Sukkôt: from Ugarit to the Talmud. The survival of a ritual ‘in the terrace’

Abstract

The Hebrew feast of sukkôt has been always supposed to be of Canaanite origin. An Ugaritic text, analysed in this paper, can be taken as its documentary antecedent. Starting from this text, the constitutive elements of the Canaanite feast are singled out, as well as its progressive transformation in the ancient Hebrew tradition through its ‘historisation’ as a commemoration of the living in the wilderness and the occasion for the public reading of the Law, up to its culmination in the postbiblical period as a joyful feast that takes up rituals which shape it as the ‘feast’ par excellence of the Jewish tradition.