Was the Torah given at Sinai on Shavuot?

The canonical Old Testament doesn't say so explicitly.

"In the third month after the children of Israel went out from the land of Egypt, on this day they came to the wilderness of Sinai." — Exodus 19:1

The Hebrew is בַּחֹדֶשׁ הַשְּׁלִישִׁי — ba-chodesh ha-shlishi, "in the third month." The third month is Sivan — the month in which Shavuot falls. But the text doesn't say which day of Sivan Israel arrived, and it doesn't identify the day as the Feast of Weeks. The most the canon itself gives you is the month.

The explicit identification — "Sinai happened on Shavuot; the Torah was given on this day" — comes from Second Temple Jewish tradition. The book of Jubilees (second century BC, preserved in Ethiopic) dates the Sinai ascent to "the third month, on the sixteenth day" (Jub 1:1) and commands Shavuot to be "the feast of weeks … once a year, to renew the covenant every year" (Jub 6:17). Centuries later, the Mishnah and the rabbinic machzor prayer-book settle on the name Zman Mattan Torateinu — "the time of the giving of our Torah." That tradition is where the modern synagogue's Shavuot liturgy draws its Torah-giving focus. But it is tradition, not Scripture — the Old Testament itself stops at "the third month."

The New Testament does something interesting with the Sinai–Shavuot connection. It doesn't cite Exodus 19. It echoes it. When Luke narrates the outpouring of the Spirit on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2:1–4), his Greek vocabulary overlaps heavily with the Septuagint translation of Exodus 19:16–20 — the voices and thunders of Sinai. Content words like φωνή (voice), λαλέω (speak), πῦρ (fire), and ἐξίστημι (astonished) appear at both. A pattern-comparison run on the LXX of Exo 19:16–20 against Acts 2:1–13 shows 18 shared Greek terms — 38% of the Sinai vocabulary reappears at Pentecost.

That's echo, not citation. Luke doesn't say "as at Sinai." But he uses Sinai's words. If his Jewish audience already read Shavuot through the Jubilees tradition — and by Luke's time many Jews did — then the vocabulary would land on ears already expecting the connection.

So the honest answer: the Old Testament doesn't explicitly date Sinai to Shavuot. The Jewish tradition developed that connection, and the New Testament presents a Pentecost narrative that resonates with the Sinai theophany in the very words it uses. What Israel received at Sinai as tablets of stone (Exo 31:18), the disciples received at Pentecost as tongues of fire (Acts 2:3) — a typological arc that runs through Jeremiah's new-covenant prophecy (Jer 31:31–34) and Ezekiel's promise of the Spirit written on hearts (Ezk 36:26–27).

For the full analysis — including the Greek vocabulary overlap between Exodus 19 and Acts 2, and the tradition history from Jubilees to the Mishnah — see the full study: Count Fifty Days.