What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionGoing without food for a time, so hunger can teach what plenty cannot.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Christianity and The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God are both here because each says something this word covers, and what they say may flatly contradict each other. The idea is the place they can be set side by side.
ShelfThe practices
Travels across3 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderJudaism · c. 1000 BCE
Newest holderThe Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church · 1998 CE
Turns up as19 rites · 6 codes · 2 experiences · 1 story
Where it turns up
every faith that holds it, by founding date — time is half real and half rank order, because a straight axis crushes three millennia against the left wall. Hover a dot for the faith.Across the faiths
one family at a time, and every family speaks before any family speaks twice — 16 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 11 faiths of this family hold it
Lent — the forty days.
Ash on the forehead, something given up, forty days matching the desert fast: the calendar's built-in season of subtraction before the feast.
Go deeper — context →
Advent, and the Nativity fast.
Four candles in the West and a domestic calendar for children; forty days of fasting from meat and dairy in the East, starting 15 November. Same season, opposite mood — one is anticipation, the other is preparation, and the shops only understand the first.
held by most
Go deeper — context →
The fasts.
Coptic Christians fast over two hundred days a year, no animal products — the calendar itself is an ascetic.
Go deeper — context →
Fasting is the ordinary condition, not the exception.
A devout Ethiopian Orthodox layperson fasts around 180 days a year and a monastic up to 250 — Wednesdays and Fridays, the eight-week Great Fast, Advent, the Fast of the Apostles, the Fast of the Assumption and the Fast of Nineveh. Fasting here means no animal product at all and nothing before the ninth hour. It is the reason Ethiopian restaurant menus have a whole vegan half.
Go deeper — context →
The Yom Kippur fast.
Twenty-five hours without food or drink; a day of atonement between each person, their neighbors, and God.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Tisha B'Av — sitting on the floor.
The three weeks before it are a mourning period and the last nine days drop meat and wine. Israeli secular culture largely ignores the day and Israeli law closes the restaurants anyway, which is itself one of the country's standing arguments.
Go deeper — context →
The fasting year.
Wednesdays and Fridays, the fifty-five days of Great Lent, the Fast of the Apostles, the Fast of the Virgin, the Fast of Nineveh and the forty-three days before Christmas — well over two hundred days in a normal year. No meat, no dairy, no eggs, no fish on most of them, and on strict days nothing until the ninth hour.
Go deeper — context →
Fast the fifty and the twenty-five.
The great fast before Easter runs fifty days and the fast before Christmas twenty-five, and both are kept as household practice — no meat, in many families no fish, and a smaller table. Kerala Christian households traditionally hand what the fast saves to the parish, which distributes it. Nombu, the Malayalam word for the fast, is used for the season as a whole.
Go deeper — context →
Fast together, and give away what the fast saves.
The fasting calendar is the Ethiopian one — Wednesdays, Fridays and the long seasons, no animal products, nothing before the ninth hour. The mahber, the parish fellowship, meets monthly, eats together and collects for funerals, weddings and the poor of the parish. In a country with no independent civil society left, the mahber is one of the last things people organise for themselves.
Go deeper — context →
Ba'utha d-Ninwaye — the three days of Nineveh.
Three days of strict fasting in the weeks before Lent, kept in memory of the city that repented at Jonah's preaching — the city whose ruins are across the river from Mosul. The Book of Jonah is read through, and in many families nothing is eaten before evening. Every East Syriac church keeps it: Chaldean, Assyrian, Ancient, Syro-Malabar.
Go deeper — context →
The Nineveh fast, and the Qurbono.
Three days of strict fasting before Lent, kept with the East Syriac churches even though the rite is West Syriac, and then the year's Qurbono in the modes of the Beth Gazo. The Syriac Catholic Church is one of the few places where the two Syriac traditions' calendars overlap in practice.
Go deeper — context →
A fast is as long as it is.
The 1964 reforms shortened the fast of the Nativity, and that shortening was the second grievance after the calendar. The position here is that fasts are received, not adjusted; the Great Fast, the Fast of the Nativity and the three days of the Ninevites run their full length.
Go deeper — context →
The ten, kept literally.
No sex, including inside marriage; no lying, which is what the silence was for; fasting twice a week; property handed to the movement. Members sold land and cattle to join, which is why so few of them had anywhere else to be by March 2000.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Vedic Religion
— 3 faiths of this family hold it
Ekadashi — the fast that comes twice a month.
No grains and no beans; fruit and milk, or in strict households nothing at all. Twenty-four of them a year, plus Nirjala Ekadashi in the June heat, which is kept without water.
Go deeper — context →
The fasts women keep for men.
A day without food or water for a husband's long life, broken when the moon is sighted through a sieve. Indian feminists have called it what it looks like; many of the women keeping it say it is theirs, that they enjoy it, and that they would like the argument conducted with them rather than about them.
Go deeper — context →
Uposatha — the observance day.
New and full moon: precepts renewed by the laity, the rule recited among the monks.
Go deeper — context →
The Eight Precepts.
On observance days a layperson takes on three more: nothing to eat after midday, no music, dancing, perfume or jewellery, and no comfortable bed. A monastic life rented for twenty-four hours.
Go deeper — context →
Paryushana.
Days of fasting, study, and — at the close — asking forgiveness of everyone, for everything: micchami dukkadam.
Go deeper — context →
Chauvihar — nothing after dark.
No food and no water between sunset and sunrise. The stated reason is that lamps draw insects and darkness hides what is in the bowl, so eating at night kills more. It predates electric light by two and a half thousand years and observant Jains keep it under electric light anyway.
held by most
Go deeper — context →
Islam
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
Life is ordered by submission.
Islam names the act itself: surrender — lived daily through prayer, alms, fasting, and pilgrimage.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
The Ramadan fast.
No food or drink from first light to sunset for a month — hunger as teacher, iftar as feast.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
The Fast.
Sunrise to sunset without food or drink, nineteen days — the year hinged on a season of restraint.
Go deeper — context →
Nineteen days.
No food or drink between sunrise and sunset through the last month of the Bahá'í year, ending at Naw-Rúz. The ill, the pregnant and nursing, travellers, the elderly, the very young and those doing heavy labour are exempt, and the faith describes the abstention as symbolic rather than mortifying — a way of noticing what is underneath the appetite rather than a punishment of it.
Go deeper — context →
Where it is argued
passages a tradition marks as contested inside itself — the disagreement is theirs, not ours
Fasting — the long kind.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church keeps seven fasting seasons and asks around 180 days a year of laypeople, up to about 250 of clergy and the devout: no animal products, and often nothing at all before the ninth hour. Western Lent asks for one meatless Friday and a bad mood.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →