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feasts, " the harvest festival of joy and thanksgiving, in celebration not only of the full ingathering of the labours of the field, but also of the fruit and of the vintage, and is therefore pre-eminently styled the Feast of Ingatherings (Ex. xxiii. 16; xxxiv. 22; Deut. xvi. 13).
It had, moreover, a clear retrospective or commemora tive significance, as is plainly stated in the command that they should dwell in booths : " And ye shall take you on the first day the fruit of the goodly trees, branches of palm trees, and boughs of thick trees, and willoivs of the brook, and ye shall rejoice before Jehovah your God seven days ; ... ye shall dwell in booths seven days, . . . that your generations may know that I made the children of Israel to dwell in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt ; I am Jehovah your God" (vers. 4043) an ordinance well calculated indeed to keep alive in their mind the grateful remembrance of the God of Israel, who sustained them miraculously in the wilderness, and led them by the hand of Moses, Aaron, and Joshua, safely into the promised land.
The Rabbis in later times regarded the SukkaJi (taber nacle), in which they dwelt during the feast, as more especially symbolical of the cloud of glory which hovered over the Tabernacle, and which led and shielded Israel by day and illumined them by night in their forty years wilderness wanderings ; but even the Mishna and the Talmud single out this feast from all the others as being of an anticipative or prophetic character, while Christian scholars and Bible students are in agreement that there is nothing in this dispensation to answer to the Feast of Tabernacles. No, its fulfilment is yet in the future, when, after Israel s national Day of Atonement shall have come to pass, and the nation which was destined of God from the beginning to be the channel of blessing to the world shall have been reconciled and cleansed, and equipped by the power of God to go forth on its mission of spreading the knowledge of their Messiah over the whole earth, the great "Feast of Ingathering" shall take place, and "all peoples " shall sit down to the " feast of fat things, yea, a
