He Shall Dwell over Them: The Feast of Tabernacles and the Tent God Pitches over the Nations
Old Testament: Leviticus 23:34, 40, 42-43
Say to the children of Israel: From the fifteenth day of this same seventh month, shall be kept the feast of tabernacles seven days to the Lord. ... And you shall take to you on the first day the fruits of the fairest tree, and branches of palm trees, and boughs of thick trees, and willows of the brook, and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God. ... And you shall dwell in bowers seven days: every one that is of the race of Israel, shall dwell in tabernacles: That your posterity may know, that I made the children of Israel to dwell in tabernacles, when I brought them out of the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.
Old Testament, also: Zacharias 14:16
And all they that shall be left of all nations that came against Jerusalem, shall go up from year to year, to adore the King, the Lord of hosts, and to keep the feast of tabernacles.
New Testament: John 7:2; Apocalypse 7:9, 15
Now the Jews' feast of tabernacles was at hand. ... After this I saw a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and tribes, and peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne, and in sight of the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands. ... Therefore they are before the throne of God, and they serve him day and night in his temple: and he, that sitteth on the throne, shall dwell over them.
The connection
Every autumn, when the harvest was gathered, Israel left its houses for a week and lived in booths of branches: "you shall dwell in bowers seven days ... That your posterity may know, that I made the children of Israel to dwell in tabernacles, when I brought them out of the land of Egypt" (Leviticus 23:42-43). They carried "branches of palm trees ... and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God" (23:40). Zacharias saw the feast outgrow Israel: "all they that shall be left of all nations ... shall go up from year to year, to adore the King, the Lord of hosts, and to keep the feast of tabernacles" (Zacharias 14:16). Christ went up to Jerusalem for this feast (John 7:2), and on its last and great day He cried, "If any man thirst, let him come to me, and drink" (7:37); in the same days, in the temple, He said, "I am the light of the world" (8:12). On the mountain of the Transfiguration Peter, seeing the glory, wanted to keep the feast there and then: "let us make here three tabernacles" (Matthew 17:4). John sees it kept at last: "a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations ... clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands", and "he, that sitteth on the throne, shall dwell over them" (Apocalypse 7:9, 15). The nations have come up to the feast, and God Himself pitches the tent. St Augustine asks what the feast foreshadowed: "If, therefore, all these things were shadows of things to come, also the feast of tabernacles was a shadow of things to come ... Let us observe what it is, and we shall be that thing", and he answers that "believers are God's tabernacle, in whom, as they are united and built together in love, God condescends to dwell". The Catechism teaches that the pilgrim Church will be fulfilled as the holy city of God, the unity of the human race that God willed from creation (CCC 1045).
Moral sense
The booth was meant to be a little uncomfortable: a roof of branches with the stars showing through, so that Israel would remember it was a people on the way. St Peter called his own body a tent: "as long as I am in this tabernacle ... the laying away of this my tabernacle is at hand" (2 Peter 1:13-14), and Abraham "abode in the land, dwelling in cottages" (Hebrews 11:9). A Christian lives in a tent on purpose: comfortable enough to rejoice, light enough to leave. St Methodius reads the feast's branches for the soul: "let him first procure the goodly fruit of faith, then palm branches, that is, attentive meditation upon and study of the Scriptures, afterwards the far-spreading and thickly-leaved branches of charity".
Anagogical sense
The feast closed on an eighth day: "on the first day and the eighth shall be a sabbath, that is a day of rest" (Leviticus 23:39). Beyond the seven days in booths stands the day that does not end, when "They shall no more hunger nor thirst ... and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes" (Apocalypse 7:16-17). The booths come down; the tent God pitches over His people stays.
The Fathers
St Methodius, Banquet of the Ten Virgins IX.4: "Whoso, therefore, desires to come to that Feast of Tabernacles, to be numbered with the saints, let him first procure the goodly fruit of faith, then palm branches, that is, attentive meditation upon and study of the Scriptures, afterwards the far-spreading and thickly-leaved branches of charity." St Augustine, Tractates on John 28.9: "If, therefore, all these things were shadows of things to come, also the feast of tabernacles was a shadow of things to come. Let us examine, then, of what thing to come was this feast-day a shadow ... Let us observe what it is, and we shall be that thing; we, I say, who are members of Christ." St Augustine, Reply to Faustus XIX.10: "believers are God's tabernacle, in whom, as they are united and built together in love, God condescends to dwell, so that Christians do not keep this feast precisely because what was thus prefigured is now fulfilled by Christ in His Church."
Warrant
Patristic. St Methodius gives a whole discourse of the Banquet to the Feast of Tabernacles as a figure of the resurrection and the life to come, reading its fruit, palms and thick boughs as faith, the Scriptures and charity (Banquet of the Ten Virgins IX.4); St Augustine names the feast a shadow of things to come fulfilled in Christ's members (Tractates on John 28.9) and believers as the tabernacle in which God dwells (Reply to Faustus XIX.10). Checked in the Greek: the feast is heorte skenon at Leviticus 23:34 and heorte tes skenopegias at Zacharias 14:16, the word John uses at John 7:2, he skenopegia; Peter's three tabernacles are treis skenas (Matthew 17:4), and at Apocalypse 7:15 God skenosei ep' autous, will pitch His tent over them, a verb made from the same word. The palms of Leviticus 23:40, kallynthra phoinikon, are the phoinikes in the hands of the multitude at Apocalypse 7:9. The Fathers quoted here read the feast as fulfilled in the Church and the life to come; joining it to Apocalypse 7:15 in particular is the entry's own, carried by the Greek. The tabernacle of the wilderness and the Word who dwelt among us have entries of their own; this one follows the yearly feast of booths. Dunk asked for the feast in the week after it was kept, in October 2026.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1045.
The verses
Leviticus 23:34 · Leviticus 23:40 · Leviticus 23:42 · Leviticus 23:43 · Zacharias 14:16 · John 7:2 · Apocalypse 7:9 · Apocalypse 7:15
