Saturnalia

What Saturnalia Was

Saturnalia was Rome’s great winter festival, held in honor of the god Saturn. It began on December 17. Over time it stretched from one day to three, then to five, and finally to seven, running through December 23. Rome’s own writers called it the best of days.

Saturn was the Roman god of sowing and the harvest, the farmer’s god. The Romans matched him with the Greek god Kronos and told stories of a golden age when he ruled and the earth gave its fruit without labor. His temple stood in the Roman Forum and held the state treasury.

For one week the normal order of life was turned upside down. Businesses and courts closed. Gambling, normally against the law, was allowed in public. Masters waited on their servants at the table. People wore a soft felt cap, dressed casually, and went from house to house greeting one another with “Io Saturnalia.” Homes were decorated with greenery. Friends exchanged gifts, especially wax candles and small clay figures given on the last day of the festival. The week ended in feasting.

A few days later, at the start of the new year on January 1, Romans gave one another gifts called strenae, along with greenery and sweets, as tokens of good fortune for the year ahead. Gifts for luck in the coming year belonged to that same midwinter season.

Saturn in Scripture

Saturn is not only a Roman problem. Israel carried his star through the wilderness.

Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? But ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves.

Amos 5:25-26

Chiun (H3594) is the Hebrew spelling of Kaiwan, the name the Babylonians and Assyrians gave to the planet Saturn. When Stephen quoted Amos before the council, the Greek text he used gave the same star another name.

Yea, ye took up the tabernacle of Moloch, and the star of your god Remphan, figures which ye made to worship them: and I will carry you away beyond Babylon.

Acts 7:43

Remphan is the name used in the Greek translation of Amos, and it is widely understood to be another name for the same star. Stephen placed Saturn’s star beside Moloch, the god of fire and child offering, and he called both “figures which ye made.” Israel had the Tabernacle of Yahuah in the middle of the camp and carried Saturn’s star in their baggage anyway.

Into the Church

Saturnalia did not die when Rome took on the name of Messiah. It was carried in.

Around the year 200, the North African writer Tertullian scolded believers for keeping Saturnalia and the New Year festival. He complained that gifts were going back and forth, games were being played, and banquets were being held, all in the name of festivals the pagans themselves kept. He noted that the pagans would never keep a believer’s feast for fear of seeming to be one, yet believers were not ashamed to keep theirs.

By the fourth century, Rome was marking the birth of the Messiah on December 25, only two days after Saturnalia ended. Scholars still debate exactly why that date was chosen. What is not in debate is what came with it: the week of feasting, the greenery in the house, the candles, the gift exchange, the merrymaking, and the gifts for luck at the turn of the year. The festival kept its customs and changed its name.

This is not only a Catholic history. The Protestant English Parliament abolished the observance of Christmas in 1647. In 1659 the Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay made it an offense, with a five-shilling fine, to keep the day by feasting or by refusing to work. The law stood until 1681. Protestants once knew where the season came from, and said so in their law books. Their grandchildren forgot.

What Torah Says

Yahuah does not leave His people to invent their own holy days. He names His own.

Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, Concerning the feasts of Yahuah, which ye shall proclaim to be holy convocations, even these are my feasts.

Leviticus 23:2

Pesach, Hag HaMatzot, Bikkurim, Shavuot, Yom Teruah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, and Shemini Atzeret are His. None of them falls in the dead of winter. Saturnalia is not on His list, and neither is any festival built on top of it.

Take heed to thyself that thou be not snared by following them… and that thou enquire not after their gods, saying, How did these nations serve their gods? even so will I do likewise. Thou shalt not do so unto Yahuah thy Elohim.

Deuteronomy 12:30-31

What thing soever I command you, observe to do it: thou shalt not add thereto, nor diminish from it.

Deuteronomy 12:32

Modern Christianity has done both things this verse forbids. It diminished the feasts Yahuah commanded, calling them Jewish and finished. It added a feast He never commanded, taken from the nations and dressed in the Messiah’s name.

Galatians 4 Turned Right Side Up

Pastors often quote Galatians 4:10 to warn believers away from keeping Yahuah’s feasts. Read in order, the passage says the opposite.

Howbeit then, when ye knew not Elohim, ye did service unto them which by nature are no gods. But now, after that ye have known Elohim, or rather are known of Elohim, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage? Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years.

Galatians 4:8-10

Paul was writing to former pagans. The days they were turning “again” to were the days they kept when they “knew not Elohim” and served gods that were no gods. Those were the festivals of the nations, the very calendar Saturnalia belonged to. The verse used to forbid Yahuah’s feasts is a warning against going back to Saturn’s.

Saturn’s Day Is Not the Sabbath

Saturn left one more mark. The Romans named a day of their week after him, dies Saturni, Saturn’s day, which English still calls Saturday. Many sincere Sabbath keepers have tied the seventh day of Scripture to that Roman weekday. Scripture does not. Yahuah “appointed the moon for seasons” (Psalm 104:19), and the Sabbath is counted from the renewed moon, falling on the eighth, fifteenth, twenty-second, and twenty-ninth of each month. A day named for Saturn, in a week that runs without regard to the moon, is not the seventh day Yahuah blessed. Even the effort to keep the Sabbath was routed through Saturn’s calendar.

Closing

Revelation calls Yahuah’s people out of Babylon “that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues” (Revelation 18:4). Saturn’s week was Babylon’s week in Roman dress. The call out of it is the same call Jeremiah gave: learn not the way of the heathen.