I remember, when I was a kid, the fun we had at Easter.  Most every year we would buy a dyeing kit from the grocery store and color hard-boiled Easter eggs many different shades and colors on the Saturday evening before Easter.  Waking up on Easter morning and finding a large basket for each one of us kids, though not quite equal to the thrills of Christmas morning, was nevertheless exciting.  Each basket would contain colored "grass," usually green, and many colored eggs, which mom insisted we eat within the first day or so lest they should go bad.  And lots of jelly beans.  And small chocolate bunnies and candies.  And the prize item - a large, sometimes solid sometimes hollow, chocolate Easter bunny.

We would also get dressed up special that day for church.  The girls had brand new spring dresses and big hats.  And I (as a small boy) dressed up in a suit and a hat.  My dad would always want to take a picture of everyone dressed up and holding their Easter baskets full of the goodies.  So we would line up on the front porch steps and pose with our best smile.

Sunday services that day were special, too.  The church would usually be packed with all the regulars and the folks who, out of some sense of obligation, would show up only on Christmas and Easter.  I guess they figured that it would be better to go at least a couple times a year than not at all.  God would have to look at that act of righteousness with some sort of favor!  After all, it was the celebration of the resurrection of Christ.  Or so we thought....

What we were doing was in line with a tradition which the Christian church had been doing for over 1600 years.  Now that kind of long history is hard to argue with.  We had supposed, in some moment of reflection, that even the apostles of Jesus had celebrated Easter, just like we were doing.  Well, a little bit of research, coupled with a sobering realization that traditions are not always from our Creator, had proved us wrong in our assumptions.  And shocking were the results of our investigation.

The celebration of Easter is not biblical after all!  The Torah, Elohim's instructions to his covenant people, does not teach the celebration of Easter.  Yahusha' never taught his disciples to celebrate Easter.  Nor did Sha'ul (the apostle Paul) or any of the other prophets, apostles or disciples in the Bible.  The celebration of Easter is not in the Bible because it is not from our Maker!

Ishtar (Easter)

It's not hard to find information about the customs of Easter.  It turns out that Easter is an old pagan worship day which Yahuwah hates.  Our modern day version of Easter is just a remake of some very ancient pagan traditions and practices.  If the Christian would really think about the source of "Easter" he would most assuredly abhor it. 

The word Easter is derived from the ancient name Ishtar, a pagan goddess and an abomination to our Creator.  She is also known as Ashtarte in historical literature and as Ashtoreth in the Scriptures:

Shemuel said to all the house of Yisrael, "If you are really turning to Yahuwah with all your hearts, remove from among you the foreign elohim and the images of Ashtoreth. Give your hearts to Yahuwah and serve only him. Then he will deliver you from the hand of the Philistines."  So the people of Yisrael removed the Baals and images of Ashtoreth. They served only Yahuwah.  (1 Shemuel 7:3,4)

These "images" are referring to the idols and statues of Ishtar, the fertility goddess of the Philistines with large, bare breasts.    The record of Shemuel refers to her again later:

Then they cried out to Yahuwah saying, 'We have sinned, for we have forsaken Yahuwah and have served the Baals and the images of Ashtoreth. Now deliver us from the hand of our enemies so that we may serve you.' (1 Shemuel 12:10)

There can be no doubt that the images, statues and idols of this offensive goddess of fertility was an offense to Yahuwah.  Israel, in their rebellion against their Creator, worshipped this woman Easter.  What makes the modern day Christian think that the festival honoring Easter (Ashtoreth) now brings a smile to Yahuwah's face?  The last time I looked, Elohim wants us to have nothing to do with the customs and practices of the pagans in worshipping their gods.  He does not want us to worship him by using pagan days, dates, customs and practices.  And this includes the festival which is in honor of Ashtoreth (Easter).

What's Wrong with Easter?

Easter is filled with detestable practices, including the slaughter of innocent babies, which Yahuwah hates.  John Michael Rood very succinctly tells us what's wrong with Easter in his cut-to-the-chase, in-your-face, in-a-nutshell summation of that springtime festival:

The Saternalia originated as the birth date of Tammuz, the bastard son of Semiramis, the widow of Nimrod of biblical evil fame. After Shem cut Nimrod in pieces, Babylonian legend insists that he ascended into the heavens and became the sun god himself. The rays of the sun implanted the seed into his widow and presto! The son of the sun god was miraculously conceived, as was the adoration of the mother and child evident in every culture on the earth.  On the winter solstice Tammuz was born; as were most of the traditions surrounding “the child-mass” season. Tammuz, the reincarnation of the sun god – Nimrod, was killed in a hunting accident when he was gored to death by a wild boar in his 40th year. Those who worshipped the son of “the sun god” then set aside 40 days of weeping for Tammuz.  They celebrated “Lent” one day for each year of his incarnation - in which they would deny a worldly pleasure for his pleasure in the afterworld (see Ezekiel 8).

After many years, his mother Semiramis died. The gods looked favorably on “the mother of god” and sent her back to earth as the spring fertility goddess – always depicted as an exaggeratedly endowed bare breasted queen of sexual desire. Semiramis, the queen of heaven, was “born again” as the goddess Easter (Ashtarte) as she emerged from a giant egg that landed in the Euphrates river at sunrise on the “sun” day after the vernal equinox. To proclaim her divine authority, she changed a bird into an egg laying rabbit. As the cult developed, the priests of Easter would impregnate young virgins on the altar of the goddess of fertility at sunrise on Easter Sunday. A year later the priests of Easter would sacrifice those three-month-old babies on the altar at the front of the Sanctuary and dye Easter eggs in the blood of the sacrificed infants.

The forty days of Lent - or weeping for Tammuz, starts the Easter fertility season.  The festivities culminate on Easter Sunday, when the priests of Easter slaughtered the “wild boar that killed Tammuz” and the entire congregation would eat the “ham” on Easter Sunday. (John Michael Rood, The Mystery of Iniquity, Chapter 8)

Yahuwah has told us that worship of this kind is completely unacceptable with Him.  Yet, all of Christianity is caught up in the celebration of the resurrection of the son on Easter day.  Little do most Christians know that the son, whose resurrection is celebrated on Easter, is Tammuz, not the Messiah of Scripture. 

Elohim described the abominations that were going on by the priests and in the temple of those who worshiped Tammuz.  The prophet Ezekiel was brought, in vision, into the temple of Yahuwah and was shown what abominable things were happening there:

Again, he said, "You will see them doing things that are even more detestable." Then he brought me to the entrance to the north gate of the house of Yahuwah, and I saw women sitting there, mourning for Tammuz. (Ezekiel 8:13,14).

The whole modern day season of Lent is the carry over of the 40 days of weeping for Tammuz.  And Yahuwah hates this.  Yahuwah hates all that is associated with the Easter season, especially when we try to pass it off as legitimate worship of the Master Yahusha'.

The Fish (Dagon It!)

Another aspect of the Easter season is the so-called "Good Friday."  This is believed by Christians to be the day that Christ died on the cross and was buried.  Theologians do a lot of interpretive gymnastics to arrive at a Friday death of Messiah, followed by a Sunday morning resurrection.  This flatly contradicts what the Messiah himself said about the length of time he would be in the grave.  He specifically and repeatedly instructed his disciples that he would be in the tomb for three days and three nights.

So Friday was not, in fact, the day Messiah died.  But it fits in really nicely with the activities which were traditionally practiced by the pagans on Friday.  Thus, it's convenient for Christians to force fit the death of Messiah into a "Friday" frame, because Friday and Sunday were significant days when the pagans practiced the worship of their god-idols.

Friday was the pagan day honoring the fish god Dagon.  Scripture speaks of Dagon, the fish god:

The rulers of the Philistines gathered to offer a great sacrifice to Dagon their elohim and to celebrate. They said, "Our elohim has handed Samson, our enemy, over to us." (Shoftim 16:23)

And again,

The Philistines took the ark of Elohim and brought it to the temple of Dagon, where they positioned it beside Dagon.  When the residents of Ashdod got up early the next day, Dagon was lying on the ground before the ark of Yahuwah. So they took Dagon and set him back in his place.  But when they got up early the next day, Dagon was again lying on the ground before the ark of Yahuwah. The head of Dagon and his two hands were sheared off and were lying at the threshold. Only Dagon's body was left intact.  For this reason to this very day neither Dagon's priests nor anyone else who enters Dagon's temple step on Dagon's threshold in Ashdod. (1 Shemuel 5:2-5)

Michael Rood continues his terse explanation of the Easter season by describing for us the pagan practice surrounding Dagon:

In later years “Good Friday”, the day that the Philistines sacrificed to Dagon, the Philistine fish god, also became an integral part of the Easter pageantry (if you are over 40 years of age, you will recall eating fish on Friday in the public school system in America). This entire menagerie of satanic festivities is the pinnacle of the abominations that God had pronounced to the Children of Israel before they entered the Promised Land. (John Michael Rood, The Mystery of Iniquity, Chapter 8)

During the time of the Messiah and afterward, Friday was well known in pagan circles to be a celebration of Dagon.  And so, as the Scriptural practices of appointed times were being abandoned and the pagan sun-god and other deity worship began to get melded into the worship practices of followers of the Messiah, too, the blending of Dagon\fish-god worship into worship of the Messiah proceeded.

The Christian Church had adopted the pagan symbol of the fish.  We all know how the third century "believers" took the symbol of the fish and used it as a representation of faith in Messiah (whom they called "Christ").  The justification goes something like this:  The Greek word for fish, ivcqu,j, represents Christ because the letters which spell it also are the beginning letters of these words: the iota begins the Greek name of the Christ, Iaysous; the chi is the first letter in the Greek Christos (Xristos or "Christ"); the theta begins the word "theos" or "God"; the upsilon begins the word hwee-os ("son"); and the sigma represents "sotayr" or Savior.  Thus, the reasoning goes, ichthus ("fish") represents "Iaysous Xristos theos huee-os sotayr" - or "Jesus Christ God('s) son, (and) Savior."

Of course, this is pure pig slop at its finest.  The fish symbol really has nothing to do with the Messiah of Scripture.  But in order to make palatable the fish god Dagon in "Christian" circles, the word "fish" had to be given a Christian meaning!  And thus was born the adoption of the very pagan fish symbol and fish god into the worship practices of those who follow the Savior of the world.

The Cross

There are yet more things that the Christian churches do which are detestable to Elohim.  From a human point of view, these things we do in the name of Messiah are perfectly fine and honor Elohim.  But Yahuwah has made it clear that when we try to worship him the way the pagan nations worship their gods, this is an abomination to him.  Take, for example, something like the sign of the cross.  The death of Messiah is such a fundamentally critical event for true faith in Elohim, it seems that the very symbol of the cross represents the death that Messiah died for humanity.  By displaying the cross, aren't we praising and honoring the one who died for each of us on the tree?

When we examine the origins of the symbol of the cross, we just may need to reconsider our thinking.  Ponder the following: 

The last letter of the Greek alphabet, tau, which corresponds to our letter "T", forms the shape of the cross.  This is the symbol for Tammuz worship - which is an affront to the living Elohim.  The meaning of the letter tau is "mark" or "signature."  This letter tau is the "mark" of the beast Tammuz.  Thus, Tammuz worship is the worship of the beast and is connected directly with the "Beast system."  Worshipping that symbol - that of the cross - is tantamount to worshipping the Beast.

What's Wrong with Mixing Pagan Practices with the Truth?

Worship of the true Elohim must never be done in the same way that unbelievers worship their gods.  The Scriptures are crystal clear about this:

Destroy completely all the places on the high mountains and on the hills and under every spreading tree where the nations you are dispossessing worship their gods.  Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and burn their Asherah poles in the fire; cut down the idols of their gods and wipe out their names from those places.  You must not worship Yahuwah your Elohim in their way  (Deuteronomy 12:1-4, mine).

You must not worship Yahuwah your Elohim in their way, because in worshiping their gods, they do all kinds of detestable things Yahuwah hates. They even burn their sons and daughters in the fire as sacrifices to their gods.  See that you do all I command you; do not add to it or take away from it (Deuteronomy 12:31,32).

Yahuwah has made it simple to understand that he does not accept worship done the way that unbelievers worship their gods.  He does not want his worshipers to add to or take away from his own prescribed way of worship.  He must be worshiped in the way that he has revealed in his word.

Let's leave all these pagan ritualistic practices, customs and traditions behind us.  Let's worship our Creator the way He instructs us to worship Him.  Say "goodbye" to the Easter bunny, good Friday, fascination with "the fish" and all other such nonsense.  Let's worship the true and living Elohim by keeping His commandments.

Published: 2005