Succot’s priestly tradition of drawing water from the Pool of Siloam drips with meaning.
Wayne Stiles is an author who has never recovered from his travels in Israel—and loves to write about them from his desk in Texas.
While enjoying the movie Ushpizin several years ago, I laughed out loud when the family’s uninvited visitor sliced the flawless etrog and casually ate it. Clearly, he had no clue to its significance! Although the movie’s English subtitles translate the language, the movie leaves the traditions of Succot for the viewer to decode.
How puzzling the holiday must seem to those unacquainted with its modern customs—much less its biblical foundations. Succot marked the most joyful of the biblical feasts because the harvest’s labor was complete, and the people would be grateful to God and expectant for the latter rains.
In addition to the name Succot (translated “Booths” or “Tabernacles” in Deuteronomy 16:13 and Leviticus 23:34), the Bible also refers to the holiday as “the Feast of the Harvest” (Exodus 23:16), the “Feast of Ingathering” (Exodus 34:22), “the feast” (1 Kings 8:2; 2 Chronicles 7:8-9; John 7:37), and “the feast of the Lord” (Leviticus 23:39). At Succot, every seven years on the sabbatical year, the Law was read in the hearing of all Israel (Deuteronomy 31:10-11).
The original purpose of feast centered on an essential reminder: “Speak to the sons of Israel, saying, ‘On the fifteenth of this seventh month is the Feast of Booths for seven days to the Lord. . . . You shall live in booths for seven days; all the native-born in Israel shall live in booths, so that your generations may know that I had the sons of Israel live in booths when I brought them out from the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God’” (Leviticus 23:34, 42-43). It was a time to remember how God had delivered them from bondage and how the Lord had provided for them in the wilderness.