SKENE 4: the Feast of Tabernacles

We will come to the Jews’ ‘wilderness years’ before long, and to the great tent, the Tabernacle, which characterised them. But first we will look at another ‘junior member’ of the ‘skene’ family of words: ‘skenopegia’. This word only occurs once in the NT (John 7.2), but it refers to one of the three great festivals of the Jewish calendar, the ‘Feast of Tabernacles’. This was a harvest festival to celebrate the ‘ingathering’, held in October; instructions for its celebration are given in Leviticus 23. 42-3: “Live in booths” – or “make your home in tents” (‘katoiko’ and ‘skene’, LXX) – for 7 days. All native-born Israelites are to live in booths, so that your descendants may know that I made the Israelites live in booths when I brought them out of Egypt”. Nehemiah 8. 13-17 records how the Jews who had returned to Jerusalem from exile, when they heard read to them by Ezra this passage from the Book of the Law, joyfully celebrated the Feast of Tabernacles. The Law told them to “go out into the hill-country and bring back branches from olive trees and wild olive trees --- to make booths”. “So the people went out and brought back branches and built themselves booths on their own roofs, in their courtyards, and in the courts of the House of the Lord. --- The whole company that had returned from exile built booths and lived in them.” It is worth noting here that in the one citation of ‘skenopegia’ in the Classical Greek lexicon, a quotation from Aristotle, it refers to the nest-building skills of the swallow; Nehemiah does not reveal whether the returned exiles were equally skilful in their booth-building. We will come across this link between a tent and a nest again (SKENE 21). The purpose of the Feast seems to have been twofold. On the one hand, it was a joyful 8-day celebration of the successful ingathering of the harvest, and of the promise of security it brought for the long winter ahead. But it was also a reminder that their real security lay elsewhere. Camping in the garden may be a big adventure for children, but for their parents it probably does not rank very high on their list of options for a good night out. To “make their home in tents” for a week would remind the Jews that, although they now lived in a city with foundations, and in houses with roofs and courtyards, they were still, like their forefathers, essentially tent-dwellers making their way through ‘the wilderness of this world’. Perhaps, too, as the pliant green branches that they had cut and interleaved with such excitement at the beginning of the week began to turn dry and brown by the end of it, and as the childlike sense of adventure at camping out was gradually worn away by the physical discomfort and practical inconvenience of living in a tent, the experience of the Feast of Tabernacles would have brought home to them how quickly the springtime of life turns to autumn, and how soon winter follows, and so would have reminded them to put their trust and rest their security in a great God rather than a good harvest.