John 7:2

Ver. 2. “ But the feast of the Jews, called that of Tabernacles, was at hand. ”

This feast was celebrated in October: six full months, therefore, according to John himself, separate this story from the one preceding, without his mentioning a single one of the facts which we have just enumerated, and which filled this entire half-year. His intention, then, is certainly not to relate a complete history, and his silence with respect to any fact whatever cannot be interpreted as a proof of ignorance or as an implicit denial of it. The feast of Tabernacles, called in Maccabees and in Josephus, as here, σκηνοπηγία, was celebrated for eight days, reckoning from the fifteenth day of the seventh month (Tisri). During this time, the people dwelt in tents, made of leafy branches, on the roofs of the houses, in the streets and squares, and even on the sides of the roads around Jerusalem. The Jews thus renewed every year the remembrance of the forty years during which their fathers had lived in tents in the wilderness. The city and its environs resembled a camp of pilgrims. The principal ceremonies of the feast had reference to the miraculous blessings of which Israel had been the object during that long and painful pilgrimage of the desert.

A libation which was made every morning in the temple, recalled to mind the waters which Moses had caused to spring forth from the rock. Two candelabra, lighted at evening in the court, represented the luminous cloud which had given light to the Israelites during the nights. To the seven days of the feast, properly so called, the law added an eighth, with which was perhaps connected, according to the ingenious supposition of Lange, the remembrance of the entrance into the promised land. Josephus calls this feast the most sacred and greatest of the Israelitish festivals. But, as it was also designed to celebrate the end of all the harvestings of the year, the people gave themselves up to rejoicings which easily degenerated into license, and which caused it to be compared by Plutarch to the feasts of Bacchus. It was the last of the great legal feasts of the year; as Jesus had not gone, this year, either to the Passover-feast or to that of Pentecost, it might be presumed that He would go to this feast. For it was assumed that every one would celebrate at least one of these three principal feasts at Jerusalem. Hence the therefore of the following verse.