The description of the event has families coming to the temple and surrounding the area while they stayed in their tents. Scholars have suggested that this is sufficiently similar to the Feast of Tabernacles, that it may have been that holy day that king Benjamin used as the springboard for his abdication.
The Feast of Tabernacles looked back to Jehovah’s protection while Israel wandered in the wilderness. The tents, or booths, represented temporary dwellings meant to invoke that time. The idea that families would be together in them fits with the nature of the festival.
An interesting possibility is that while the festival looked backward, it may have also signaled a looking forward to a future time of salvation by Jehovah, a time of a future Messiah. In the New Testament, John 7:37–38, Jesus uses the great feast day to preach of himself as the living water, declaring himself the Messiah.
If there was such a tangential understanding that the feast would look forward to the Messiah, it makes an even stronger platform for the subject of king Benjamin’s speech.