a booth: a temporary shelter woven from leafy branches
At its root this is the rough little hut a person throws together in an afternoon out of interwoven boughs. A vinedresser sleeps in one to guard the harvest, a herder pens cattle behind one, a soldier camps under one in the field. It is by definition the opposite of a house: flimsy, makeshift, meant to last a season and then be abandoned.
That plain picture carries two feelings at once, and the biblical writers play on both. A booth is fragile, something you could knock over by morning. Yet a booth is also a covering, real shade from the sun and real shelter from the storm. From this single image the word branches out in several directions without ever losing its core.
- One branch is the autumn festival, the Feast of Booths, when Israel was told to live in these shelters for a week to remember the years in the wilderness.
- Another is a picture of God himself: the dark storm cloud is spoken of as his booth, and his protection over his people is a shelter that hides them from harm.
- A third, most pointed of all, is the fallen royal line of David, once a great house and now pictured as a collapsed hut that God promises to raise again.
So one humble word does a great deal of work. Whether it names a farmer's lean-to, a holy week of camping out, the cloud-pavilion of God, or a broken dynasty, it always keeps the double note of something frail and something sheltering.