Jacob Built Booths and Israel Built Them Again at Succoth

Jacob crossed the river with a limp, and he met his brother, and when Esau offered to travel on with him he said no with as much courtesy as he could manage. So he stopped in open country instead, on ground with nothing built on it. He had children who needed shade and cattle that needed more, but he did not raise a house, because a house is a claim and he was in no condition to make one. He cut branches and made booths for the livestock, and the place took the name of the work he did there: Succoth (Genesis 33:17).

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Walls That Belonged to Other Men

His great-grandchildren laid brick in Egypt, and not one course of it was theirs. A man who builds all day and sleeps where he is told stops thinking of a wall as shelter and starts thinking of it as a measurement of somebody else's wealth, so when the night finally came and the order was to go, they carried dough that had not risen and walked out of Rameses with nothing on their backs that an overseer had assigned them.

The first place they stopped was called Succoth (Exodus 12:37).

The First Night Nobody Owned Them

One of them went out with a knife at dusk to cut branches, and his hands did not know what to do at first, because every wall he had ever raised had gone up on another man's order and to another man's line. Nothing here was measured. He cut what he could reach, dragged it back, and leaned it into a frame that would have been laughed at in the brick yards. The roof leaked starlight. The wall was a suggestion. It took him less than an hour, and when he crawled in under it and his children crawled in after him, the thing above their heads was his.

He did not invent the shape. The name of the ground had been waiting for four generations, since a frightened man with a limp had once cut branches on country like this for his cattle and left the word behind him.

The King Who Asked Last

Nobody had asked him for his loyalty yet. That came at the end, after everything else, and he was there for all of it. He walked between the standing walls of the sea with dry sandals while the chariots behind him did not come out the other side. He went out in the grey mornings after that and gathered bread off the desert floor that had not been there the night before. He drank from Miriam's well when there was no water in that country, ate quail when the meat gave out, and stood with a spear against Amalek when Amalek came for the stragglers.

Only then did the offer come: "I will rule over you."

There was a gap before the answer, and in that gap he thought about the overseer's list and the man who used to own his mornings, because that was the only kind of rule he had ever lived under, and rule had always meant a hand on the back of his neck. Then he counted the order of things again. The sea had come first, and the bread, and the water, and the meat, and the spear. He said yes, and then he said it again, and everyone standing near him said it twice as well.

A Day That Nobody Could Claim

Later the seventh day came to him as a gift and not as a schedule. It was a holy day and a day of the holy kingdom, and it was given to Israel to eat on, to drink on, to be filled with joy on, and to cease from all the work that men do. Frankincense still went up and the offerings still went before the Lord on it, because ceasing was never the same thing as having nothing to bring, and the smoke stood in for the camp day after day as a memorial that pleased Heaven.

He ate sitting down on those days. In Egypt a man ate standing, because the work was waiting and the work belonged to somebody else. The branches he had cut at Succoth had kept off almost no weather, and the seventh day kept off almost no trouble, and he slept under both of them with nothing owed in the morning.