Episode 154: Sukkot and the Mystery of the Eighth Day

What do the Parable of the Wicked Tenants, the eighth day, the pilgrimage festivals, and the Fruit of the Spirit all have in common? Everything.

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He began to speak to them in parables: “A man planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug out a pit for a winepress, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenant farmers and went away. At harvest time he sent a servant to the farmers to collect some of the fruit of the vineyard from them. But they took him, beat him, and sent him away empty-handed. Again he sent another servant to them, and they hit him on the head and treated him shamefully. Then he sent another, and they killed that one. He also sent many others; some they beat, and others they killed. He still had one to send, a beloved son. Finally, he sent him to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But those tenant farmers said to one another, ‘This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ So they seized him, killed him, and threw him out of the vineyard. What then will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and kill the farmers and give the vineyard to others. Haven’t you read this Scripture: The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This came about from the Lord and is wonderful in our eyes?” They were looking for a way to arrest him but feared the crowd because they knew he had spoken this parable against them. So, they left him and went away. (Mark 12:1-12, CSB)

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have many years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids (affiliate link)and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com. If you have kids, I also have a weekly broadcast where I teach them Bible context in a way that shows them why they can trust God and how He wants to have a relationship with them through the Messiah. All Scripture this week is from the Christian Standard Bible.

So, why on earth would I associate Sukkot with this parable? Because it occurs at harvest time and that is the focus of this next week’s celebrations—beginning tonight for me and perhaps at another time for you based on your calendar and I am going to give you a heads up here; I don’t even remotely care what day you do this on. I just don’t. Been there, done that, played calendar and name police and it never bore anything in me except horrible, prideful, elitist fruit. So, I care about IF you keep it and not WHEN. And even with that, I care about the reasons WHY you are or aren’t keeping it. I never did until the Lord spoke to me about it—and I don’t place human voices on par with His so just because I am saying something and teaching something, just doesn’t rise to the same level as God placing it in someone’s heart. I will never forget the time I was kicked out of a congregation because I had the audacity to wish people “Chag Sameach” on, *gasp*, the wrong day. Got an earful publicly and privately from the leader of the congregation and the people who were commenting on my post were treated deplorably. I got blocked by him and his wife and I never went back. And so, what was gained, folks? Nothing. What was lost? Unity over the big stuff. And with that, I will segue into the whole point of having a harvest festival—the presentation of the best of our fruit to Yahweh.

Each of the three pilgrimage festivals involve the presentation of or celebration of the harvest to honor Yahweh. During the Passover week, on the day after the weekly Sabbath, the first sheaf of barley was presented at the Temple by the priests from their own fields. This occurred on the first day of the week—or it could also be seen as the eighth day aka shemini atzeret. Shavuot, or Pentecost, celebrates the wheat harvest but was also a day when the firstfruits of the wheat harvest, along with the Bikkurim, which was a presentation of the best of the early harvest in baskets, to the priests at the Temple. This also occurred on the first day of the week, or the eighth day. In the Fall, after all of the harvest was in and the tithes presented, the seven-day festival of Sukkot was celebrated—also called the Festival of the Ingathering at the beginning of the agricultural year. This festival was followed by an additional day called, you guessed it, Shemini Atzeret, or the Eighth Day.

The harvest festivals always feature either a prominent (or hidden) eighth day—symbolizing New Creation, new life, new beginnings, and resurrection. It is the presentation of what belongs to Yahweh, being given over to Yahweh. The eighth day was the day of Yeshua’s/Jesus’s resurrection, the falling of the Holy Spirit upon the gathered followers of Yeshua on Shavuot, and the very day when Yeshua cried out, “On the last and most important day of the festival, Jesus stood up and cried out, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. The one who believes in me, as the Scripture has said, will have streams of living water flow from deep within him.”  He said this about the Spirit. Those who believed in Jesus were going to receive the Spirit, for the Spirit had not yet been given because Jesus had not yet been glorified” (John 7:37-39, CSB). Luke tells us that the Transfiguration occurred on the eighth day. The initial priesthood was inaugurated on the eighth day and the fire came down from heaven, consumed the sacrifice on the altar, and the glory of God rested on the Holy of Holies in the Tabernacle. Solomon built the Temple in seven years but it was completed in the eighth month. John tells us that the eighth day is the most important day of Sukkot. And with the Scriptural focus on the historical and spiritual events of the eighth day, now we know why. The eighth day of a male child’s life was the day of circumcision—which was a pointer to the promise of a coming Messiah from the seed of Abraham, through a woman. Which might seem odd but we know from ancient writings that it was believed that a woman’s uterus was considered to be a field and that the man’s sperm was a “baby seed” that needed nothing except a fertile field to grow in. It wasn’t until the 1660’s that they figured out that wasn’t true and that women produced eggs that were a needful part of the process. And that it was a man’s contribution, and not women, who determined gender. If I was to keep going, we could just talk about the importance of the eighth day all through the Bible. But I want to talk about the harvest.

In the Parable of the Wicked Tenants, Yeshua hearkens back to what was just an unapologetic, in your face parable based on Isaiah 5:1-7: “I will sing about the one I love, a song about my loved one’s vineyard: The one I love had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. He broke up the soil, cleared it of stones, and planted it with the finest vines. He built a tower in the middle of it and even dug out a winepress there. He expected it to yield good grapes, but it yielded worthless grapes. So now, residents of Jerusalem and men of Judah, please judge between me and my vineyard. What more could I have done for my vineyard than I did? Why, when I expected a yield of good grapes, did it yield worthless grapes? Now I will tell you what I am about to do to my vineyard: I will remove its hedge, and it will be consumed; I will tear down its wall, and it will be trampled. I will make it a wasteland. It will not be pruned or weeded; thorns and briers will grow up. I will also give orders to the clouds that rain should not fall on it. For the vineyard of the Lord of Armies is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah, the plant he delighted in. He expected justice but saw injustice; he expected righteousness but heard cries of despair.”

This was rich in meaning to any agricultural society—to work hard all year and to be rewarded with a bad or insufficient harvest. To plant hedges in order to keep out foxes and walls to keep out thieves and wandering livestock. This is a vineyard that was given every advantage—from the vinestock to the excellent soil to the care it was provided. But the grapes were worthless and were to be left vulnerable. In context, this was spoken to a people who were not only idolatrous, which is bad enough, but also oppressive. The vulnerable were crying out because the powerful were exploiting them, enslaving them, and robbing them. They were misusing the bounty that the Lord had provided and were trampling on “the least of these.” They cried out, and Yahweh heard their cries and decided to act. And of course, the wealthy ended up slaughtered and exiled while the poor were allowed to remain in the Land when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple, both of which had been defiled and violated through idolatry, oppression, treachery, and the shedding of innocent blood. The Jews of the first century decried these terrible sins and felt that due to their Torah observance, that they were nothing like that generation. They were wrong. You can legalistically keep Torah and still act corruptly—all you need are loopholes and creative arguments and proof-texting and cherry-picking of Scripture. You know, like we still do now when we want to get out of Yeshua’s really difficult commands in the Sermon on the Mount and we want to overrule Him. Or ditch Paul when he echoes that we shouldn’t act like jerks?

Now, this was a well-known parable from Isaiah and Yeshua is going to build His own, counting on His audience having heard it before and especially the literate elites. If you remember from my series on Mark, Yeshua spoke in parables when He (a) didn’t want the hardhearted to understand what He was teaching, and (b) when He wanted to be clear enough to be understood yet obscure enough that the subjects of His parables wouldn’t be able to say anything for fear of admitting it was about them. This is both.

He began to speak to them in parables: “A man planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug out a pit for a winepress, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenant farmers and went away.

This was very common during those days, for an absentee landowner to be nowhere near their land in Judea and Galilee or to even be foreigners. Oftentimes, tenant farmers were actually the former owners of the Land who had lost it due to the severe taxation they experienced from Rome, the Temple elites and Herod’s corrupt tax collectors. It was sadly normal to work your own land, for someone else, to whom you owe a large portion of the harvest. Right off, the crowd would have felt hostility toward the nasty colonizing landowner profiting off their oppression. They are not thinking about Yahweh as the owner yet.

At harvest time he sent a servant to the farmers to collect some of the fruit of the vineyard from them. But they took him, beat him, and sent him away empty-handed.

There was doubtless a collective smirk and nodding in approval from the gathered audience. “Yeah, that’s how you treat those danged Romans!” What they couldn’t say was “those danged chief priests” who had grown incredibly wealthy from owning and taxing the businesses around and even on the Temple Mount. They were buying up the land of people who couldn’t burden the tithe and the taxation together. They are totally thinking about Romans taking advantage of their poverty by demanding produce, the Temple elites doing the same, and taxation at this point. Social banditry was on the rise (think if Robin Hood was Jewish) and these bandits were very popular because of the revenge they took on the wealthy.

Again, he sent another servant to them, and they hit him on the head and treated him shamefully. Then he sent another, and they killed that one. He also sent many others; some they beat, and others they killed.

Of course, in retrospect, we see the treatment of the prophets in pre-exilic Israel and Judea—the audience is just enjoying the vicarious violence that they could never get away with perpetrating against the villains among them.

He still had one to send, a beloved son. Finally, he sent him to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But those tenant farmers said to one another, ‘This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ So, they seized him, killed him, and threw him out of the vineyard.

This wasn’t as strange as it sounds to our modern ears. You’ve heard the expression, “Possession is nine tenths of the law” right? An owner from far away might not have the means to send soldiers and with so many dead servants to show for all this—if he hasn’t sent them yet, he probably can’t. And if he gives up on getting anything from the land, he may give up. But they had to be thinking, “What a colossal idiot this guy is, sending his son when they killed all the servants.” Unless the son was a Roman citizen, even the government wouldn’t much care. Unless they got a really big bribe or something.

What then will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and kill the farmers and give the vineyard to others.

Okay, it just stopped being fun and subversive, darnit. That fire sure got doused in a hurry. Yeshua has stopped being entertaining and now He has shocked them back into reality. There will be consequences. No gain. He isn’t talking about a revolution where they all take back their land. The tenants would have been better off just parting with the harvest due their landlord instead of leaving their wives and children widowed and orphaned. The fairy tale is over and Yeshua has just totally doused all of the crowd’s hopes that He would be leading such a revolt against the powers that be. Their collective hopes are dashed. He is not the revolutionary Messiah they are looking for. And if it had ended there, that’s how everyone might have perceived it. Except Yeshua buried the lede and is now going to change the entire meaning:

Haven’t you read this Scripture: The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This came about from the Lord and is wonderful in our eyes?” They were looking for a way to arrest him but feared the crowd because they knew he had spoken this parable against them. So, they left him and went away.

Oh yeah, He went there. First, He talked about reading that Scripture so He isn’t talking to the overwhelmingly illiterate crowd. He’s talking to the educated Temple elites. Most everyone else had only heard that Scripture. We have to be really attentive when reading the Bible because it was (all of it) given to a culture that transmitted and received information orally. Writing and reading was rarely needed and not being able to read or write wasn’t a disadvantage until quite recently—after the development of the printing press, really. Authority was vested in the original speaker and not in the written word (I am talking about this a lot in the study series that I will continue with next week). So pay attention when the word writing is used, make sure it isn’t a mistranslation of simply something that is being communicated—because we consider the written text to be best but they knew that the words were only truly authoritative because without the proper tone applied to them, they could be completely twisted. Just like on Facebook when people see something they disagree with and assume that the tone is hostile. Yeshua, for example, being the logos is the spoken word of God. It wasn’t just what He said but how He said it.

Anyway, the landlord is suddenly Yahweh, the servants are the prophets, and even someone called “the Son” isn’t safe. Yeshua is quoting Psalm 118:22 and hinting at Isaiah 28:16, where what the people have rejected was the most important thing of all. And they all know it now—but the reference to reading wouldn’t apply to more than a few of them. They wouldn’t have missed it. It would be like if I said something to a crowd like, “Well, when YOU voted that person into office,” and anyone who wasn’t a citizen or too young, or a convicted felon would perceive that comment differently than someone who could legally vote. What we hear is different depending on what is normative for us. When we hear read or write, it doesn’t register because it is normative and assumed that everyone can.

But what does all this have to do with Sukkot? It has everything to do with Sukkot. Getting back to the beginning, each pilgrimage festival was about presenting Yahweh’s portion of the harvest to His representatives. He is that landlord in a faraway land. We are the tenants—just as they were. We have an obligation to recognize and honor His right to the fruit of our harvest and so we must labor for good and bountiful fruit to present Him with the best of it, with what He deserves. We are still an agricultural people, spiritually, even if we live in high-rise apartments in cities and can’t even see the ground, much less grow anything in it. Our harvest comes in the form of good spiritual fruit that is nothing if it is only “spiritualized”. Becoming meek, peaceable, humble, loving, joyful, patient, generous, gentle, self-controlled, considering others as more worthy than we are, merciful, trustworthy, just, and serving the least of these as though they were Yeshua Himself—it isn’t optional, it is a condition of truly following the Lamb wherever He goes.

We cannot go where He goes if all we produce is the fruit of the flesh– sexual immorality, moral impurity, promiscuity, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and anything similar (Gal 5:19-21, CSB). Let me tell you what these things look like out there now in the “Torah observant” community. Widowed and divorced people promoting the idea that abstinence is only for virgins so that they can have sex while they are dating—I had to unfriend a guy who was pushing that, in private, to women he was interested in. A guy who, get this, was saying that eating the wrong cut of beef was a worse sin than idolatry. Teaching lies after you know it is in error because you don’t want to lose the audience and money you built off it. Idolatry nowadays mostly comes down to greed, sex, and Christian Nationalism—where the state is promoted and politicians are worshiped and the nation is seen as a savior, which requires turning a blind eye to oppression and historical evils. Hatred is rampant over the smallest of disagreements (which goes back to idolatry). Fighting, manipulation, divisiveness, undermining of others in order to build personal kingdoms in service of personal ambition. Porn use, a desire for multiple wives (sex partners), more and more cheap stuff supplied through domestic and overseas slave labor, dependence on military power, alcohol abuse, etc.

Are we presenting rancid fruit, or are we withholding it altogether? Do we have wealth but refuse to share it with the vulnerable? Do we have skills that we refuse to use for the good of the Kingdom? Do we have power and influence but refuse to help the oppressed? There are a great many ways to deny our Lord His harvest. We need to be very mindful of how we handle our own share of it.

Oh look, Yeshua isn’t the only one who can bury the lede…