn things around in the most amazing and surprising ways, something He did most famously in the Resurrection of Messiah which is what we celebrate on the Feast of Firstfruits. Give it a listen if you haven’t before. I think you’ll enjoy it!

Anyway, here are three versions of the script.

Editable Word Doc

Editable Pages File

Non-editable PDF File

As with my script for Seudah Maphsehket, I make no promises that the Word and Pages files will hold the formatting, so to see how I intended it to look, check the PDF file. I print them front back with the short-edge binding setting and then fold them in half. I’ve included a coloring sheet for the cover as well as two different omer counters in the script itself, one to color and one to write something you are thankful for each day. If you just want to print the omer counters, you should be able to click on these photos and save them and then print them in whatever size you want.

One other cool Omer counter I saw this year is being offered for free from Torah Sisters Magazine. Each day, you scan the QR code and it takes you to a worship song by a Messianic artist. I was excited to see I’m #7, but I would think it was a cool idea even if I hadn’t been included