Sukkot is the plural of sukkah, “shelter,” especially a booth in the fields or outdoors built to provide temporary shelter* during harvest or fruit gathering (the Hebrew asiph, meaning fruit gathering, is the other name for the holiday, in a way similar to our Thanksgiving); the root is s-k(h)-k(h) from which we also have skhakh, the “branches covering the sukkah’s roof.”
Related modern words include skhakhah, “shed”; sokhekh, “awning”; masakh, “screen”; musakh, “garage.”
Other words connected with the holiday of Sukkot are lulav (derived from the original livlev), “to sprout, blossom”; etrog (derived from the Persian turnuj, Arabic ’utrunj); ushpizin, “guests, hosts,” from the Latin/Greek “hospice, hospital, hotel, hostel”; and the Israeli Hebrew word le-ashpez, “hospitalize.”
*Including for cattle, as “[Jacob] made stalls (sukkoth) for his cattle; that is why the place was called Sukkot” (Genesis 34:14).
Yona Sabar is a professor of Hebrew and Aramaic in the department of Near Eastern Languages & Cultures at UCLA.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.