Trinity Free Church Huntingdon

This feast, known in Hebrew as Succoth or the Feast of Ingathering, was also a harvest festival. Whereas Pentecost celebrating the wheat harvest came in early summer, Tabernacles, giving thanks for summer fruits and later crops, coincided roughly with the end of our September or early October. It was a very happy occasion when people brought their offerings just as we do at our harvest services, and it reminded them that they enjoyed a settled life compared with the hardships of the wanderings in the desert of their forebears. As a reminder, God had them build little temporary shelters of plaited branches with thatched roofs where they lived instead of their houses for the seven days duration of the feast.

It is also worth noting that among all the other elements of this feast, 70 bullocks were sacrificed, 13 on the first day, 12 on the second, down to 7 on the last day and this was not for the Jewish people but for the rest of the world because it was believed that there were 70 different nations in the world. From the beginning God’s purpose in calling the Jews had been that they should bring the rest of mankind to know Him. Christians see that it was in Jesus that God finally achieved His purpose.

At Tabernacles they gave thanks for things other than crops just as we do and each day a priest fetched water from the Pool of Siloam in a golden pitcher, and took it to the Temple where the High Priest poured it into a basin at the altar. He then added wine and these, mingled, were poured out as a libation to God, symbolising a prayer for rain. Autumn was coming and agriculture in Israel depended on the rains coming to a land baked hard and parched after the long hot dry summer, to allow it to be tilled and seed to be sown for next year’s crops. It also symbolised a prophetic looking forward to the pouring out of God’s Holy Spirit upon the nation and all believers, in the reign of the Messiah. Here we see relevance to what happened at Pentecost.

This ritual with water was carried out each day of the feast and on the last day, the Day of the Great Hosanna, it was accompanied by singing, music, blowing of trumpets, waving of palm branches and chanting the Hallel, psalms 113 to 118, including the words familiar to us from the story of Palm Sunday, “Hosanna. Blessed is He who comes in the Name of the Lord”. The word Hosanna is not just a cheer. It means “Save now”, a prayer that the Saviour would come. It was in this setting that Jesus cried out “If any man thirst, let him come unto Me and drink. . . out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water”. His Messianic claim was unmistakable and the Bible records ‘there was division among the people’.

At night the Temple was brilliantly illuminated. The great golden candlesticks were lit and the people brought torches. The historian Josephus recorded that the whole city was lit up but the symbolism was to show the Temple as the Light of the world and again we see God’s purpose was to reach out to the nations. At the end of the feast the lights were extinguished but, again, this was the setting against which Jesus said “I am the Light of the world” and everyone understood the connection. Besides being the true Light, He provides the living water and enables the harvest of souls. In the three elements of Tabernacles, light, water and harvest, Jesus again updates the old Testament into the New. And His light has not been put out.