Hakhel is the imperative of qahal, to assemble: gather them. Deuteronomy 31:12 spells out the guest list: the men, the women, the little ones, and the sojourner within your towns, that they may hear and that they may learn. Every seventh year, at Sukkot, the whole nation stood together and heard the Torah read aloud, unfiltered, all of them at once.

Read the guest list against every instinct religious hierarchy has ever had. Not the elders only. Not the literate. Not a qualified remnant who could be trusted with the text. Women, children, and the foreigner who wandered in, all named explicitly, all entitled to hear the words themselves, so that they may learn. The command assumes the text belongs in every ear in the nation.

Nehemiah 8 shows the command kept. Ezra reads from daybreak to midday before the whole assembly, men and women and all who could understand, and the Levites move through the crowd giving the sense so that the people understood the reading. They had the skill and the people did not, and they spent the advantage closing the gap. The Greek translators rendered qahal with ekklesia, the word the Brit Chadashah uses for the assembly of believers, which means the ekklesia inherits the hakhel shape: everyone gathered, everyone hearing, no one stationed between the words and the ears.