Chapter VIII: The Hebrew Sabbath

The earliest Biblical references to the Sabbath all indicate that the institution had long been found among the Hebrews. It appears in the most ancient documents of the Law, such as the two Decalogues,[746] the old “Ritual Code,” and the nearly related “Book of the Covenant.”[747] It is mentioned in the “Books of Kings” during the time of the prophet Elisha.[748] It is noticed in the prophecies of Amos and Hosea.[749] The antiquity of the Sabbath is further indicated by the fact that Hebrew tradition preserved no certain information of its origin. From the Old Testament we cannot tell whether the Sabbath was hallowed in remembrance of Jehovah’s rest after the Creation,[750] or whether it was instituted as a memorial of the escape of the Hebrews from Egypt.[751] Assuming, with most reputable critics, that the narrative in the first chapter of Genesis, which divides the work of creation into six days, is comparatively late, it follows that the Sabbath could not have been founded as a reminiscence of the completion of the Creation. The author must have been familiar with the institution of a seven-day week ending in a Sabbath. Its chief characteristic was then that of a day of rest, as appears from the fact that, without mentioning the Sabbath by name, he seeks to glorify it by placing the hallowed character of the seventh day at the beginning of the world. The sanctity of the seventh day is in reality antedated, and the priestly writer wished to adjust artificially the work of creation to it.[752]

An old and still common theory derives the Sabbath institution from the worship of Saturn, after which planet the first day of the astrological week received its designation.[753] The theory is untenable for more than one reason. In the first place the Hebrews did not name their weekdays after the planets, but indicated them by ordinal numbers. In the second place Saturn’s Day began the planetary week, while the Jewish Sabbath was regarded as the last day of the seven, a suitable position for a rest day. And in the third place neither the Hebrews nor any other Oriental people ever worshipped the planet Saturn as god and observed his day as a festival. It is true that, besides Venus, another planet familiar to the Hebrews may be recognized in the Old Testament under the name Kewan, the Assyrian designation of Saturn.[754] This name appears in a passage of Amos, where the prophet has been supposed to be referring to an early worship of Saturn by the Israelites during the period of their sojourn in the Wilderness.[755] But a single Old Testament text, both corrupt and obscure, can scarcely be cited as proving that Saturn was ever recognized by the Israelites as a distinct god. If it be held that Amos had in mind the Hebrews of his own time, the passage in question can only refer to the adoption by them of astrological notions derived from Babylonia. These imported superstitions eventually led Jewish rabbis to call Saturn _Shabbti_, “the star of the Sabbath,” which, however, is not a naming of the day after the planet, but a naming of the planet after the day. It was not until the first century of our era, when the planetary week had become an established institution, that the Jewish Sabbath seems always to have corresponded to Saturn’s Day.[756]

The association of the Sabbath Day with Saturday was probably one reason why Saturn, a planet in Babylonian astrological schemes regarded as beneficent rather than malefic, should have come to assume in late classical times the rôle of an unlucky star (_sidus tristissimum_, _stella iniquissima_). The oldest reference to Saturday is found in a verse by the poet Tibullus (d. 19 B.C.), who apparently identifies Saturn’s Day with the supposed inauspicious Jewish Sabbath, when he gives as one of his excuses for not quitting Rome the bad omens which detained him “on the sacred day of Saturn.”[757] Ovid mentions “foreign Sabbaths” along with the anniversary of the day of the battle of the Allia—_dies Alliensis_—as unlucky occasions.[758] Frontinus, a Roman military officer and tactician (d. about 103 A.D.), says that Vespasian defeated the Jews by attacking them on Saturn’s Day, when it was unlawful for them to do anything. Dio Cassius also speaks of the Jews having dedicated to their god the day called the day of Saturn, “on which, among many other most peculiar actions, they undertake no serious occupation.”[759]

The Hebrews manifested so little originality in cultural matters and borrowed so heavily from their neighbours that it becomes a natural inquiry whether the Sabbath, with the seven-day week, may not have arisen outside of Israel. Writing in the seventeenth century the learned John Spencer argued that Egypt was the original home of the institution, since in various Old Testament passages the Sabbath is declared to have been established to commemorate the exodus from Egypt.[760] But the Egyptians, as we have seen, divided their months into decades, and no evidence exists that they ever employed for civil purposes any shorter division of the month.[761] A second hypothesis, which makes the week and the Sabbath a direct importation from Babylonia, is likewise without warrant in the light of existing information.[762] The same may be said of the theory that the Sabbath was first taken over from Babylonia by the agricultural inhabitants of Canaan, from whom, in turn, the Israelites borrowed an institution which would have no meaning to a nomadic people.[763] But the opinion, so frequently expressed, that the Sabbath cannot be very primitive, since it “presupposes agriculture and a tolerably hard-pressed working-day life,”[764] betrays an imperfect acquaintance with popular superstition. The brief prohibitions of work found in the Pentateuch cannot be separated, by any subtleties of exegesis, from the numerous other taboos with which the institution was invested. The rest on the Sabbath is only one of the forms of abstinence in connection with lunar changes; and, if the Sabbath began as a festival at new moon and full moon, it may well have been observed by the Israelites before their contact with Canaanitish culture. The ancient dwellers in the Arabian wilderness, who celebrated new moon and full moon as seasons of abstinence and rest, little dreamed that in their senseless custom lay the roots of a social institution, which, on the whole, has contributed to human welfare in past ages and promises an even greater measure of benefit to humanity in all future times.

To a shepherd people in tropical or semi-tropical lands the moon appears as a gentle guardian, bringing restful coolness after the day with its withering heat, and dispelling with her kindly beams the thick darkness which may cloak a lurking foe. “This,” writes an intrepid traveller, “is the planet of way for the way-faring Semitic race. The moon is indeed a watch-light of the night in the nomad wilderness; they are glad in her shining upon the great upland, they may sleep then in some assurance from their enemies.”[765] To the Israelites, as to the ancient Egyptians, the moon was preëminently the “wanderer,” by whose movements the earliest calendars were framed.[766] One of the Hebrew names for “month” is _yérah_, from _yārēaḥ_, “moon”; it is called, also _ḥodesh_, which means new moon. One of the most magnificent of the _Psalms_ declares that Jehovah “appointed the moon for the seasons”;[767] all the Jewish festivals were determined by the moon. At the same time there is no Biblical testimony to indicate that the Israelites ever conceived of the moon as a divinity and addressed to that luminary specific acts of worship. It was only toward the end of the Hebrew monarchy, when the Chosen People were giving themselves over to astrology, divination, and the worship of the heavenly bodies, that clear evidence of a moon-cult appears in the Old Testament, where it encounters the denunciation of the prophets, the prohibitions of the Law, and the repressive measures of a reforming king.[768]

The evidence is quite conclusive that of the lunar phases it was especially the new moon and the full moon which first aroused the attention of the Semitic nomads and evoked feelings of delight and veneration. Even to-day “the first appearing of the virgin moon is always greeted with a religious emotion in the deserts of Arabia.”[769] When the Bedouin and Fellahin of modern Palestine first see the lunar crescent they exclaim, “God’s new moon has appeared in his exaltedness. May it be for us a blessed new moon.”[770] Modern Jewish ritual prescribes a special service for the new-moon day, including the recital of psalms of joy. So familiar an expression as Hallelujah, “praise Jehovah” (Jahweh), is a verbal form of the onomatopoetic stem _hilâl_, meaning “new moon,” “crescent,” with the addition of the divine name.[771] The Hebrew month, as among other peoples who count by lunations, began when the silvery crescent was first discerned in the evening twilight. In later Judaism, as soon as the moon’s appearance was proved by credible witnesses before the Sanhedrin at Jerusalem, the feast of the new moon was held, and messengers were sent abroad to announce the opening of the new month. The celebration of the festival would seem, at least occasionally, to have lasted two days, an arrangement obviously dictated by the inability to determine beforehand on which of two successive days the moon might be expected to appear.[772]

The new-moon festival was considered an exceptional solemnity as early as the time of Saul. The twentieth chapter of the _First Book of Samuel_ records a conversation between David and Jonathan in which the former says, “Behold, to-morrow is the new moon, and I should not fail to sit at meat with the king.” It appears from this chapter that the first two days of the month were marked by feasts at which all members of the household were expected to be present, unless prevented by some ceremonial uncleanness.[773] The occasion was also observed by compulsory abstinence from all servile work.[774] In the time of Elisha the new moon seems to have been one of the favourite occasions for consulting the prophets, a circumstance which could be explained if the day were marked by a cessation of the usual occupations.[775] There are other reasons, presently to be given, for believing that until the Exile, or later, the new moon was a general rest day; and such it still remains for Jewish women, whose conservative instincts have thus preserved a memorial of its ancient observance.[776]

Full moon, as well as new moon, enjoyed a religious significance to the early Hebrews. Two great agricultural festivals, one marking the commencement of the barley harvest, the other, the close of the fruit harvest, must have been celebrated at about the time of full moon, for, when the sacred calendar was framed in post-Exilic times, they were definitely fixed at the middle of the month.[777] The Passover, observed on the fourteenth day of the first month (Nisan), was followed on the fifteenth day by the Feast of Unleavened Bread, occupying seven days.[778] The Feast of Tabernacles began on the fifteenth of the seventh month (Tishri) and likewise continued for seven days.[779] The religious importance of these two festivals is indicated by the injunction to keep the first and last days of the Feast of Unleavened Bread as times of “holy convocation,” when no “servile work” might be done,[780] and by the significant expression _shabbāthôn_ (“solemn rest”), which is used in reference to the beginning and end of the Feast of Tabernacles, that is, to the fifteenth and twenty-second of the month Tishri.[781] Furthermore, the Pentateuchal codes contain a passage, the meaning of which was in dispute several centuries before the Christian era, where the word “Sabbath” appears to be used in a sense precisely the same as that of the Babylonian _shabattum_, referring to the fifteenth day of the month. In the twenty-third chapter of _Leviticus_ it is prescribed that on “the morrow after the Sabbath” the sheaf of the first-fruits of the harvest is to be brought to the priest, who shall wave it before Jehovah, and that, counting from “the morrow after the Sabbath,” fifty days are to elapse before the commencement of the Feast of Weeks.[782] As Professor Jastrow has clearly shown, the word “Sabbath” is here used, not in its later sense of a seventh day of rest, but as a survival of the old designation of the Sabbath as the full-moon day. “The two references in _Leviticus_ stand out as solitary sign-posts of an abandoned road.”[783]

In some of the older parts of the Bible, and especially in the earlier prophetical compositions, the new moon and the Sabbath are repeatedly mentioned together. In the pathetic narrative which describes how the Shunammite woman went to seek Elisha that the prophet might restore her son to life, her husband asks, “‘Wherefore wilt thou go to him to-day? It is neither new moon nor Sabbath.’”[784] The prophet Hosea, promising that the people’s unfaithfulness shall be punished, cries out wrathfully, “I will also cause all her mirth to cease, her feasts, her new moons, and her Sabbaths, and all her solemn assemblies.”[785] Amos rebukes the oppressors of his people “that would swallow up the needy, and cause the poor of the land to fail, saying ‘When will the new moon be gone, that we may sell grain? and the Sabbath, that we may set forth wheat, making the ephah small and the shekel great?’”[786] Isaiah condemns the formalism of the ancient faith in striking words: “Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; new moon and Sabbath, the calling of assemblies—I cannot bear iniquity with the solemn meeting.”[787] Elsewhere, in the same work appears the prophecy: “And it shall come to pass, that from one new moon to another, and from one Sabbath to another, shall all flesh come to worship before me, saith Jehovah.”[788]

This remarkable association of the Sabbath with the day of new moon had been previously noticed by such acute critics as Wellhausen and Robertson Smith, who were unable to offer a satisfactory solution of the problem thus presented.[789] When, however, the cuneiform records disclosed the fact that the Babylonian _shabattum_ fell on the fifteenth (or fourteenth) day of the month and referred to the day of the full moon, it became clear that in these Biblical passages we have another survival of what must have been the primary meaning of the Hebrew term _shabbāth_.[790] As late, then, as the eighth century B.C., popular phraseology retained a lingering trace of the original collocation of the new-moon and full-moon days as festival occasions characterized by abstinence from secular activities. How long-lived were the old ideas is further illustrated by the provision in Ezekiel’s reforming legislation that the inner eastern gate of the new Temple at Jerusalem should be shut during the six working days, but should be opened on the Sabbath and on the new-moon day for the religious assemblage of the people.[791] That the term _shabbāth_, the designation of the full-moon day, should have come to be applied to every seventh day of the month seems to be quite in accord with both Babylonian and Hebrew usage, which, as we have seen, led the month itself to be called after the new-moon day.[792]

The Hebrew seven-day week, ending with the Sabbath, presented so obvious a resemblance to the Babylonian septenary period, which closed with an “evil day,” that scholars have felt themselves compelled to seek its origin in Babylonia. The two institutions, nevertheless, show important differences. The Babylonian cycle, as far as we know, was never employed as a chronological unit; the Hebrew week was a true civil week, a definite and well-understood period of time. The Babylonian cycle seems not to have been dissociated from the lunation;[793] the Hebrew week was a periodic week, running unfettered from month to month and from year to year. The Babylonian “evil day” was an unnamed unlucky day, observed by the king, by priests, and by physicians, but not certainly by the people at large; the Hebrew Sabbath was a named holy day, dedicated to the worship of the national god and kept by the entire community as a festival. These real divergencies make it certain that the Hebrew week and Sabbath, in the form in which we know them, could not have been taken over without change from Babylonia. The celebration of new-moon and full-moon festivals, which both Babylonians and Hebrews appear to have derived from a common Semitic antiquity, underwent, in fact, a radically unlike evolution among the two kindred peoples. To dissever the week from the lunar month, to employ it as a recognized calendrical unit, and to fix upon one day of that week for the exercises of religion were momentous innovations, which, until evidence to the contrary is found, must be attributed to the Hebrew people alone.

In his able treatise Meinhold has argued that until the age of Ezekiel the Hebrews employed no weeks at all. He then supposes that continuous seven-day weeks were introduced, largely through Ezekiel’s reforming influence, and hence that the Sabbath as the last day of the periodic week was a post-Exilic institution.[794] Critics have pointed out that it is highly improbable that so far-reaching a change should have occurred without being recorded; moreover, that the acceptance of such a hypothesis makes it necessary to assume that all places in the Old Testament where the Sabbath is mentioned as the seventh day are either of Ezekiel’s time or later. But the problem is simplified if we hold that the Hebrews employed lunar seven-day weeks, perhaps for several centuries preceding the Exile; weeks, that is, which ended with special observances on the seventh day but none the less were tied to the moon’s course. The change from such cycles to those unconnected with the lunation would not have involved so abrupt and sudden a departure from the previous system of time reckoning as that from a bipartite division of the lunar month to a week which ran continuously through the months and the years.[795]

The establishment of a periodic week ending in a Sabbath observed every seventh day was doubtless responsible for the gradual obsolescence of the new-moon festival as a period of general abstinence, since with continuous weeks the new-moon day and the Sabbath Day would from time to time coincide. This seems to be a more natural explanation than that which regards the complete ignoring of the new-moon festival in the “Book of the Covenant” and in the Deuteronomic legislation as a deliberate act, designed to wean the people away from an observance to which heathenish superstitions were attached. The day of new moon never lost, indeed, its significance in Jewish ritual, for, when all the great festivals were definitely fixed to certain days, the new moon, as marking the beginning of the month, continued to hold a leading place in the sacred calendar. The Priestly Code prescribed special offerings for the new-moon day, and in Ezekiel’s legislation the sacrifices marking it exceeded in importance those for the Sabbath.[796] The ancient character of this festival as a season of compulsory abstinence from labour survived in its observance as a rest day by Jewish women, perhaps also in the provision of the law of _Leviticus_ that the first day of the seventh month, beginning the new year, should be a “solemn rest,” “a memorial of blowing of trumpets, a holy convocation.”[797]

The Sabbath is described in the Pentateuchal codes as an agricultural institution. It appears there as a day of rest from farm labour, to be observed not only by the householder and his family, but also by the slaves, the cattle, and the stranger within the gates. In what is generally considered the earlier form of the Decalogue the keeping of the Sabbath is prescribed, “that thy man-servant and thy maid-servant may rest as well as thou”; or, as expressed in another passage, “that thine ox and thine ass may have rest, and the son of thine handmaid, and the sojourner may be refreshed.”[798] From this commandment one might draw the conclusion that in pre-Exilic times the Sabbath enjoyed a purely humanitarian character as a season of repose for man and beast. The omission of any similar statement in the later form of the Decalogue, where the prohibition of Sabbath labour is based solely upon Jehovah’s rest on the seventh day,[799] would then be explained as the outcome of the priestly desire to exalt the Sabbath as a religious festival at the expense of its more humane and social aspects. The further requirement that even in the busiest seasons of the year no plea of necessity might be accepted in mitigation of the strict rule of Sabbath observance—“in ploughing time and in harvest thou shalt rest”[800]—also would be taken as evidence of the growing rigour of ecclesiastical ordinances.

Properly considered, however, this priestly attitude toward the Sabbath was not a radical departure but rather an intensification of the austere significance attached from the earliest times to the new-moon and full-moon days. The Pentateuchal codes contain, in fact, a number of Sabbatarian regulations which are meaningless, except when elucidated from the comparative standpoint as taboos. The rule requiring every one to remain indoors on the Sabbath: “Abide ye every man in his place, let no man go out of his place on the seventh day,”[801] is identical with the numerous rules which impose seclusion on tabooed or unlucky occasions, as a means of avoiding physical contact with supernatural and invisible powers of evil.

The prohibition: “Ye shall kindle no fire throughout your habitations upon the Sabbath Day,”[802] which in another passage[803] is amplified into the rule requiring all cooking to be done on the preceding day, may be first compared with the taboos observed by “the shepherd of great peoples” in Babylonia. On four “evil days” he was not to eat roasted meat or baked bread, and on the nineteenth day he might eat nothing which had been touched by fire.[804] In a remarkable calendar of the unlucky days observed by the Egyptians we find an extensive series of regulations regarding the use of fire. On the fifth of the month of Athyr, fire might not be looked at and, if it went out, it might not be rekindled. On the eleventh of Tybi no one might approach a fire-place, for, said the scribe, on that day the god Ra had once burst into flame to devour his enemies, and the effects of his metamorphosis were felt on every anniversary of the day. These taboos, which reach back into a remote period of Egyptian history, are still found among the peasants of Thebes and the Saîd, who, on certain days of the year, refuse to kindle a fire, and on others avoid approaching the flame, even of a candle or a lamp, and the most timid do not smoke.[805] In Hawaii, as we have seen, during the four _tabu_ seasons in each lunar month, “every fire and light was extinguished.” The same regulation is attached to periods of abstinence elsewhere in the aboriginal world.[806]

Some of these taboos relating to fire may reflect primitive man’s fear of a mysterious element which had not yet been completely tamed and harnessed to human use; but the fact that among various peoples all fires are put out after a death indicates a more probable origin of the prohibition in the fear of attracting evil spirits or influences. In Morocco, when a person has died in the morning, “no fire is made in the whole village until he is buried, and in some parts of the country the inmates of a house or tent where a death has occurred, abstain from making fire for two or three days.”[807] Similar customs are found in Polynesia, Borneo, the East Indies, Burma, and various parts of Africa; they were practised by Persians and Greeks in antiquity; and they still survive among the peasants of Calabria and the Scottish Highlanders.[808] It is hardly possible to urge that the putting-out of fires on such occasions is always a necessary result of the widespread custom of fasting after a death and until the corpse is buried; as a matter of fact we find that fires may be extinguished when there is no fasting, and also that the fast is often restricted to the daytime, when evil spirits, and in particular the ghost of the dead man, are presumed to be unable to see.

But, as Professor Westermarck has so ably shown, the widespread custom of fasting is itself often to be explained as due to the desire to prevent pollution.[809] Under certain circumstances to partake of food may cause defilement; hence fasting is only one of the numerous precautions necessary to avoid contamination. These ideas find expression in the rules which, like those prescribing the cessation of labour after a death, require mourners to abstain from eating food infected with the death pollution. Fasting may also be enjoined on other critical occasions, such as an eclipse of the sun or the moon, or during a thunderstorm; and we have seen that it characterizes some of the tabooed days previously considered.[810] Such well-established facts suggest that in the earliest period fasting may have also marked the Hebrew Sabbath.[811] This hypothesis seems first to have been advanced by the “judicious” Hooker, who observes that “it may be a question, whether in some sort they [the Jews] did not always fast on the Sabbath.”[812] He instances a statement of Josephus that the sixth hour or noon was the time when “our laws require us to go to dinner on Sabbath-days.”[813] Various pagan writers also refer to the Sabbath as a day of fasting.[814] Such a notion may have arisen from a misunderstanding of the Biblical rule forbidding cooking on the Sabbath, or, perhaps, from a confusion of this festival with the great fast on the Day of Atonement, which was a _shabbāth shabbāthôn_, a “Sabbath of solemn rest.”[815] Yet it seems difficult to understand the rule forbidding fasting at new moon and on the seventh day,[816] except as a reference to a custom formerly observed but in later times regarded as an illegitimate rite. Since the Sabbath fell, originally, at the middle of the month, it may be that the new-moon and full-moon days were once marked by both cessation of labour and abstinence from food. The foregoing pages have supplied too many instances of the transformation of fasts into feasts for such an explanation to be dismissed as an idle conjecture.[817]

When the notion of a weekly Sabbath was extended, after the Captivity, to the Sabbatical Year, the seventh year was to be a “Sabbath of solemn rest” (_shabbāth shabbāthôn_) for the land, not because of the advantage of allowing soil to lie fallow at regular intervals, but because the land itself was consecrated as “a Sabbath unto Jehovah.”[818] The regulation does not imply that, as a consequence of a fallow year, the land will produce better harvests on the succeeding year. It is expressly said that the year before the Sabbatical Year is the one to be conspicuous for its fruitfulness: “Then I will command my blessing upon you in the sixth year, and it shall bring forth fruit for the three years.”[819] The rule requiring that the produce of the soil should be devoted to the poor and to the cattle[820] perhaps indicates a partial triumph of the utilitarian spirit. During the Jubilee, at the end of seven times seven years, “Ye shall not sow, neither reap that which groweth of itself in it, nor gather the grapes in it of the undressed vines,”[821] a regulation which can be explained only as the outcome of the sabbatarian observances attached to the seventh day and the seventh year.

In the Hawaiian Islands and west Africa any one who broke a sabbatarian taboo suffered death. Among the early Israelites the Sabbath-breaker was threatened with a similar penalty: “Every one that profaneth it shall surely be put to death; for whosoever doeth any work therein, that soul shall be cut off from among his people.”[822] We are not informed how frequently this stern ordinance was enforced; the case of the wood-gatherer on the Sabbath, who, by direction of Moses, acting on a direct revelation from Jehovah, was stoned to death outside the camp, is the only instance of capital punishment for Sabbath desecration which has found its way into the Scriptures as we now have them.[823] The instance is an instructive one, as revealing the strong sense of group-welfare and hatred of the non-conformist, characteristic of a religion which had not yet outrun clan and tribal limitations.

The Old Testament affords evidence that the Hebrews kept the Sabbath with varying degrees of rigour in different places and at different times. Under the later prophets a movement appears to have begun toward a stricter observance of the day, as is seen in the effort of Jeremiah to prevent burden-bearing on the Sabbath, and in Ezekiel’s constant insistence on the profanation of the Sabbath in his catalogue of the sins of the Israelites.[824] But more than a century after these prophets, in the age of Nehemiah, the people of Judea made wine and gathered the harvest on the Sabbath. All manner of burdens were brought into Jerusalem on that day, and the inhabitants bought and sold with the men of Tyre.[825] These practices indicate that the Sabbath bade fair to become a social institution, divorced from supernatural sanctions.

It is doubtless true that the Exile tended to augment the religious importance of the Sabbath, since even in heathen lands it could be observed by a people who now had neither state nor temple. In the Exilic literature great significance is ascribed to the Sabbath,[826] and in post-Exilic law it is regarded as a sign between Jehovah and the children of Israel that Jehovah is their God. It is impossible, however, to follow those critics who assume that the rigour of the sabbatarian observances after the Exile forms an entirely new development, and that the priestly Sabbath represents something very different from the Sabbath of the “Book of the Covenant” or of _Deuteronomy_.[827] The increased significance of the institution led naturally to a revival of the old taboos with which the day had been always invested, taboos which otherwise might have been expected to disappear with advancing culture and the decay of supernaturalism. Closer contact with Assyria and Babylonia, from the eighth to the sixth century B.C., also may have helped to revitalize the older superstitions and to give to the Sabbath once more an austere character.[828] The day, in fact, seems never wholly to have lost all traces of its severe and sombre origin in a period of taboo; it is significant in this connection that, while the Hebrews had their favourable and unfavourable days, as the expression _yôm tôb_ (“good day”) for holy days shows, the Sabbath is never so described.[829]

The later history of the Sabbath as a _tabu_ day culminates in the exaggerations of pharisaic Judaism and the extraordinary micrology of the rabbinical enactments.[830] The _Mishna_ enumerates no less than thirty-nine principal classes of prohibited actions. Some of these are regarded as belonging to as ancient a period as any of the taboos found in the Old Testament; the majority, however, represent only an elaboration of the scriptural precepts. Two entire works are devoted to the provisions for Sabbath observance. The first treatise, called _Shabbāth_, is chiefly remarkable as an illustration of the subtle refinements and distinctions of which the rabbis were capable. Thus, the prohibitions to tie or untie a knot being regarded as too general, it was necessary to define the species of knot referred to. A camel-driver’s knot and a boat-man’s knot rendered the man who tied or untied them a Sabbath-breaker; but Rabbi Meir said, “A knot which a man can untie with one hand only, he does not become guilty by untying.” Rabbi Jehudah, still more liberal of mind, laid down the rule that any knot which was not intended to be permanent might be lawfully tied. The second treatise, _Ērūbim_, was intended to alleviate the extreme rigour of some of the enactments in the former work. Thus, the limits of a “Sabbath Day’s journey” having been fixed at two thousand cubits, the rabbis conceded that one who before the Sabbath had deposited food for two meals at the boundary thereby removed his habitation from the town and made that place his new domicile. When the Sabbath came, he was at liberty to proceed two thousand cubits beyond it, though he lost the right to walk the same distance in the opposite direction. As is well known, literal obedience of the Sabbath regulations was sometimes carried to such an extreme as to prove a source of great hardship, danger, and even death to its devotees.[831]

These legal fictions, these casuistical elaborations of the simple ordinances of the Pentateuch concerning the Sabbath, may be paralleled by the growth of pontifical regulations at Rome relating to what might and what might not be done on public ferial days.[832] Like the Roman _feriæ_, also, the Hebrew Sabbath affords an instance of what seems to be a very general, perhaps universal, tendency of the human mind to dwell with special emphasis on the festive aspects of a holy season, and by some subtle alchemy of the spirit to convert what was once a day of gloom and anxiety into a day of gladness and good cheer. The post-Exilic prophet, the so-called second Isaiah, when he urges his people to “call the Sabbath a delight”[833] presents it, indeed, as a festival “holy to Jehovah,” but capable, nevertheless, of contributing to man’s physical and mental refreshment. And in later Judaism the strict observance of the Sabbath rest did not by any means preclude abstinence from bodily pleasures. Fasting, as we have seen, was forbidden on that day; three substantial meals were to be “enjoyed,” so Jewish theologians declared; and the New Testament itself contains evidence that Pharisees of the strictest type gave sumptuous entertainments on the Sabbath.[834] In fact, various Christian Fathers were persuaded that the Jews observed the Sabbath as a day of violent excess, and converts to Christianity were cautioned against applying to the Lord’s Day the _luxus sabbatarius_. “The Jews in our time,” says St. Augustine, “observe their Sabbath by a kind of bodily rest, languid and luxurious. They abstain from labour and give themselves up to trifles, and, though God ordained the Sabbath, they spend it in actions which God forbids. Our rest is from evil works, their rest is from good works; for it is better to plough than to dance.”[835] We may believe that such criticisms had slight justification in the real nature of the Jewish observance, little more, perhaps, than Plutarch’s quaint notion that the Sabbath must bear some relation to Dionysus, for, said Plutarch, when the Jews keep the Sabbath, they invite one another to potations till all are drunk.[836] It is more satisfying to turn to hundreds of Jewish hymns where the Sabbath is hailed “as a day of rest and joy, of pleasure and delight, a day in which man enjoys some presentiment of the pure bliss and happiness which are stored up for the righteous in the world to come, and to which such tender names were applied as the ‘Queen Sabbath,’ the ‘Bride Sabbath,’ and the ‘Holy, dear, beloved Sabbath.’”[837]

The Jewish Sabbath appears to have been first brought to the attention of the Romans as early as the last century of the republic, when Pompey’s sweeping campaigns in the East led to the establishment of Roman dominion over Syria and Judea. References to the institution in Tibullus, Horace, and Ovid indicate that its peculiar character as a day of rest was then generally understood.[838] Their contemporary, Philo, the Hellenistic Jew of Alexandria, declared that the seventh day was the festival, not of one city or one country, but of all the earth, “the birthday of the world,”[839] and Josephus could write that there was no city among the Greeks or the barbarians where the festival of the Sabbath was not celebrated.[840] These statements, though exaggerated, bear witness to the success of that Jewish propaganda which, at the very time when the preaching of Christianity began, carried this other Oriental faith throughout the ancient world. The great commercial cities of the Mediterranean became seats of thriving Jewish communities where pagan proselytes adopted Jewish customs, including the observance of the Sabbath.[841]

The Jewish seven-day week with its numerical indications of the days was adopted by the early Christians, to whom the planetary week, bearing the names of pagan deities, could scarcely prove attractive.[842] Friday and Saturday continued to have the designations παρασκευή and σάββατον, respectively, but Sunday, which by Jewish custom was called “the first day” after the Sabbath, eventually received the designation ἡ κυριακὴ ἡμέρα (_dies dominica_), the Lord’s Day.[843] The New Testament contains unambiguous evidence that from a very early period “the first day of the week” was observed by Christians as a day of assembly for the “breaking of bread” and perhaps for the collection of free-will offerings.[844] The author of the _Epistle of Barnabas_, toward the end of the first century, speaks of keeping the “eighth day” for rejoicing, and justifies its observance as a celebration of the resurrection of Christ.[845] The _Didache_, or _Teaching of the Twelve Apostles_, a work which belongs to the early part of the second century, enjoins meetings “on the Lord’s own day” (κατὰ κυριακὴν δὲ Κυρίου), for the breaking of bread and giving thanks.[846] Eusebius of Cæsarea, in his _Ecclesiastical History_, preserves a fragment of a letter of Dionysius, Bishop of Corinth (175 A.D.), to Soter, Bishop of Rome, in which the former says, “To-day we passed the Lord’s holy day, when we read your epistle”; and the same historian also mentions the fact that Melito, Bishop of Sardis (170 A.D.), had written among other works a treatise on the Lord’s Day.[847] Justin Martyr, writing about the middle of the second century, describes how, “on the day called Sunday” (τῇ τοῦ Ἡλίου λεγομένη ἡμέρα), all town and country Christians were wont to assemble for instruction in the holy writings, and for prayer, the distribution of bread and wine, and the collection of alms. The name Sunday commemorates, according to Justin, the first day of creation and the resurrection of Christ from the darkness of the grave.[848] Justin’s use of this nomenclature, in a work addressed to the pagans, witnesses to the spread of Oriental solar worship throughout the Roman Empire, leading to the substitution of the day of Sun for Saturn’s Day, as the beginning of the planetary week. As we have learned, the Christians themselves adopted eventually the pagan designation of the first day of the week.[849]

Though Jesus regarded the Sabbath as still binding on his followers, his teaching that it was a social institution designed for practical benefit to mankind, and not as a fetish, brought him repeatedly into conflict with the Pharisees, and called forth those utterances which have been so strangely neglected by sabbatarians in after ages: “For the Son of man is lord of the Sabbath”; “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath”; “My Father worketh [on it] even until now, and I work.”[850] Jewish Christians appear at first to have continued the observance of the Sabbath, but this practice met the unqualified condemnation of St. Paul;[851] and one of the _Epistles_ of St. Ignatius, who suffered martyrdom about 107 A.D., refers to Christians as “no longer observing the Sabbath, but living in the observance of the Lord’s Day (μηκέτι σαββατίζοντες, ἀλλὰ κατὰ κυριακὴν ζῶντες), on which also our life has sprung up again by Him and by His death.”[852] However, the Jewish element in the churches of the East was strong enough to secure the ecclesiastical recognition of Saturday as a holy day. It long continued to be observed like Sunday, by religious assemblies and feasting, though not by any compulsory cessation of the ordinary occupations.[853] Tertullian was the first Church Father to declare that Christians ought to abstain on Sunday from secular duties and occupations, lest they should “give place to the Devil.”[854] Tertullian’s statement has sometimes been understood to indicate a Sabbatarian spirit on the part of its author; properly considered, however, it means only that Christians should so carefully observe the duties peculiar to the Lord’s Day as to neglect, if necessary, their worldly business on that day. Other Church Fathers of the third century, including Origen and Cyprian, made no reference to Sunday as a day of abstinence from labour. The earliest Sunday law, the edict issued by Constantine in 321 A.D., bore no relation to Christianity.[855] What began, however, as a pagan ordinance, ended as a Christian regulation; and a long series of imperial decrees, during the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, enjoined with increasing stringency abstinence from labour on Sunday. The view that the Christian Lord’s Day is but the Jewish Sabbath transferred from the seventh to the first day of the week found occasional expression in both the law and the theology of the Middle Ages, and culminated in the sabbatarian excesses of English and Scottish Puritanism.[856]