The Feast of Booths was a harvest festival that would have been celebrated from the fifteenth to the twenty-second day of the month.1 This feast commemorated God’s provision for his people during their time in the Sinai wilderness. Now it would become an occasion of rejoicing in God’s care during their seventy years of exile in the Babylonian wilderness.
2 Detailed instructions for the Feast of Booths can be found in Leviticus 23:33–43 and Numbers 29:12–40. In summary, the people had to build and live in temporary shelters for seven days and each day they also had to offer, in addition to the morning and evening sacrifices, several bulls, two rams, fourteen lambs, one goat, flour, and oil. On the eighth day, they offered one bull, one ram, seven lambs and one goat. In total, during the Feast of Booths they slaughtered: seventy-one bulls, fifteen rams, one hundred five lambs, eight goats along with measures of flour and oil.
4 And they kept the Feast of Booths, as it is written, and offered the daily burnt offerings by number according to the rule, as each day required,