What is Sukkot?

What the Torah asks for

Sukkot is the plural of sukkah, a booth: a shelter of branches like the ones farmers put up in the fields at harvest. The Torah sets the feast on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, once the threshing and the wine pressing are done (Deuteronomy 16:13). It is a thanksgiving, “the feast of ingathering, at the end of the year” (Exodus 23:16). And it is a memory.

You shall dwell in temporary shelters for seven days. All who are native-born in Israel shall dwell in temporary shelters, that your generations may know that I made the children of Israel to dwell in temporary shelters when I brought them out of the land of Egypt.

Leviticus also names what to carry: “the fruit of majestic trees, branches of palm trees, and boughs of thick trees, and willows of the brook” (Leviticus 23:40). The name Tabernacles comes from the Latin Bible’s tabernacula, huts. Solomon dedicated his Temple at this feast (1 Kings 8:2), and the exiles back from Babylon built booths on their roofs and in the Temple courts, with “very great gladness” (Nehemiah 8:16–17).

Water and light in the Temple

By Jesus’s day it was simply “the feast,” the busiest pilgrimage of the year. The Mishnah, written down around AD 200, remembers how the Temple kept it. Each morning a priest filled a golden flask at the Pool of Siloam and poured the water on the altar, a prayer for the winter rains (Sukkah 4:9). Willow branches stood around the altar, and the crowd circled it singing Psalm 118:25, “Save us now,” in Hebrew hoshia na, the cry behind Hosanna. At night, in the Court of the Women, young priests climbed ladders to fill giant golden lamps, with wicks twisted from the priests’ worn-out clothes, until no courtyard in Jerusalem was left dark (Sukkah 5:2–3). Anyone who had not seen it, the Mishnah says, had never seen real joy. Feelings ran high, too: Josephus says a crowd once pelted the priest-king Alexander Jannaeus with citrons at the altar (Antiquities 13.372).

Jesus at the feast

John sets a whole chapter at Sukkot. Jesus’s brothers urge him to go up and show himself. He goes later, “not publicly, but as it were in secret,” and teaches in the Temple halfway through the week (John 7:10, 14). Then, after seven mornings of water poured at the altar, he speaks in the language of the feast.

Now on the last and greatest day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink!”

Soon after, by the treasury in the court of the great lamps, he says, “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12). Water and light, chosen on purpose. So did Jesus celebrate Sukkot? John says he went up and taught there, as a Galilean Jew would; Was Jesus Jewish? follows that thread.

Sukkot today

The feast falls in September or October, five days after Yom Kippur. Families build a sukkah in a garden, on a balcony or a roof: at least three walls and a roof of cut branches loose enough to let the stars show through. Each morning except the Sabbath they hold the four species, a palm frond bound with myrtle and willow beside a citron called an etrog, and wave them in every direction. Many invite seven symbolic guests, from Abraham to David. The seventh day, Hoshana Rabbah, recalls the circling of the altar. Then come Shemini Atzeret, the solemn eighth day of Leviticus 23:36, and Simchat Torah, when the yearly reading of the Torah ends and begins again.