The wild olive in the sukkah

This message was given at Shoresh David Messianic Congregation in Monroeville, PA on the occasion of Sukkot/Feast of Booths 2025.

Chag sukkot sameach, friends. Happy Feast of Booths. 

Today we will take a look at Nehemiah 8. We’ll look over its context. Then we’re going to dive into a midrash on one verse. The verse may look inconsequential, but it has an odd phrase that shows up in only a few places. As you will see, it has proved hard to translate consistently. But, because of where it shows up in the Tanakh and because a related term comes up in the New Testament, I believe it has something to say to us today here in this place, to this mix of people. 

Let’s set the scene. 

Nehemiah and his faithful band have just finished rebuilding the walls around Jerusalem and the temple. It’s been 140 years since Babylon destroyed Solomon’s Temple, nearly 100 years since Cyrus allowed the rebuilding of the temple, 70 years since the Second Temple was finished and consecrated. 

Now that the city and the temple have been fortified, Ezra the priest will teach Torah AND put it into practice. 

At the start of the chapter, it’s Rosh Hashanah or the Day of Blasting, the first day of Tishei (or the seventh month). The people weep at hearing the Torah read, but Ezra and Nehemiah remind them it is a feast day. No weeping today. Go party with your people!

“Do not be grieved,” Ezra says, “for the joy of the LORD is your strength.” 

I love this verse. This is a breath prayer for me, something I say quietly – under my breath – to acknowledge a surge of joy or to ask for God’s strength. “The joy of the LORD is my strength.”

And so the people go celebrate, having learned some Torah. 

The next day, they come to hear more Torah read and explained. And Ezra purposely goes to the instructions for Sukkot. 

When we get to Nehemiah 8:13,  Tishrei 2 (second day of the seventh month).  We know it’s the second day of the seventh month in the text. Most of us here know that Sukkot starts on the 15th of the seventh month. So 13 days left to Sukkot in our reading. 

Ezra and the people need those 13 days to spread the word and to gather the materials needed to build booths or huts.

Ezra has specifically read the instructions that they are to live in a sukkah, a booth for seven days. So he must be reading from Leviticus. The mandate for the Feast of Booths is found in Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, but each highlights different parts. 

• Leviticus 23 tells us to dwell in booths, and 
• Deuteronomy 16 tells us to observe the festival of Sukkot. 
• Numbers takes the better part of chapter 29 to detail every sacrifice made on the seven days plus the solemn assembly on the eighth day. 

Similarly, the Scriptures show two times returned exiles celebrated Sukkot and highlight different aspects. In Ezra 3, we see the first wave of exiles rebuild the altar and offer the prescribed Sukkot offerings. Here in Nehemiah 8, the focus is on the third wave of exiles building booths/sukkot. It says that the children of Israel had not built booths since the days of Joshua! Yet we know from Ezra that the sacrifices for Sukkot had been offered a few years before. I think it’s safe to believe that those sacrifices had been made the whole time the first temple and tabernacle were up and running. So the part of the celebration (the best part in my opinion) had not been done for 1,000 years: building the festival huts.

Let’s bring our focus to verse 15.

So they proclaimed and circulated a proclamation in all their cities and in Jerusalem, saying, “Go out to the hills, and bring olive branches and wild olive branches, myrtle branches, palm branches and branches of other leafy trees, to make booths, as it is written.” (NASB)

On Bible Gateway, out of 58 English translations, 41 use “wild olive” or equivalent in that verse, nine say “pine,” three say “oil tree,” and the other five use some vague name there.

What's going on there? 

The Hebrew says to bring zeit and etz-shemen, olive branches and oil tree branches.  What is an oil tree? What is etz-shemen?

The term shows up three places in Scripture: here in Nehemiah, in Isaiah 41, and in a description of Solomon’s Temple in 1 Kings 6.

The translations, even in Jewish sources, are all over the place. 

• In 1 Kings 6, Christian and Jewish translators agree it’s “olive wood.”
• In Isaiah 41, it’s among the list of trees that God will plant in the desert to show the poor and needy that he is their provider. There, etz-shemen is rendered mainly as olive, but also pine and the literal oil tree.

Etz shemen shows up in Ben Sira 50, one of those extra inter-testamental books that Catholics and Anglicans read, and it shows up in the Talmud. The Ben Sira quote is significant because, like in Nehemiah 8, it shows up next to zeit, the Hebrew word for olive, and is translated as wild olive. Ben Sira lived less than 200 years before Jesus and Paul.

We know how words shift in meaning over time and place. So I find the Ben Sira quote valuable, as his usage of etz-shemesh as wild olive tree may be helpful as we consider a passage in the New Testament. 

Where do we see wild olive in the New Testament? Romans 11. Why does Paul use this metaphor of two olive trees? Surely, Paul had read Ben Sira, and we know that Paul the Pharisee knew etz-shemen from Kings, Isaiah, and Nehemiah. 

Let’s go to Romans 11 (CJB).

13 However, to those of you who are Gentiles I say this: since I myself am an emissary sent to the Gentiles, I make known the importance of my work 14 in the hope that somehow I may provoke some of my own people to jealousy and save some of them! 15 For if their casting Yeshua aside means reconciliation for the world, what will their accepting him mean? It will be life from the dead!

16 Now if the hallah offered as firstfruits is holy, so is the whole loaf. And if the root is holy, so are the branches. 17 But if some of the branches were broken off, and you — a wild olive — were grafted in among them and have become equal sharers in the rich root of the olive tree, 18 then don’t boast as if you were better than the branches! However, if you do boast, remember that you are not supporting the root, the root is supporting you. 19 So you will say, “Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in.” 20 True, but so what? They were broken off because of their lack of trust. However, you keep your place only because of your trust. So don’t be arrogant; on the contrary, be terrified! 21 For if God did not spare the natural branches, he certainly won’t spare you! 22 So take a good look at God’s kindness and his severity: on the one hand, severity toward those who fell off; but, on the other hand, God’s kindness toward you — provided you maintain yourself in that kindness! Otherwise, you too will be cut off! 23 Moreover, the others, if they do not persist in their lack of trust, will be grafted in; because God is able to graft them back in. 24 For if you were cut out of what is by nature a wild olive tree and grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these natural branches be grafted back into their own olive tree!

25 For, brothers, I want you to understand this truth which God formerly concealed but has now revealed, so that you won’t imagine you know more than you actually do. It is that stoniness, to a degree, has come upon Isra’el, until the Gentile world enters in its fullness… 

That's a big chunk of Romans because we need to see the context.

I am speaking today to Messianic Jewish congregation here today, a mixed multitude of Jews and Gentiles. This passage is familiar to most of us. The passage is a word of warning to us Gentiles. But what we’ll focus on today is Paul’s choice of metaphor – two different types of olive tree joined together in God’s garden, Jew and Gentile made into one fruitful tree in God’s kingdom. 

Where did this sprout from in Paul’s mind. Sure, the Holy Spirit brought it to him. The Holy Spirit brings things to our remembrance. So Paul’s dictating this letter to the Romans – a mixed congregation like this one, a microcosm of the global church. The Gentiles and the Jews want to worship Jesus just a little differently. There are arguments on whether to keep the feasts, whether to keep kosher, whether we keep this fast or if we can buy meat at that store in the market. That’s the message of Romans – the call to unity within the mixed multitude that is the church of Messiah. 

Remember, I said this would be midrash. Midrash is a Jewish teaching style where we use holy imagination to fill in some gaps, to try to answer the questions the Scriptures raise. So I ask you to extend me some grace as I do some prayerful, Scripture-grounded imagining.

Nehemiah 8 speaks of cultivated and wild olives joined together to make the sukkah. Sukkot is a feast day that’s open to all. 

In Deuteronomy 16, the LORD says

13 “You shall keep the Feast of Booths seven days, when you have gathered in the produce from your threshing floor and your winepress. 14 You shall rejoice in your feast, you and your son and your daughter, your male servant and your female servant, the Levite, the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow who are within your towns. 15 For seven days you shall keep the feast to the Lord your God at the place that the Lord will choose, because the Lord your God will bless you in all your produce and in all the work of your hands, so that you will be altogether joyful.

Sukkot is not only for the citizens of Israel, as Leviticus 23 says, but also for the servants, the foreigners, the orphans, and the widows. EVERYBODY is invited to the sukkah. 

In the prophetic vision of Zechariah 14, all the nations of the earth will be invited to celebrate Sukkot in Jerusalem with God. He’ll expect them to be there. 

For this reason, in a prophetic action, the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem has hosted a Feast of Tabernacles gathering in Jerusalem since 1980. Jesus-followers from around the world gather to mark Sukkot with God in Jerusalem, as he will require in the age to come. 

So maybe Paul thinks about Jews and Gentiles celebrating Sukkot together in the final fulfillment. He remembers that Nehemiah’s sukkah instructions have olive and wild olive together. Paul knows the last days have begun with the resurrection of Jesus Messiah, and he sees this picture of an old olive tree being pruned and refreshed with graftings from wild olive trees. 

I believe most of what Paul teaches us is information he learned in his formation as a Pharisee, educated in Jerusalem and Greek-speaking Tarsus. He knows the Scriptures and the teachings of the sages before him. And all that information is spun around, rethought, reimagined, reanimated by his encounter with the Living God in the person of Yeshua Messiah.

The Pharisees believed in the resurrection. The Pharisees believed that the nations would come to God, but at the very end. Paul realizes when he is confronted by Jesus on the road to Damascus that the resurrection has begun and that all the prophecies of the nations coming to the God of Israel have started to be fulfilled. That is why he takes up Jesus’ call to be the Apostle to the Nations!

Let’s circle back to Nehemiah 8 and tie everything together. 

17 The entire assembly of those who had returned from the captivity made booths and lived in them. The sons of Israel had indeed not done so from the days of Joshua the son of Nun to that day. And there was great rejoicing. (NASB)

“And there was great rejoicing.”

These returned exiles have rediscovered what is probably my favorite Levitical feast. The text says they hadn’t built booths since the days of Joshua, almost 1,000 years before. Sukkot certainly wasn’t celebrated while in Babylon.  After the long, hot summer of exile, Sukkot has finally come. 

Compare this with what C.S. Lewis writes about Narnia in the Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe: “It’s always winter but never Christmas.” Narnia was under the spell of the White Witch, which sucked the world of its joy. Then Aslan came and broke the witch’s spell. Joy returned! Christmas returned!

So it was for Judah for a thousand years. It was always a hot toiling summer – Judah toiled under judges, bad kings, and ultimately exile – but it was never Sukkot. Judah hadn’t experienced – until Nehemiah 8 – the full joy of freedom and God’s provision that Sukkot celebrates. 

Why does C.S. Lewis make it winter and never Christmas? First of all, because he was a Brit. But the metaphor of always winter and never Christmas points to how the White Witch was keeping the Narnians oppressed and depressed. It took Aslan – certainly a picture of the Lion of Judah – dying in Edmund's place to break the witch’s curse on the land. 

Sukkot is a festival meant to remind Israel that God has been with them all along. God has been their covering and their provision. God has been their shade in the wilderness, the one who brings water from stones, the one who gives bread from heaven. 

So the people of Judah and Israel, by not celebrating Sukkot, were forgetting Immanuel, the God who took them out of Egypt, the God who sustained them in the wilderness, the God who gave them the Promised Land. 

And I know some of you are thinking of the Messianic theories that place Jesus’ birth at Sukkot.[1] If this is new to you, ask a Messianic friend. But, yes, the announcing angel equates Yeshua with Immanuel, God with us (Matt 1). John 1 calls Jesus the Word of God, who is God and who tabernacles with us. It’s a connection that we can see from this side of history but would not have been visible from Nehemiah’s side of history.

Theories about Jesus’ actual birthday aside, I am satisfied with the picture of Zechariah 14 and the invitation of Deuteronomy 16. All are invited to God’s tent. All the nations will enter into God’s tent when New Jerusalem comes down and sanctifies and joins earthly Jerusalem. On that day, it will be clear to all the world that God is truly with us, ruling, reigning, providing.

As Paul says, quoting Isaiah and sticking Jesus right at the center, at the name of Yeshua

every knee will bow —

in heaven, on earth and under the earth —

and every tongue will acknowledge

that Yeshua the Messiah is Adonai —

to the glory of God the Father. (Phil 2:10-11, Isa 45:23)

We celebrate that today, praying for the day when all our family, friends, and neighbors accept the invitation to the Sukkah that is Jesus. 

We’ve run this way and that in the Scriptures. We’ve been in the Torah and the Prophets and we’ve peeked into the New Testament. Let’s recap and glean some application.

• We are celebrating an ancient festival today. Sukkot goes back to the Torah, established by God as one of the Feasts of the Lord (Lev 23). It is renewed post-exile (Ezra 3, Nehemiah 8). We see Jesus celebrate Sukkot (John 7). For all those reasons, we’re celebrating Sukkot today. 

• Sukkot is for everybody. Deuteronomy commands the people of Israel to include everybody in their community in Sukkot celebrations. We see that open invitation points to a future fulfillment when the LORD will expect all the nations of the earth to celebrate the Feast of Booths with him in Jerusalem, when every knee will bow and every tongue confess that the LORD is Messiah.
  
  That means we should be inviting everyone into the sukkah, both the literal booth you put in your yard and the metaphorical sukkah that is the family of God. Think and pray about who you should invite to congregation next, who you should invite to your table to share a meal and fellowship and talk about the things of God.
  
  
• The reunification of Jew and Gentile – separated from each other after the Tower of Babel – is all over the Scriptures, and we may be seeing a hint – a remez – of that grafting together in Nehemiah’s instructions for building a sukkah.
  
  The sukkah is just another metaphor for the dwelling place God is building for himself. [2] Paul and Peter speak of Jews and Gentiles together in Jesus as living stones making up the house of God. The joining of living stones or the grafting of trees, God is making for himself a people – a kingdom of priests – out of Jew and Gentile.
  
  
• Above all, see Immanuel – God with us – in the sukkah. God is with us in the wilderness. God is uniting the mixed multitude in the wilderness. God is making Jew and Gentile into one new humanity in the wilderness. Jesus is providing bread and wine for us abundantly in the wilderness. He is the bread of heaven. He is our refuge from the hot sun of this brutal world. He will take us out of this exile, and we will see him make all things right in the end. 

Let us pray.

Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments, and commanded us to dwell in the sukkah. Thank you for covering us under the shadow of your wing. Thank you for sending Yeshua to tabernacle with us. Thank you for bringing Jew and Gentile together in the Messiah. Give us the strength, courage, and gift of hospitality to invite others into your covering love, grace, and peace. Amen.

Footnotes

1. Thomas Lancaster, “Birth of Jesus at Sukkot,” First Fruits of Zion, 28 Sept 2023. https://ffoz.org/messiah/articles/birth-of-jesus-sukkot.
2. Cf. Eph 2:19:22; 1 Peter 2:5