The Todah was worship where “word and meal and praise and sacrifice constitute a unity.” The Todah was a celebration of thanksgiving for a great event.
It began at the temple. The person brought the animal and the four types of bread to the priest. The animal was sacrificed with the blood and the fat portions given to God and burned on the altar. Some of the unleavened breads were also offered by burning on the altar. As with other sacrifices, the priest kept the portion of the animal. By the first century, the priest also kept one of the loaves of the leavened bread.
The meat and bread from the sacrifice and the rest of the food was made ready for the feast after the temple ceremony. There might have be banquet rooms available at the temple, but most likely the host rented space from someone living in Jerusalem or was staying in a tent outside the city gates. Tradition allowed the meat to be prepared in any number methods: boiled or cooked in a stew were two common ways, but for Jews most popular way to eat meat was roasted.
As with other feasts, bread, wine, and the meat played an important role. The bread served at the feast was the leavened bread of the sacrifice. It was tje daily bread that represented not only basic human nourishment but also the life of the one who had been saved. The meat was also that which was offered in sacrifice. The animal at sacrifice represented life, life given to all creatures, but especially the life of the one making the sacrifice.
The Todah sacrifice and feast also represented the new life of the host, his or her life after the recovery from the near death experience. As an essential element of the Todah meal, the host recited how God acted to deliver him or her from death. This was a song of salvation built upon the new foundation of the person’s existence. It described the time when they faced death and then gave thanks for his or her salvation. This is another example of the difference of the Todah. In other religious feasts, the primary emphasis was on the community.
Like the Passover feast, the meat had to be eaten on the same day that the sacrifice was made: “And the flesh of your thanksgiving sacrifice of well-being shall be eaten on the day it was offered; you shall not leave any of it until morning” (Leviticus 7:15).
The Todah was about a personal event that changed a person’s life. Imagine the gratitude, relief, and thankfulness experienced by the person who had returned from the threshold of death. The host then shared the experience of deliverance and new life with a group of family and friends. On one hand, the Todah reflected something deeply personal. But the Todah also had a powerful communal aspect as well. Family and friends who knew and loved the host, joined with that person during their time of trial, to be thrilled at his or her deliverance. This was a community that would have been deeply impacted by the person’s death and so were all the more joyful because of the recovery.
But the Todah was also a public celebration at which both God and the people of Israel were symbolically present at the sacrifice and the following meal. The priest as a representative of the people took part in the celebration through his prayers at the sacrifice and joined in the feastova; by receiving a portion of the bread and meat. The sacrifice—the animal unleavened bread, and leavened bread—all represented the basic human nourishment and thus the life of the one who had been rescued. God was believed to be present at the sacrifice by receiving the fat, blood, bread, the very life of the victim and the new life of the host. God was also present at the feast as the host sang the song of thanksgiving and told the story of redem tion, and as the guests shared the sacrificial meat and bread and drank the cup of redemption.
The first documented instance of a "thanksgiving feast" is in Genesis 21:8, "And the child grew and was weaned, and Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned." Clearly this meal hosted by Abraham was a thanksgiving feast. The biblical commentator Rashbam compares this to the narrative related in the first chapter of I Samuel, where Chanah brought her son Samuel to the Tabernacle in Shiloh when he was weaned, along with thanksgiving offerings.