SABBATH ( שבת), the day of sacred rest w hich among the Hebre w s follo w ed six days of labour and closed the week.
1. Observance of the Sabbath.— The later Jewish Sabbath, observed in accordance with the rules of the Scribes, was a very peculiar institution, and for m ed one of the m ost marked distinctions between the Hebrews and other nations, as appears in a striking way from the fact that on this account alone the Romans found themselves compelled to exe m pt the Jews from all military service. The rules of the Scribes enumerated thirty-nine main kinds of work forbidden on the Sabbath, and each of these prohibitions gave rise to new subtilties. Jesus’s disciples, for example, who plucked ears of corn in passin g throu g h a field on the holy day, had, accordin g to Rabbinical casuistry, violated the third of the thirty-nine rules, which forbade harvesting; and in healin g the sick Jesus Himself broke the rule that a sick m an should not receive medical aid on the Sabbath unless his life was in dan g er. In fact, as our Lord puts it, the Rabbinical theory see m ed to be that the Sabbath was not made for m an but man for the Sabbath, the observance of which was so m uch an end in itself that the rules prescribed for it did not require to be justified by appeal to any lar g er principle of reli g ion or humanity. The precepts of the law were valuable in the eyes of the Scribes because they were the seal of Jewish particularis m , the barrier erected between the world at lar g e and the exclusive community of Jehovah’s g race. For this purpose the most arbitrary precepts were the most effective, and none were more so than the complicated rules of Sabbath observance. The ideal of the Sabbath which all these rules ai m ed at realizin g was absolute rest from everythin g that could be called work; and even the exercise of those offices of humanity which the strictest Christian Sabbatarians re g ard as a service to God, and therefore as specially appropriate to His day, was looked on as work. To save life was allo w ed, but only because danger to life “superseded the Sabbath.” In like manner the special ritual at the temple prescribed for the Sabbath by the Pentateuchal law was not re g arded as any part of the hallowin g of the sacred day; on the contrary, the rule was that, in this re g ard, “Sabbath was not kept in the sanctuary.” Strictly speakin g , therefore, the Sabbath was neither a day of relief to toilin g humanity nor a day appointed for public w orship; the positive duties of its observance were to wear one’s best clothes, eat, drink, and be g lad (justified fro m Isa. lviii. 13). A m ore directly reli g ious element, it is true, was introduced by the practice of attendin g the syna g o g ue service; but it is to be remembered that this service was primarily regarded not as an act of worship but as a m eetin g for instruction in the law. So far, therefore, as the Sabbath existed for any end outside itself it was an institution to help every Jew to learn the law, and from this point of view it is re g arded by Philo and Josephus, who are accustomed to seek a philosophical justification for the peculiar institutions of their reli g ion. But this certainly was not the leadin g point of view with the mass of the Rabbins; and at any rate it is quite certain that the syna g o g ue is a post-exilic institution, and therefore that the Sabbath in old Israel m ust either have been entirely different from the Sabbath of the Scribes, or else must have been a m ere day of idleness and feastin g , not accompanied by any properly reli g ious observances or havin g any properly reli g ious m eanin g. The second of these alternatives may be dismissed as quite inconceivable, for, thou g h m any of the reli g ious ideas of the old Hebre w s were crude, their institutions were never arbitrary and m eanin g less, and when they spo k e of consecratin g the Sabbath they m ust have had in view some reli g ious exercise of an intelli g ible kind by which they paid w orship to Jehovah.
Indeed, that the old Hebrew Sabbath was quite different from the Rabbinical Sabbath is de m onstrated in the trenchant criticis m which Jesus directed a g ainst the latter (Matt. xii. 114; Mark ii. 27). The g eneral position which He takes up, that “the Sabbath is made for man and not m an for the Sabbath,” is only a special application of the wider principle that the law is not an end in itself but a help towards the realization in life of the g reat ideal of love to God and m an, which is the su m of all true reli g ion. But Jesus further m aintains that this view of the law as a whole, and the interpretation of the Sabbath law which it involves, can be historically justified fro m the Old Testament. And in this connexion He introduces two of the main m ethods to which historical criticism of the Old Testa m ent has recurred in modern times: He appeals to the oldest history rather than to the Pentateuchal code as provin g that the later conception of the law was unkno w n in ancient times (Matt. xii. 3, 4), and to the exceptions to the Sabbath law which the Scribes the m selves allo w ed in the interests of worship (ver. 5) or hu m anity (ver. 11), as showin g that the Sabbath m ust ori g inally have been devoted to purposes of worship and humanity, and was not al w ays the purposeless arbitrary thin g which the schoolmen made it to be. Modern criticism of the history of Sabbath observance amon g the Hebrews has done nothin g more than follow out these argu m ents in detail, and show that the result is in a g ree m ent with what is known as to the dates of the several co m ponent parts of the Pentateuch. Of the le g al passa g es that speak of the Sabbath all those which show affinity with the doctrine of the Scribes— regarding the Sabbath as an arbitrary sign between Jehovah and Israel, entering into details as to particular acts that are forbidden, and enforcing the observance by severe penalties, so that it no longer has any religious value, but appears as a mere legal constraint—are post-exilic (Exod. xvi. 23-30, xxxi. 12-17, xxxv. 1-3; Num. xv. 32-36); while the older laws only demand such cessation from daily toil, and especially from agricultural labour, as among all ancient peoples naturally accompanied a day set apart as a religious festival, and in particular lay weight on the fact that the Sabbath is a humane institution, a holiday for the labouring classes (Exod. xxiii. 12; Deut. v. 13-15). As it stands in these ancient laws, the Sabbath is not at all the unique thing which it was made to be by the Scribes. “The Greeks and the barbarians,” says Strabo (x. 3, 9), “have this in common, that they accompany their sacred rites by a festal remission of labour.” So it was in old Israel: the Sabbath was one of the stated religious feasts, like the new moon and the three great agricultural sacrificial celebrations (Hosea ii. 11); the new moons and the Sabbaths alike called men to the sanctuary to do sacrifice (Isa. i. 14); the remission of ordinary business belonged to both alike (Amos viii. 5), and for precisely the same reason. Hosea even takes it for granted that in captivity the Sabbath will be suspended, like all the other feasts, because in his day a feast implied a sanctuary.
This conception of the Sabbath, however, necessarily underwent an important modification in the 7th century b.c., when the local sanctuaries were abolished, and those sacrificial rites and feasts which in Hosea’s time formed the essence of every act of religion were limited to the central altar, which most men could visit only at rare intervals. From this time forward the new moons, which till then had been at least as important as the Sabbath and were celebrated by sacrificial feasts as occasions of religious gladness, fall into insignificance, except in the conservative temple ritual. The Sabbath did not share the same fate, but with the abolition of local sacrifices it became for most Israelites an institution of humanity divorced from ritual. So it appears in the Deuteronomic decalogue, and presumably also in Jer. xvii. 19 sq. In this form the institution was able to survive the fall of the state and the temple, and the seventh day’s rest was clung to in exile as one of the few outward ordinances by which the Israelite could still show his fidelity to Jehovah and mark his separation from the heathen. Hence we understand the importance attached to it in the exilic literature (Isa. lvi. 2 sq., lviii. 13), and the character of a sign between Jehovah and Israel ascribed to it in the post-exilic law. This attachment to the Sabbath, beautiful and touching so long as it was a spontaneous expression of continual devotion to Jehovah, acquired a less pleasing character when, after the exile, it came to be enforced by the civil arm (Nell, xiii.), and when the later law even declared Sabbath-breaking a capital offence. But it is just to remember that without the stern discipline of the law the community of the second temple could hardly have escaped dissolution, and that Judaism alone preserved for Christianity the hard-won achievements of the prophets.
The Sabbath exercised a twofold influence on the early Christian church. On the one hand, the weekly celebration of the resurrection on the Lord’s day could not have arisen except in a circle that already knew the week as a sacred division of time; and, moreover, the manner in which the Lord’s day was observed was directly influenced by the synagogue service. On the other hand, the Jewish Christians continued to keep the Sabbath, like other points of the old law. Eusebius (H.E., iii. 27) remarks that the
Ebionites observed both the Sabbath and the Lord’s day; and this practice obtained to some extent in much wider circles, for the Apostolical Constitutions recommend that the Sabbath shall be kept as a memorial feast of the creation as well as the Lord’s day as a memorial of the resurrection. The festal character of the Sabbath was long recognized in a modified form in the Eastern Church by a prohibition of fasting on that day, which was also a point in the Jewish Sabbath law (comp. Judith viii. 6).
On the other hand, Paul had quite distinctly laid down from the first days of Gentile Christianity that the Jewish Sabbath was not binding on Christians (Rom. xiv. 5 sq.; Gal. iv. 10; Col. ii. 16), and controversy with Judaizers led in process of time to direct condemnation of those who still kept the Jewish day (e.g., Co. of Laodicea, 363 a.d.). Nay, in the Roman Church a practice of fasting on Saturday as well as on Friday was current before the time of Tertullian. The steps by "which the practice of resting from labour on the Lord’s day instead of on the Sabbath was established in Christendom and received civil as "well as ecclesiastical sanction will be spoken of in Sunday; it is enough to observe here that this practice is naturally and even necessarily connected with the religious observance of the Lord’s day as a day of worship and religious gladness, and is in full accordance with the principles laid down by Jesus in His criticism of the Sabbath of the Scribes. But of course the complete observance of Sunday rest was not generally possible to the early Christians before Christendom obtained civil recognition. For the theological discussions whether and in what sense the fourth commandment is binding on Christians, see Decalogue, vol. vii. p. 17.
2. Origin of the Sabbath.— As the Sabbath was originally a religious feast, the question of the origin of the Sabbath resolves itself into an inquiry why and in what circle a festal cycle of seven days was first established. In Gen. ii. 1-3 and in Exod. xx. 11 the Sabbath is declared to be a memorial of the completion of the work of creation in six days. But it appears certain that the decalogue as it lay before the Deuteronomist did not contain any allusion to the creation (see Decalogue, vol. vii. p. 16), and it is generally believed that this reference was added by the same post-exilic hand that wrote Gen. i. 1-ii. 4a. The older account of the creation in Gen. ii. 4b sq. does not recognize the hexaemeron, and it is even doubtful whether the original sketch of Gen i. distributed creation over six days. The connexion, therefore, between the seven days’ week and the work of creation is now generally recognized as secondary. The week and the Sabbath were already known to the writer of Gen. i., and he used them to give the framework for his picture of the creation, which in the nature of things could not be literal and required some framework. At the same time, there was a peculiar appropriateness in associating the Sabbath with the doctrine that Jehovah is the Creator of all things; for we see from Isa. xl.-lxvi. that this doctrine was a mainstay of Jewish faith in those very days of exile which gave the Sabbath a new importance for the faithful.
But, if the week as a religious cycle is older than the idea of the week of creation, we cannot hope to find more than probable evidence of the origin of the Sabbath. At the time of the exile the Sabbath was already an institution peculiarly Jewish, otherwise it could not have served as a mark of distinction from heathenism. This, however, does not necessarily imply that in its origin it was specifically Hebrew, but only that it had acquired distinguishing features of a marked kind. What is certain is that the origin of the Sabbath must be sought within a circle that used the week as a division of time. Here again we must distinguish between the week as such and the astrolo g ical week , i.e., the wee k in which the seven days are named each after the planet which is held to preside over its first hour. If the day is divided into twenty-four hours and the planets preside in turn over each hour of the wee k in the order of their periodic times (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon), we g et the order of days of the wee k with which we are familiar. For, if the Sun presides over the first hour of Sunday, and therefore also over the eighth, the fifteenth, and the twenty-second, Venus will have the twenty-third hour, Mercury the twenty-fourth, and the Moon, as the third in order from the sun, will preside over the first hour of Monday. Mars, a g ain, as third from the Moon, will preside over Tuesday (Dies Martis, Mardi), and so forth. This astrolo g ical week became very current in the Roman empire, but was still a novelty in the time of Dio Cassius (xxxvii. 18). This writer believed that it came from E g ypt; but the old E g yptians had a wee k of ten, not of seven days, and the ori g inal home of astrolo g y and of the division of the day into twenty-four hours is Chaldaea. It is plain, however, that there is a lon g step between the astrolo g ical assi g nation of each hour of the week to a planet and the reco g nition of the week as an ordinary division of ti m e by people at large. Astrolo g y is in its nature an occult science, and there is not the sli g htest trace of a day of twenty-four hours a m on g the ancient Hebrews, who had the week and the Sabbath lon g before they had any acquaintance with the planetary science of the Babylonian priests. Moreover, it is quite clear from extant remains of Assyrian calendars that our astrolo g ical week did not prevail in civil life even amon g the Babylonians and Assyrians: they did not dedicate each day in turn to its astrolo g ical planet. These facts m a k e it safe to reject one often-repeated explanation of the Sabbath, viz., that it was in its ori g in what it is in the astrolo g ical wee k , the day sacred to Saturn, and that its observance is to be derived from an ancient Hebrew worship of that planet. In truth there is no evidence of the worship of Saturn amon g the oldest Hebrews; Arnos v. 26, where Chiun (Kaiwan) is taken by many to m ean Saturn, is of uncertain interpretation, and, when the tenses are ri g htly rendered, refers not to idolatry of the Israelites in the wilderness but to the ti m e of the prophet.
The wee k , however, is found in various parts of the world in a for m that has nothin g to do with astrology or the seven planets, and with such a distribution as to ma k e it pretty certain that it had no artificial ori g in, but su gg ested itself independently, and for natural reasons, to different races. In fact the four quarters of the m oon supply an obvious division of the month; and, w herever new moon and full moon are religious occasions, we g et in the m ost natural way a sacred cycle of fourteen or fifteen days, of which the wee k of seven or ei g ht days (deter m ined by half moon) is the half. Thus the old Hindus chose the new and the full m oon as days of sacrifice; the eve of the sacrifice was called upavasatha, and in Buddhism the same word (upōsatha) has come to denote a Sabbath observed on the full m oon, on the day when there is no m oon, and on the two days which are ei g hth from the full and the new m oon respectively, with fastin g and other reli g ious exercises.
From this point of view it is most si g nificant that in the older parts of the Hebrew Scriptures the new moon and the Sabbath are almost invariably mentioned together. The month is beyond question an old sacred division of time common to all the Semites; even the Arabs, who received the week at quite a late period from the Syrians
(Bîrûnî, Chronology, Eng. tr., p. 58), greeted the new moon with reli g ious acclamations. And this m ust have been an old Se m itic usage, for the word which properly m eans “to g reet the new m oon” (ahalla) is, as La g arde (Orientalia, ii. 19) has shown, etymolo g ically connected with the Hebrew words used of any festal joy. Amon g the Hebrews, or rather perhaps amon g the Canaanites, whose speech they borro w ed, the joy at the new moon became the type of reli g ious festivity in g eneral. Nor are other traces wantin g of the connexion of sacrificial occasions— i.e ., religious feasts—with the phases of the moon amon g the Semites. The Harranians had four sacrificial days in every m onth, and of these two at least were deter m ined by the conjunction and opposition of the moon.
That full moon as well as new moon had a religious si g nificance amon g the ancient Hebrews seems to follow from the fact that, when the g reat a g ricultural feasts were fixed to set days, the full moon was chosen. In older times these feast-days appear to have been Sabbaths (Lev. xxiii. 11; comp. Passover, vol. xviii. p. 344).
A week determined by. the phases of the moon has an avera g e len g th of 29 1/2 - 4 = 7 3/8 days, i.e ., three weeks out of ei g ht would have eight days. But there seems to be in 1 Sam. xx. 27, compared with vv. 18, 24, an indication that in old ti m es the feast of the new moon lasted two days—a very natural institution, since it appears that the feast was fixed in advance, while the Hebrews of Saul’s time cannot have been g ood enou g h astronomers to k now beforehand on which of two successive days the new moon would actually be observed. In that case a week of seven wor k in g days would occur only once in two months. We cannot tell when the Sabbath became dissociated from the month; but the chan g e seems to have been made before the Book of the Covenant, which already re g ards the Sabbath simply as an institution of humanity and i g nores the new moon. In both points it is follo w ed by Deuteronomy.
The Babylonian and Assyrian Sabbath.— The word “Sabbath” (sabattuv), with the explanation “day of rest of the heart,” is claimed as Assyrian on the basis of a textual emendation made by F. Delitzsch in II. Bawl., 32, 16. The value of this isolated and uncertain testimony cannot be placed very high, and it seems to prove too much, for it is practically certain that the Babylonians at the time of the Hebrew exile cannot have had a Sabbath exactly corresponding in conception to what the Hebrew Sabbath had become under very special historical circumstances. What we do know from a calendar of the intercalary month Elul II. is that in that month the 7th, 14th, 19th, 21st, and 28th days had a peculiar character, and that certain acts were forbidden on them to the king and others. There is the greatest uncertainty as to the details (compare the very divergent renderings in Accords of the Past, vii. 160 sq. ; Schrader, K.A.T., 2d ed., p. 19; Lotz, Q u. de historia Sabbati, 39 sq.); but these days, which are taken to be Assyrian Sabbaths, are certainly not “days of rest of the heart,” and to all appearance are unlucky days, and expressly designated as such. If, therefore, they are “Assyrian Sabbaths” at all, they are exactly opposite in character to the Hebrew Sabbath, which Hosea describes as a day of gladness, and which never ceased to be a day of feasting and good cheer.
Etymology of the word “Sabbath . ”—The grammatical inflexions of the word “Sabbath” show that it is a feminine form, properly shab-bat-t for shabbāt-t, from שבת II. The root has nothing to do with resting in the sense of enjoying repose; in transitive forms and applications it means to “sever,” to “put an end to,” and intransitively it means to “desist,” to “come to an end.” The grammatical form of shabbath suggests a transitive sense, “the divider,” and apparently indicates the Sabbath as dividing the month. It may mean the day which puts a stop to the week’s work, but this is less likely. It certainly cannot be translated “the day of rest.”
Sabbatical Year.— The Jews under the second temple observed every seventh year as a Sabbath according to the (post-exilic) law of Lev. xxv. 1-7. It was a year in which all agriculture was re- mitted, in which the fields lay unsown, the vines grew unpruned, and even the natural produce was not gathered in. That this law was not observed before the captivity we learn from Lev. xxvi. 34 sq. ; indeed so long as the Hebrews were an agricultural people with little trade, in a land often ravaged by severe famines, such a law could not have been observed. Even in later times it was occasionally productive of great distress (1 Mac. vi. 49, 53; Jos., Antt., xiv. 16, 2). In the older legislation, however, we already meet with a seven years’ period in more than one connexion. The release of a Hebrew servant after six years’ labour (Exod. xxi. 2 sq. ; Deut. xv. 12 sq.) has only a remote analogy to the Sabbatical year. But in Exod. xxiii. 10, 11 it is prescribed that the crop of every seventh year (apparently the self-sown crop) shall be left for the poor, and after them for the beasts. The difference between this and the later law is that the seventh year is not called a Sabbath, and that there is no indication that all land was to lie fallow on the same year. In this form a law prescribing one year’s fallow in seven may have been anciently observed. It is extended in ver. 11 to the vineyard and the olive oil, but here the culture necessary to keep the vines and olive trees in order is not forbidden; the precept is only that the produce is to be left to the poor. In Deuteronomy this law is not repeated, but a fixed seven years’ period is ordained for the benefit of poor debtors, apparently in the sense that in the seventh year no interest is to be exacted by the creditor from a Hebrew, or that no proceedings are to be taken against the debtor in that year (Deut. xv. 1 sq.).
