Bible Trivia | Bible Trivia: 6 Ancient Worship Practices, Explained | Digging Deeper

Question 1. What were the “Urim and Thummim,” and who used them?

Answer: These were objects placed in the high priest’s breastplate, used to discern God’s will. This was established in Exodus 28:30.

Context & Exhortation: “And thou shalt put in the breastplate of judgment the Urim and the Thummim; and they shall be upon Aaron’s heart, when he goeth in before the LORD” (Exodus 28:30). 

Scripture never fully explains what these objects physically were or exactly how they functioned. They were maybe something like sacred lots, possibly stones, that could somehow yield a discernible yes-or-no answer from God on questions brought before Him, though the mechanics remain genuinely uncertain. 

What we can trace is their use across the historical books: Numbers 27:21 has Joshua needing to consult them through the priest before making military decisions. 1 Samuel 28:6 notes, with real weight, that when Saul desperately sought guidance near the end of his reign, “the LORD answered him not, neither by dreams, nor by Urim, nor by prophets”.

This is a chilling detail, since the total silence of the Urim was itself an answer, just not the one Saul wanted. 

By the time of the return from exile in Ezra 2:63, certain priestly lines couldn’t even serve “till there stood up a priest with Urim and with Thummim” — implying that the practice had already stopped being used or there was uncertainty about it by then. 

This whole mysterious system points toward something the New Testament later makes explicit: God’s people are not left forever dependent on an unseen, external mechanism to know His will, because believers now have direct access to God’s Spirit dwelling within them (1 Corinthians 2:12, John 16:13). 

We have something the Urim and Thummim only pointed toward. Not a stone that gives yes-or-no answers, but a Spirit who leads us into all truth.

Question 2. According to the book of Hebrews, what three items were kept inside the ark of the covenant?

Answer: A golden pot of manna, Aaron’s rod that budded, and the tablets of the covenant. 

Context & Exhortation: “Which had the golden censer, and the ark of the covenant overlaid round about with gold, wherein was the golden pot that had manna, and Aaron’s rod that budded, and the tables of the covenant” (Hebrews 9:4). 

Each of the three items tells its own story: the manna (Exodus 16:32–34) was preserved as physical evidence that God had faithfully fed an entire generation in the wilderness with bread they hadn’t planted or earned; Aaron’s rod that budded (Numbers 17:1–10) was kept as proof of God’s chosen priesthood, after it miraculously sprouted blossoms and almonds overnight to settle a rebellion over who had the right to serve as priest; and the stone tablets (Exodus 25:16) held the law itself, the terms of the covenant. 

Provision, priesthood, and law — three physical objects, kept together in the single most sacred space in Israel’s entire religious life. They were behind the veil, approached only once a year by the high priest alone (Hebrews 9:7). 

What’s remarkable is what Hebrews does with this list just a few verses later: it argues that Christ Himself fulfills and surpasses every one of these three items at once. He is the true bread from heaven (John 6:32–35), our true and permanent High Priest (Hebrews 4:14), and the one who doesn’t merely deliver the law but fulfills it completely (Matthew 5:17). 

Everything hidden behind that veil, in that box, was pointing forward to one Person who would eventually make the veil itself unnecessary (Hebrews 10:19–20).

Question 3. Which biblical feast is associated with the wheat harvest and, in Jewish tradition, later connected with the giving of the Law at Sinai?

Answer: The Feast of Weeks — Pentecost.

Context & Exhortation: Leviticus 23:15–16 commands Israel to count seven full weeks or forty-nine days from the offering of firstfruits, and then to hold a feast on the fiftieth day. “Pentecost” comes directly from the Greek word for “fiftieth.” 

The Leviticus text frames it as an agricultural celebration, marking the wheat harvest, requiring specific offerings of new grain, and requiring specific provision for the poor and the stranger (23:22). Notice gleaning built directly into a festival calendar. 

Jewish tradition, developing over the centuries after the Torah, came to associate this feast with the giving of the Law at Sinai, since the timing roughly aligned with Israel’s arrival there after the Exodus. It is worth noting that this specific connection is a later traditional association rather than something the Pentateuch states outright. 

What makes this feast unforgettable for us as Christians is Acts 2. On this exact Jewish festival day, fifty days after Passover- the same feast when, by tradition, God gave His law written on stone at Sinai- the Holy Spirit falls on the gathered disciples in Jerusalem, and three thousand people are added to the church in a single day (Acts 2:1–41). The law given at Sinai on this feast day in one telling of history; the Spirit poured out in Jerusalem on this same feast centuries later. 

Whether or not you hold to every detail of that traditional connection, the pattern is striking: God writing His will first on stone, and later, through this very feast, writing it directly onto human hearts by His Spirit. 

Question 4. Which feast required Israelites to live in temporary shelters for seven days, in remembrance of the wilderness wandering?

Answer: The Feast of Tabernacles, or Booths (Sukkot).

Context & Exhortation: “Ye shall dwell in booths seven days… That your generations may know that I made the children of Israel to dwell in booths, when I brought them out of the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 23:42–43). 

Every year, generations of Israelites who had never personally experienced the wilderness, who lived comfortably in permanent houses in the land of promise, were commanded to voluntarily leave those houses for a week and sleep in flimsy, temporary shelters. 

This was a deliberate attempt to recreate the vulnerability their ancestors had actually lived through, so the memory of dependence on God wouldn’t end up as a story told secondhand from a comfortable distance. 

It’s a strikingly physical, almost inconvenient way to preserve a memory. Not a plaque, not a museum, but an annual week of actual discomfort, actual thin walls, actual exposure to weather, deliberately chosen. 

There’s real wisdom in that design for us. Comfort has a way of quietly erasing our memory of dependence. Once the crisis is over, the house is built, and the pantry is full, it becomes remarkably easy to forget how completely we once relied on God for daily bread. 

God built this yearly festival specifically to stop Israel from forgetting. 

What would it look like for you to build a similar, deliberate practice into your own life or your family’s rhythm — some regular, physical reminder that keeps the memory of God’s past provision from fading into comfortable, forgettable history? 

Question 5. Which day was set apart as the most solemn day of national repentance, when the high priest alone entered the Most Holy Place?

Answer: The Day of Atonement — Yom Kippur — commanded in Leviticus 16 and Leviticus 23:26–32.

Context & Exhortation: Once a year, and only once, the high priest passed behind the veil into the Most Holy Place, the single most restricted, sacred space in all of Israel’s worship. And even then, only after extensive sacrifice and purification, carrying blood not just for the people’s sins but for his own (Leviticus 16:11–14). 

Leviticus 16 also describes a striking ritual — the ritual of the two goats. One goat was sacrificed as a sin offering, and the other goat was the 'scapegoat.' The priest laid both hands on its head, confessed over it 'all the iniquities of the children of Israel’, then the goat was sent alive into the wilderness (16:21–22). It carried Israel's sin away to a place it could never return from.

This was the one day of the year Israel’s guilt was dealt with comprehensively, and it required an enormous, costly, carefully choreographed process. This process was repeated annually because it never removed sin permanently; it only covered it year after year. So the whole process had to start over the next year. 

Hebrews 10:1–4 makes the point very clearly: these annual sacrifices “can never… make the comers thereunto perfect,” and could never actually take away sins. These only serve as a reminder of them. 

Yom Kippur was a shadow of something greater. One mediator entered the most sacred space. He carried blood. He took Israel's guilt somewhere it could never return from. But he had to do it again every year.

Christ did this once, for good. 'By his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us' (Hebrews 9:12).

Family, you and I don’t need an annual scapegoat. We have a permanent one.

Question 6. What was a “shekel,” and what role did it play in everyday life in the biblical world?

Answer: A shekel was a standard unit of weight, later also used as a unit of currency. It was the basic measure behind most Old Testament transactions.

Context & Exhortation: Before coined money existed, a shekel was simply a unit of weight. People weighed silver, gold, or other valuables on a scale against a standard shekel weight to determine value.

This is why Genesis 23:16 describes Abraham weighing out “four hundred shekels of silver, current money with the merchant” to purchase a burial site for Sarah. An actual scale, actual weighing, no coins involved at all. 

The shekel shows up at some of Scripture's most important moments.

Joseph's own brothers sold him for twenty pieces of silver (Genesis 37:28).

Every Israelite man had to pay a half-shekel temple tax — rich or poor. "The rich shall not give more, and the poor shall not give less" (Exodus 30:11–15). Your net worth didn't matter. Everyone stood the same before God.

Centuries later, Judas betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver (Matthew 26:15). Some scholars connect that number back to Exodus 21:32 — the price paid if a slave was killed by someone else's ox. 

What we are seeing here is that money in Scripture is seldom just background detail. It shows up again and again at moments of real moral weight.

So we are encouraged to watch what we do with money, and what we’re willing to trade it for. It will show what we truly value.

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