The Feast of Booths (colorized) Jan Luyken, 1705. Rijks Museum
When Building a Sukkah Became a Commandment
Farmers and soldiers built sukkot as temporary shelters, as did pilgrims coming to Jerusalem for the week-long Sukkot festival. The practice of building a sukkah “each on his roof, and in their courtyards,” as described in Nehemiah (8:14–17), likely began in exile, in memory of the pilgrim booths of First Temple times. It then entered Leviticus as a commandment and reached the wider Judean public through Ezra’s Torah reading.
Published: September 24, 2026
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Last Updated: October 28, 2026
For a discussion of this, see Jacob L. Wright, “The Origins of Torah Study,” TheTorah (2015); Aaron Demsky, “Historical Hakhel Ceremonies and the Origin of Public Torah Reading,” TheTorah (2017).
Biblical texts are based on RJPS.
Joshua’s name appears as יֵשׁוּעַ, the standard late form in Ezra-Nehemiah, rather than יְהוֹשֻׁעַ. The rabbis read the shortened form as pointed criticism: b. Arakhin 32b takes the missing ה to mark Joshua’s failure to uproot idolatry, while y. Sheviʿit 6:1 explains that Scripture diminished the honor of the righteous man in his grave for the sake of the honor of the righteous man of his own day. See also Minhat Shai ad loc.
In the printed text and most manuscripts, the passage has וַיַּעֲשׂוּ בְּנֵי הַגּוֹלָה “and the exiles made” instead of MT’s וַיַּעֲשׂוּ כׇל הַקָּהָל “and all the congregation made.” Exceptions are CUL: T-S F 1(1).117+, Vatican 120–121, and Munich 95, which follow MT’s reading.
Unless otherwise noted, translations of rabbinic texts come from the editors and/or author.
Hebrew texts of the commentators follow AlHaTorah.org.
Exodus 20:19/21:1–23:19.
According to Israel Knohl, the next verse is a supplement:
ויקרא כג:לח מִלְּבַד שַׁבְּתֹת יְ־הֹוָה וּמִלְּבַד מַתְּנוֹתֵיכֶם וּמִלְּבַד כׇּל נִדְרֵיכֶם וּמִלְּבַד כׇּל נִדְבֹתֵיכֶם אֲשֶׁר תִּתְּנוּ לַיְ־הֹוָה.
Lev 23:38 apart from the sabbaths of YHWH, and apart from your gifts and all your votive offerings and all your freewill offerings that you give to YHWH.
He assigns this verse to one of the latest editorial strata in the Torah, and reasons that because the Booths passage comes after it, that passage may belong to the same very late period. Israel Knohl, The Sanctuary of Silence: The Priestly Torah and the Holiness School (Fortress, 1995), 39 n. 88. Knohl notes that Erich Auerbach, “Die Feste im alten Israel,” VT 8 (1958): 11–14, reaches similar conclusions about the dating.
Redaction critical scholars have long noted that this is a sign of redaction. See discussion in Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford 1988), 184–185, 197–199; David Frankel, The Murmuring Stories of the Priestly School (Brill, 2002), 258-260; Emanuel Tov, “Glosses, Interpolations, and Other Types of Scribal Additions in the Text of the Hebrew Bible,” in Language, Theology, and the Bible: Essays in Honour of James Barr, ed. S.E. Balentine & J. Barton (Clarendon, 1994), 40-66 [Revised version: The Greek and Hebrew Bible (1999), 53-74].
This is followed by a resumptive repetition (Wiederaufnahme) returning to the seven-day festival:
ויקרא כג:מא וְחַגֹּתֶם אֹתוֹ חַג לַיְ־הֹוָה שִׁבְעַת יָמִים בַּשָּׁנָה חֻקַּת עוֹלָם לְדֹרֹתֵיכֶם בַּחֹדֶשׁ הַשְּׁבִיעִי תָּחֹגּוּ אֹתוֹ.
Lev 23:41 You shall observe it as a festival of YHWH for seven days in the year; you shall observe it in the seventh month as a law for all time, throughout the ages.
E.g., Exodus 33:8, Leviticus 14:8, Numbers 11:10.
On the problem, and one attempt to resolve it, see David Ben-Gad HaCohen, “When and Where the Israelites Dwelt in Sukkot,” TheTorah (2016); David Frankel, “How and Why Sukkot Was Linked to the Exodus,” TheTorah (2015). The rabbis imagine that this is a reference to the divine cloud. See discussion in Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, “The Sukkah and Its Symbolism,” TheTorah (2014).
See David Frankel, “Integrating the Exodus Story into the Festivals,” TheTorah (2015). In post-biblical literature, Shavuot also gets linked to the exodus experience, specifically as commemorating the revelation at Sinai. See Norman Solomon, “Shavuot: How the Festival of Harvest Grew,” TheTorah (2014).
Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 23–27: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 3B (Doubleday, 2001), 2067, adopting Yehuda Feliks, טבע וארץ בתנ״ך: פרקים באקולוגיה מקראית [Nature and Land in the Bible: Chapters in Biblical Ecology] (Rubin Mass, 1992), 378.
H. G. M. Williamson, Ezra, Nehemiah, WBC 16 (Word Books, 1985), 297.
Joseph Blenkinsopp, Ezra–Nehemiah: A Commentary, OTL (Westminster, 1988), 291. This is also how the Leviticus verses are understood by the Karaite and Samaritan communities. See Shawn Joe Lichaa, “Sukkot’s Unshaken Four Species,” TheTorah (2016); Benyamim Tsedaka, “A Fruity Sukkah Made from the Four Species,” TheTorah (2014). Milgrom, Leviticus 23–27, 2037–38 and 2064–67, argues that Leviticus 23:40 actually prescribes carrying the species in procession around the altar, and that reading them as building material was devised in the exile, where there was no altar to circle.
Knohl, Sanctuary of Silence, 38–39 and n. 88. He sees this as a command “based on a hermeneutic etiology of the name of the first station of the Israelites in the exodus from Egypt,” that is, of Sukkot, the camp Israel reaches on leaving Egypt (Exod 12:37; Num 33:5). Compare Frankel, “How and Why Sukkot Was Linked to the Exodus,” who argues the same derivation from the place name.
Some scholars connect the Transjordanian town of Sukkot with the festival of the same name, suggesting that it was an ancient site for the celebration of the harvest festival. Genesis 33:17 would then preserve a separate etiological explanation of the town’s name. See J. Glen Taylor, Yahweh and the Sun: Biblical and Archaeological Evidence for Sun Worship in Ancient Israel, JSOTSup (Continuum, 1993), 254–256 [p. 255 n. 1]. As support, Taylor cites S. Cohen, “Succoth,” in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible [IDB], ed. George Arthur Buttrick et al. (Abingdon, 1962), 4.449.
NJPS and R‑JPS render בַּסֻּכּוֹת here as the place name Succoth, which would make it irrelevant to this point, but many commentators take it as “in booths,” a reading favored by the parallel clause about Joab and the troops camped in the open field.
Both Milgrom and Knohl take the festival’s name to come from exactly that: temporary shelters put up around the sanctuary by people who had come a distance. Knohl, Sanctuary of Silence, 38–39 n. 87: the commandment “originated in the pilgrim custom of building temporary shelters during the festival (which is defined as a holiday requiring one’s presence in the temple vicinity).” Knohl uses this to explain why the obligation runs seven days and not eight: the eighth is an עצרת, not a חג. Cf. Milgrom, Leviticus 23–27, 2037, who describes the pre‑exilic booths as “an incidental feature of the preexilic festival, namely, the shelters erected by some of the celebrants—those who journeyed to the sanctuary from afar.”
One might speculate further that the wilderness of Lev 23:43 carried a second resonance for people who had spent decades outside the land, where later rabbinic usage sets הארץ against חוץ לארץ (cf. y. Sheviʿit 8:3). This is speculation, and almost certainly not the conscious sense of the verse.
For a different account of the roofs, as a vestige of a Canaanite practice of building booths for the gods on the temple roof, see Zev Farber, “The Origins of Sukkot,” TheTorah (2017).
See Lisbeth S. Fried, “Sukkot in Ezra-Nehemiah and the Date of the Torah,” TheTorah (2015), who takes them to show that Ezra’s Torah was not our text; Milgrom (2065–67) and Knohl (39 n. 88) both reject that inference. Knohl speaks of “the confusion that reigned during the Restoration period regarding the performance of the commandment of building booths and its relation to the ritual of the ‘Four Kinds.’” He further notes that ככתוב בתורה is applied in the same book to the wood offering (Neh 10:35), a customary practice with no basis in Scripture at all.
