Forgotten Commands: Leafy Huts

Multiple commandments just seem to get overlooked, and I think that’s a real tragedy. Most of these commands are little commands, the smallest of commands, even, but they are still direct instructions from our Father in Heaven, which means we should take them seriously. 

Faithfulness in the little things demonstrates our readiness to handle the big things and the things we consider to be important. We should take the little things a bit more seriously than we do, and instead of trying to moralize everything, as Christianity has been trying to do for generations, we should be absolutely obedient. 

Most of these commands aren’t that difficult to follow either, and following them teaches us something important, both in diligence and in the actual command itself. God didn’t tell us to do things arbitrarily, and this knowledge of His nature gives us the ability to trust that His instructions are for our good. 

One of these often overlooked commands is found in the instructions for keeping the Feast of Tabernacles. It’s either moralized as merely being a command to rejoice regardless of how you do it, it’s considered to be a command only for the Israelites, or it simply gets ignored altogether.

Leviticus 23:40 NKJV - 'And you shall take for yourselves on the first day the fruit of beautiful trees, branches of palm trees, the boughs of leafy trees, and willows of the brook; and you shall rejoice before the LORD your God for seven days.

Leviticus 23:41 NKJV - 'You shall keep it as a feast to the LORD for seven days in the year. [It shall be] a statute forever in your generations. You shall celebrate it in the seventh month.

Now, before we finish the instructions given here, I want to point out that verse 42 is never considered to be only for the Israelites, even though it explicitly says that the command is for those who are native Israelites. It’s easily understood that this applies to us since we were grafted into the people of God. 

Leviticus 23:42 NKJV - 'You shall dwell in booths for seven days. All who are native Israelites shall dwell in booths,

Leviticus 23:43 NKJV - 'that your generations may know that I made the children of Israel dwell in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt: I [am] the LORD your God.' "

The reason we understand that this applies to us is that, more than simply being a symbol of dwelling in temporary dwellings in the wilderness, it’s symbolic of us dwelling in the temporary dwellings that are our bodies. 

2 Corinthians 5:1 NKJV - For we know that if our earthly house, [this] tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.

We absolutely are in temporary dwellings, and as it says, flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, so our fleshly bodies must be changed or glorified, as it says. We’ll go from dwelling in this temporary and fragile body to dwelling in a permanent and incredibly powerful body at our resurrection.

Our time here on Earth is short and temporary, and Earth is only our temporary home. We will not dwell with flesh forever, and we all look forward to the time when we can put off mortality and put on immortality. 

2 Corinthians 5:2 NKJV - For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed with our habitation which is from heaven,

That’s what we look forward to, and it’s what the Feast of Tabernacles pictures, among other things. There are seven days of dwelling in the flesh, and finally, on the 8th day assembly, the dwelling becomes permanent. That’s where this command from God comes into play, especially in our celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles.

Leviticus 23:40 NKJV - 'And you shall take for yourselves on the first day the fruit of beautiful trees, branches of palm trees, the boughs of leafy trees, and willows of the brook; and you shall rejoice before the LORD your God for seven days.

God tells us to take the branches of various trees and rejoice before Him for seven days. What exactly does it mean to rejoice with tree branches?

Do we run around waving them?

Do we sing songs with them?

Do we make meals with them?

Do we hang them as decorations in our house?

What exactly do we do with them?

Well, it’s not left up to our speculation, because we actually are given an example of this command being put into practice. 

The children of Israel had not kept the Feast of Booths for many years, so they had forgotten how to do it. They returned to the land after a time of captivity, and they had to reread the Law in order to know what exactly they were supposed to do. We find this in the book of Nehemiah, chapter 8, and they directly and literally interpret the command about leafy branches.

Nehemiah 8:14 NKJV - And they found written in the Law, which the LORD had commanded by Moses, that the children of Israel should dwell in booths during the feast of the seventh month,

Nehemiah 8:15 NKJV - and that they should announce and proclaim in all their cities and in Jerusalem, saying, "Go out to the mountain, and bring olive branches, branches of oil trees, myrtle branches, palm branches, and branches of leafy trees, to make booths, as [it is] written."

So they go out to the mountains and rivers to collect these branches and look at what they do with them. 

Nehemiah 8:16 NKJV - Then the people went out and brought [them] and made themselves booths, each one on the roof of his house, or in their courtyards or the courts of the house of God, and in the open square of the Water Gate and in the open square of the Gate of Ephraim.

They make the temporary dwellings out of them! 

They made the temporary dwellings out of these branches, and in the next verse, we see that they sat in them and rejoiced, as they were commanded in Leviticus. 

Nehemiah 8:17 NKJV - So the whole assembly of those who had returned from the captivity made booths and sat under the booths; for since the days of Joshua the son of Nun until that day the children of Israel had not done so. And there was very great gladness.

Nehemiah 8:18 NKJV - Also day by day, from the first day until the last day, he read from the Book of the Law of God. And they kept the feast seven days; and on the eighth day [there was] a sacred assembly, according to the [prescribed] manner.

So when we go back to Leviticus and we see the command to take leafy branches and rejoice with them, this is what they were supposed to do with them, and what we are supposed to do with them even today.

Now, why make the booths out of branches? 

Surely there are better materials to make a tent out of since branches are not that durable!

The leaves will begin to fall off by the end of the Feast, and there won’t be much left of our booth, so an animal skin would make much more sense. That is, unless there is a specific lesson that God is trying to convey with the branches and their fragility. 

Isaiah 40:6 NKJV - The voice said, "Cry out!" And he said, "What shall I cry?" "All flesh [is] grass, And all its loveliness [is] like the flower of the field.

Isaiah 40:7 NKJV - The grass withers, the flower fades, Because the breath of the LORD blows upon it; Surely the people [are] grass.

Isaiah 40:8 NKJV - The grass withers, the flower fades, But the word of our God stands forever."

Our flesh is temporary, and it quickly fades away. It starts out looking good when we are young, and by the time we are old, it has begun to fade away and wither into wrinkles, grey hair, and dust. 

Psalm 103:14 NKJV - For He knows our frame; He remembers that we [are] dust.

Psalm 103:15 NKJV - [As for] man, his days [are] like grass; As a flower of the field, so he flourishes.

Psalm 103:16 NKJV - For the wind passes over it, and it is gone, And its place remembers it no more.

Just like the leaves on these bowers, a stiff wind of time carries us away with very few remembering us and who we are. Without God and the resurrection, we would fade away permanently to never live again. Solomon poeticized this process in Ecclesiastes, and he paints a vivid mental picture of the effect time has on the human body. 

The outcome of this realization is for us to remember our Creator while we are still young and before we grow old, and the difficult days of old age come upon us. 

Ecclesiastes 12:1 NKJV - Remember now your Creator in the days of your youth, Before the difficult days come, And the years draw near when you say, "I have no pleasure in them":

Ecclesiastes 12:2 NKJV - While the sun and the light, The moon and the stars, Are not darkened, And the clouds do not return after the rain;

Ecclesiastes 12:3 NKJV - In the day when the keepers of the house tremble, And the strong men bow down; When the grinders cease because they are few, And those that look through the windows grow dim;

Ecclesiastes 12:4 NKJV - When the doors are shut in the streets, And the sound of grinding is low; When one rises up at the sound of a bird, And all the daughters of music are brought low.

Ecclesiastes 12:5 NKJV - Also they are afraid of height, And of terrors in the way; When the almond tree blossoms, The grasshopper is a burden, And desire fails. For man goes to his eternal home, And the mourners go about the streets.

Ecclesiastes 12:6 NKJV - [Remember your Creator] before the silver cord is loosed, Or the golden bowl is broken, Or the pitcher shattered at the fountain, Or the wheel broken at the well.

Ecclesiastes 12:7 NKJV - Then the dust will return to the earth as it was, And the spirit will return to God who gave it.

Growing old should motivate us to seek God more and more, especially as we see the end of our days drawing near, and this frailty is exactly why we are told to use leafy branches in the construction of our temporary dwellings. 

By the end of the Feast, the booth will have lost most of its leaves, and it will be looking kind of ratty, just like our fleshly bodies. It won’t be fit to dwell in any longer, and we’ll have to move on to something more permanent. 

Should we be taking leafy branches and making temporary dwellings out of them?

Absolutely!

If we are going to keep the Feast of Tabernacles, this instruction is central to the proper observance of these days. It’s a picture of our short and very temporary time here on Earth, and it’s a command from our Father in Heaven. 

Now, this brings up a question central to the reason behind most people ignoring this command, which is simply that most people don’t want to live in a tent made of leaves, especially in a cold climate. 

It could be downright miserable to do so, in fact. 

Do we have to live in these leafy tents?

Could we just pitch a tent and call it good?

Well, a synthetic tent doesn’t count since the command is specifically to make it out of branches. 

We need to go back to the reason this command was given and the instructions that parallel it. The command wasn’t given to produce hardship and misery; it was given for us to rejoice. 

“and you shall rejoice before the LORD your God for seven days.”

Dwelling doesn’t necessarily have to mean we are sleeping in these booths, but it does mean that we should be spending time in them. We should be doing some rejoicing in them! 

We could eat our meals in them, have Bible study and worship in them, play games in them, or whatever else rejoicing looks like for us. Rejoicing in the context of the Feast includes eating and drinking because it is a celebration, so we should be eating meals in these booths. 

In our family, we traditionally rent a house together for the Feast, and a way we could implement this command is to build a booth out of branches wherever we rent and eat our meals in it, sing songs of praise in it, and maybe even sleep in it if the weather permits. 

It’s really not that hard a command to implement, though most people are happy to focus on the rejoice aspect of the command and ignore the part about building a leafy hut.

Let’s go back to the original command for a moment to get some specific details for what we are supposed to do to fulfill this instruction. 

Leviticus 23:40 NKJV - 'And you shall take for yourselves on the first day the fruit of beautiful trees, branches of palm trees, the boughs of leafy trees, and willows of the brook; and you shall rejoice before the LORD your God for seven days.

There are two things to notice about this command: the first is that there’s a specific time to build it, and the second is that there are specific materials. The time to build it is on the first day of the Feast, but there is also a Holy convocation on this day, so we need to take that into account when we begin building. On the first day of the Feast, we go out and gather the branches and bring them back so we can build the booth, but not just branches. 

Notice we are also supposed to bring back ripe fruit from local trees as well. We use all of these things to assemble the booth and decorate it, and to make it beautiful. The trees we utilize are leafy trees rather than evergreen trees, and this again goes back to the temporary nature of this booth.

It also keeps us separate from the pagan practices of those who utilize and decorate evergreen trees to celebrate the birth of the pagan sun god, which is a good thing to stay separated from.

Now that we are armed with this information about how to better celebrate the Feast in accordance with the direct commands given by God, will our Feast look a little different next year? 

I hope to see many pictures of assembled booths next year, and my family and I will be doing the best we can to observe this command ourselves, and we will be sharing a picture of our own temporary dwelling.

It would be cool to even take a daily picture of it to capture its decay over the week of celebration as well. Whatever the case, let’s always strive to be faithful to even the smallest of commands, even those we have conveniently forgotten.