Genesis 33:17

Temporary shelters made from tree branches. They were used especially at the Feast of Tabernacles. Jonah made himself such a shelter. They were also used for cattle. The Hebrew is succoth.

Jacob had refused the help offered him, and Esau had gone. Again Jacob shows the crookedness that seems to have been his natural bent. He had said to Esau, "I come to my lord in Seir," and then he went straight to Succoth, which lay in a different direction altogether. And once he arrived there, the record is that he built a house and made booths for his cattle. This shows he had a mind to settle down in the land, rather than keep the character of a stranger, as his grandfather Abraham had done.

Jacob slips away to Succoth, which should be marked east of the Jordan... The serious sign of the patriarch's state was that he built a house for himself. That was a plain departure from the pilgrim practice of his fathers, and indeed his own. Matthew Henry says Jacob "was glad of booths," as if the contrast were with his descendants in houses of stone. That is incorrect. The very point of God's word here is that he "built himself a house," while his fathers lived in tents even in the land of promise. It was marked indifference and decline in this respect; all the more because Jacob was only on his way to the land.

Jacob had exchanged the tent for a house, and the pilgrim stranger had become a citizen and a freeholder.

After all this display of God's goodness, we find Jacob settling down in Succoth. Succoth was not the destination God appointed for him. The Lord had not said to him, "I am the God of Succoth"; no, but "I am the God of Bethel." Bethel, then, and not Succoth, should have been Jacob's great object. But the heart is always prone to settle for a position and a portion short of what God would graciously give.

Rather than going on to Bethel (God's house), he built a house for himself. This was only half-way obedience. It did not satisfy his own conscience, for he left all these buildings behind and travelled to Shalem, a city of Shechem.

However small, it was a turn away from the path of a pilgrim. It was also a halt on a road he should have followed without stopping until he reached Bethel. And since one shortcoming always leads to another, the next thing we read of him is that he bought a piece of a field from the children of Hamor... God Himself is not the first object of the soul. His gifts, sadly, too often shut out God Himself.

One wrong step away from our true position before the Lord leads to many a sin, scandal and sorrow... His stay at Succoth and Shechem covers some ten years. He had to be unsettled to get him back to his pilgrim place. The way was painful for all, and it brought deep shame, humiliation and fear to the patriarch.

"God has spoken in His holiness: 'With exultation I will divide up Shechem and portion out the Vale of Succoth'" (Psalm 60:6). Shechem and Succoth remind us how Israel's history began with Jacob, their father. These are the first places where he settled when he came back to the land of promise, after his years in a foreign land. One day it will be the same for the remnant of Israel. They will gather around the true David and take back their land as they follow Him.