Hashkiveinu follows directly after the evening recitation of the Shema in Jewish liturgy, and its content shifts the service's attention from the Shema's declaration of God's oneness to a specific petition for safety through the coming night, asking that God cause the one praying to lie down in peace and rise again to life, and extending that request outward to spread a shelter of peace over the household, over Jerusalem, and over the whole people. Its central image, a sukkat shalom, shelter or tabernacle of peace, has been read by later Jewish liturgical commentary as connecting linguistically and thematically to the temporary shelter, the sukkah, built during the autumn festival of Sukkot, a structure explicitly fragile and temporary, which some commentators argue makes the metaphor especially apt for the vulnerability inherent in sleep, when a person is at their most physically defenseless.
Because nighttime was widely understood across ancient and medieval cultures as a period of heightened vulnerability to both physical and spiritual danger, prayers of this kind requesting overnight protection appear in various forms across many religious traditions, though Hashkiveinu's specific wording and its fixed liturgical placement immediately after the evening Shema are distinctively part of the rabbinic Jewish prayer book.