Feast of Tabernacles: A Human Harvest

Feasts of Israel Series: Part 25

We’ve been examining how the Feast of Tabernacles points toward the future. Last time, we noted how the booths remind us life is fragile. Yet they also turn our focus toward a permanent, more sturdy home to come.

Now we’ll consider how the feast’s place on Israel’s agricultural calendar points us even farther forward.

We noticed how Passover (along with the feasts of Unleavened Bread and the Sheaf of Firstfruits) marks the beginning of the barley harvest. Pentecost lines up with another in-gathering—the reaping of wheat. All of this happens during the first three months of the year.

During the fourth, fifth, and sixth months, figs, olives, and grapes come into the barns (see the chart above). The seventh month begins with the feasts of Trumpets and Atonement, and ends with the Feast of Tabernacles. This final celebration commemorates the end of the entire harvest season. No more fruit of the field will be saved that year.

The harvest comes to an end with the Feast of Tabernacles, leaving us with the same sense of finality we had with the booths. The message of the little tents, however, seemed directed at us personally. “I must consider my ways because I will die one day. Yet I have a hope and a future dwelling with God.” The end of the harvest somehow feels more global. It isn’t just one crop being finally gathered in, but the entire produce of the field. Is God trying to warn us to eat our vegetables before they’re gone?  

More Than Vegetables

Ever the layered-thinker, God surely had more than food on His mind when He devised these feasts and rituals. It was no accident He lined up the feasts with the farming schedule.

We can’t read through the New Testament without noticing how often Jesus speaks about seedtime and harvest. Somewhere in all His farming parables, He manages to connect the in-gathering of crops with the in-gathering of human souls. Matthew 13 has several of these stories. In each, Jesus makes clear that either the seeds, vegetation, or fruit symbolize human beings. The parable of the wheat and the tares in verses 37–43 holds particular relevance to our study of the Feast of Tabernacles.

The field in the story, Jesus says, represents the world, while the seeds being sown are people. The Son of man scatters good seeds while the “wicked one” plants bad seeds. At harvest time, angels will be doing the gathering. The tares and wheat (the good and the bad) share the earth while they live on it. They don’t, however, share the same destiny. When the angels draw their sickles, the tares will lose all hope for a future. Not so the wheat. They will be gathered into a barn called “the kingdom of their Father.”

And just when does this final reaping take place? “The harvest,” Jesus says, “is the end of the age” (Matthew 13:39).

If the booths remind us we have a “use by” date, the totality of the harvest warns all mankind is limited to the time given them.

Is the Feast of Tabernacles, then, all about doom and gloom? Maybe for the tares, but not for the rest of the harvest.

You Shall Surely Rejoice

It is supposed to be a time of great joy. While God’s people had reasons to rejoice during each of the seven feasts, God actually commanded them to do so during the Feast of Tabernacles. And why not? They were not only celebrating God’s faithfulness in producing a single crop, but for blessing the entirety of the land’s fruitfulness!

Nor were they to rejoice alone. “And you shall rejoice in your feast, you and your son and your daughter, your male servant and your female servant and the Levite, the stranger and the fatherless and the widow, who are within your gates. Seven days you shall keep a sacred feast to the Lord your God in the place which the Lord chooses, because the Lord your God will bless you in all your produce and in all the work of your hands, so that you surely rejoice” (Deuteronomy 16:14–15 NKJV).

With the Feast of Tabernacles taking on the joyful atmosphere of a giant block party, what did the invited servants and strangers have to celebrate? What about those not in the family of Israel?

God made Israel His “chosen” nation, not because they were the only ones God cared about. But so they could represent Himself to the world. He established their laws, rituals, and even their history to illustrate how He intended to save all mankind. While Jews, like the barley harvest, were to be the first nation He’d gather in, they weren’t to be the last.

In Isaiah 56:7, God declared His house to be a place of prayer for all nations, not just Israel. Malachi 1:11 likewise says His name will be great among all nations, not just one. When Jesus came, He confirmed again that God’s final harvest would not be complete without all mankind being touched. “This gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come” (Matthew 24:14).

The End and the Beginning

The message of the harvest leaves us with a sense of ending, yet it offers hints of a beginning as well.

The Feast of Tabernacles may begin with seven days inside booths, but it won’t finish until the people come out of them on the eighth day. And eight is the number of new beginnings.

The harvest season itself follows suit. The seventh month marks the end of the harvest but not the end of Israel’s sacred calendar. The eighth month comes quick on its heels when the people prepare for a new season and harvest to come (see God’s Gardening Calendar). They will rise up once more to plant, and tend, and prune, and last year’s wheat will become this year’s seed.

What stands ahead of us after God’s final harvest, we don’t yet know. While I’m sure our worship will rise to levels we’ve never known before, I also believe there will be happy work for us to do. More to plant for His pleasure. More fruit to produce for His glory.

Meanwhile, we labor where we are, planting the good word of the Gospel wherever we go. Warning of the end but offering the hope of beginning, for the fields are white with harvest.

“The harvest truly is great, but the laborers are few; therefore pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest” (Luke 10:2 NKJV).