When Jacob returned to Bethel — the very stones where he had dreamed of the ladder decades earlier — he did not simply set up a marker and move on. He raised a pillar of stone on the exact spot where God had spoken with him, and then he performed a ritual that seemed strange for a lone patriarch in the wilderness.
He poured out a libation of wine. Then he poured out a libation of water. Then he anointed the stone with olive oil.
Wine alone would have fit the later Temple rite. Why water? Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 35:14) gives the answer in a single explosive phrase: because thus it was to be done at the feast of Tabernacles. Jacob, centuries before Moses, centuries before the Temple stood in Jerusalem, was already performing the nisukh ha-mayim — the water libation that the sages would later call the most joyous rite of the year, the one that made the Court of the Women blaze with torchlight on the nights of Sukkot.
The Targumist is telling us something vast. The festivals did not begin at Sinai. They were already written into the instincts of the patriarchs. When Jacob's heart welled up with gratitude at Bethel, his body knew exactly what to do — because the rhythm of Israel's worship was older than Israel itself.
The oil, the wine, the water: three liquids for three kinds of thanks. And Jacob, alone with his stone and his God, celebrated the first Sukkot the world had ever seen.