The Water Libation in the Festival of Booths - The BAS Library
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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > December 1996

The Water Libation in the Festival of Booths

Nonbiblical rites, though originating in popular worship and rooted in magical practice, were ultimately assimilated into Israel’s official monotheism.

By Jacob Milgrom

As I write, the fall holiday season is ending in Jerusalem with two simultaneous but contrary activities. The locals are dismantling their sukkot, the booths, or tabernacles, of the Festival of Booths, which for a week stood on balconies and in gardens, where everyone dines and where the more intrepid also sleep. Palm fronds are stacked on pavements to be hauled away. Visiting Diaspora Jews, still in festival finery because they observe an extra day of the holiday,a stream toward the Liberty Bell Garden where they will dance into the night with Torah scrolls to celebrate the annual completion […]

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Footnotes

1.

The custom goes back to the time when communication was very slow; Jews in the Diaspora could not know when the Sanhedrin had declared a new moon and would observe two days as a holiday because of the uncertainty over which was the right day.

2.

Modern translations render this phrase as “out of his heart” but admit, in a footnote, that it literally means “out of his belly.” Unfortunately, “out of his heart” completely misses Jesus’ reinterpretation of the birth image in Zechariah 14:8.

Endnotes

1.

Mishnah Sukkah 4:6, 9.

2.

Jacob Milgrom, Numbers (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1990).

3.

Raphael Patai, “Control of Rain in Ancient Palestine,” Hebrew Union College Annual 14 (1939), pp. 254–258.

4.

Tosefta Sukkah 4.4.

5.

Mishnah Sukkah 5.1–4.