Tabernacles, Feast Of

The Feast of Tabernacles is the annual Israelite festival also called the Feast of Booths, held from the fifteenth day of the seventh month for seven days and followed by an eighth day of holy assembly. Scripture calls it “the feast of booths for seven days to Yahweh” (Leviticus 23:34), and it also uses end-of-year harvest language: the “feast of ingathering, at the end of the year” (Exodus 23:16) and the “feast of harvest at the year’s end” (Exodus 34:22). Linguistically, the English name “Tabernacles” corresponds to the booth or temporary-shelter language of Leviticus 23:34 and Leviticus 23:43.

According to the law, the seven days included offerings made by fire to Yahweh, and the eighth day was a holy convocation and solemn assembly on which no regular work was to be done (Leviticus 23:36). The festival was to teach each generation that Yahweh made the children of Israel dwell in temporary shelters when he brought them out of the land of Egypt (Leviticus 23:43). Nehemiah records that the people dwelt in booths during the feast of the seventh month (Nehemiah 8:14), kept the feast seven days, and held a solemn assembly on the eighth day according to the ordinance (Nehemiah 8:18). Deuteronomy 31:11 directs that the law be read before all Israel when they come to appear before Yahweh at the place he chooses.

Scripture also records a rival feast: Jeroboam ordained a feast in the eighth month, on the fifteenth day, “like the feast that is in Judah,” at Bethel, in a month he had devised of his own heart (1 Kings 12:32-33). In the prophets, Zechariah says that those left of the nations that came against Jerusalem will go up year by year to worship Yahweh of Armies and to keep the feast of booths (Zechariah 14:16), and that the nations which do not go up will receive punishment (Zechariah 14:19).

Christian traditions differ in how they read the festival’s continuing significance. Many Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant bodies treat it as part of Israel’s covenant order whose ritual obligations are not binding on the church, while some Sabbatarian and Messianic communities continue to keep it; interpreters also differ over whether Zechariah 14:16-19 describes a future universal celebration or a symbolic hope. Leviticus 23:43 gives the feast a memorial purpose, and Zechariah 14:16 gives it a future, universal horizon; the extent of its present obligation is a matter of confessional interpretation.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.