What is the Feast of Tabernacles?
The Feast of Tabernacles (also called the Feast of Booths, or of ingathering) was the last of the yearly festivals God gave Israel, kept in the seventh month once the crops were safely in. It looks two ways at once: back to a homeless past in the wilderness, and forward to a time of settled joy that commentators see as still future.
What the feast was
The basic facts of the feast are set out compactly by one reference work, which also states what the writers commonly see behind it.
Morrish Bible DictionaryThis fell on the fifteenth day of the seventh month and continued seven days, with a holy convocation on the eighth day. Israel dwelt in booths during the feast, in remembrance of their having lived in tents when brought out of Egypt. It was at the end of their harvest and vintage, when they enjoyed the fruits of God's goodness. The feast prefigures the millennium, when the people will enter into full blessing, and the eighth day, the great day, the communion of the heavenly and the earthly.
Why booths
The shelters of branches were not decoration. They were a deliberate memory built into a week of plenty.
A. J. PollockDuring the Feast of Tabernacles, which took place at the end of the harvest, a time of plenty and rejoicing, a faint picture of the fulfilment of the type in the days to come, the Israelites by birth were to dwell in booths to remind them how God had brought them out of the land of Egypt. They might forget this in the comfort of the land and in the joy of the bountiful reign of their Messiah with all its accompaniments of peace and plenty never before known in the world. It does not do for us to forget the pit out of which we have been dug, that we are after all, with all the wondrous blessings that are ours, sinners saved by grace.
The booths were temporary by design, and that was the point: they told the people that the wandering was over.
The Christian's FriendIn it the children of Israel dwelt in booths, in witness that, once strangers, they were strangers no longer.
Its timing in the year
The feast came only after everything was gathered — and the timing carries weight for those who read the calendar as a picture.
J. N. DarbyConsequently, we find that the feast of tabernacles took place after the increase of the earth had been gathered in, and, as we learn elsewhere, not only after the harvest but after the vintage also; that is, after separation by judgment, and the final execution of judgment on the earth, when heavenly and earthly saints should be all gathered in. Israel was to rejoice seven days before Jehovah.
The order of the last three feasts
The seventh month held three appointments close together, and the writers read them as a sequence with a cause behind the joy.
Arno Clemens GaebeleinThe blowing of the trumpets: the remnant of Israel called and gathered; the day of atonement: Israel in national repentance looking on Him whom they pierced, when He comes the second time; the feast of tabernacles: the millennium… It will be the time of the complete harvest, the time of rejoicing, when sorrow and sighing will flee away.
Zechariah extends the guest list beyond Israel: "Then everyone who survives of all the nations that have come against Jerusalem shall go up year after year to worship the King, the LORD of hosts, and to keep the Feast of Booths" (Zechariah 14:16, ESV — older translations read "feast of tabernacles").
A feast Israel largely forgot
Strikingly, the most joyful of the feasts went unkept for centuries, and it was the weakest generation that recovered it.
C. H. MackintoshThey lost sight of the fact that they had been strangers and pilgrims, and so they neglected this feast for a long time. From the days of Joshua down to the time of Nehemiah, the feast of tabernacles had never once been celebrated. It was left to the feeble remnant that returned from the Babylonian captivity to do what had not been done even in the bright days of Solomon.
The eighth day
One feature belongs to this feast alone — a day added after the seven. Jesus stood up on that day and called the thirsty to Himself (John 7:37).
J. T. MawsonThe last great day of the feast was the eighth day, and that eighth day was a Sabbath. It foreshadowed God's eternal rest, when heaven should come down to earth, and when the two should no longer be separated but united in the joy of the manifestation of the fullness of God… And so the rejection of Him by Israel, which seemed to be an overwhelming disaster, was turned into a triumph of divine goodness. The eighth day of the feast, which stood outside man's sin and its consequences, became the platform from which He announced God's intention to put those who believed in Jesus into living contact with heavenly and eternal fullness and power.
Summary
- Gathered. The feast began only when harvest and vintage were finished — joy comes after everything has been brought in.
- Sheltered. Seven days in booths kept the memory of the wilderness alive inside the abundance, so plenty would not erase grace.
- Ordered. Trumpets, then atonement, then tabernacles: gathering and repentance come first, and the rejoicing follows.
- Widened. The reach is not Israel only; the surviving nations come up to Jerusalem to keep this same feast.
- Extended. The eighth day stands outside the week — and on it Christ offered the thirsty something heavenly and eternal, not merely earthly.