A Harvest Festival Reread as a Memory of the Wilderness

Sukkot begins the fifteenth of Tishrei and runs seven days, the span this rule records, one of the three pilgrimage festivals alongside Passover and Shavuot on which the Torah commanded appearance at the Jerusalem Temple. Its practices point in two directions at once. The festival's name comes from the sukkah, a temporary booth built for the week, and Leviticus twenty three gives the practice an explicitly historical justification, commanding the booths as a reminder that the Israelites dwelt in such shelters during the wilderness years after the Exodus.

Scholars of the festival's history note that its timing, at the close of the agricultural year after the harvest was gathered in, and its association with the Four Species, the palm branch, myrtle, willow and citron bound and waved as part of the ritual, sit more comfortably with an agricultural thanksgiving origin than with the wilderness narrative alone, and the Torah itself names the festival both as the feast of ingathering and as the commemoration of the booths in different passages. The two readings are not treated as competing in later tradition so much as layered, an agricultural festival given a historical memory that reframes what the booths themselves are understood to mean.