FIRE:Connecting with God--by Linden Malki

The first mention of fire in Scripture is in connection with worship: the instruction given for the offering that God required of Noah after the flood.  We can see several points of it's being a "burnt offering"; one is that it is destroyed in the process, and the smoke rises upwards toward God. In some cases, the roasted offering became food for the priests and for those celebrating Passover.  We can probably assume that the original Passover celebrations, if any, happened at Shiloh or Jerusalem. After the split in the Kingdom, there appears to be a revival of Passover celebrations at the time of Hezekiah and later, Josiah. It appears that the celebrations were observed more regularly after the Second Temple was built under Nehemiah. A central part of the celebrations was the sacrifice of the Passover lamb (or young goat) until the destruction of the Temple in 70AD.

It is interesting that this tradition lasted up through the whole of the Old Testament period, until the second Temple was destroyed.  The decision was made by the Jewish leadership to discontinue the offerings until the Temple was again available. When the Old City of Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount, was recovered in the 1967 war, a small organization of religious  Jews began preparing for the reestablishment of the sacrifices and other traditions, even though the Temple area is still under the control of the Muslim authorities and not available to Jews.

The traditional Passover sacrifice, however, is not dead. When the Northern Kingdom of Israel was conquered by the Assyrians in 700 BC, there were still Samaritans living in the original area of the cities of Samaria and Nablus, maintaining their old traditions. At their largest, under Roman rule, it is estimated that there were about  million Samaritans still holding to their traditions, similar to but not identical to the Jewish communities.  There are about 800 left now, overlapping the line between Israel and the Palestinian West Bank.  Their annual Passover celebration still maintains the tradition of  sacrificing a young sheep or goat per family in a communal fire pit as part of the Passover meal. They also attract visitors interested in observing this 3600 year old celebration.   
                                                                                                                 
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