Sabbath

SABBATH, the seventh and especially sacred day of the week among the Jews.

Observance.

How tenaciously the Jews held to the ance of the Sabbath may be seen from the fact that on this account the Romans found themselves compelled to exempt them from 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 subtleties. When the disciples of Jesus plucked ears of corn on the Sabbath they had, according to the Rabbinical views, violated the third of the thirty-nine rules, which forbade harvesting; and in healing the sick Jesus himself broke the rule that a sick man should not receive medical aid unless his life was in danger. In fact, as Jesus put it, the Rabbinical theory seemed to be that the Sabbath was not made for man but man for the Sabbath, the observance of which was so much an end in itself that the rules prescribed for it did not require to be justi fied by appeal to any larger principle of religion or humanity. The precepts of the law were valuable in the eyes of the Scribes because they were the seal of Jewish particularism, the barrier erected between the world at large and the exclusive community of Yahweh's grace. The ideal at which these rules aimed was abso lute rest on the Sabbath from everything that could be called work; and even the exercise of those offices of humanity which the strictest Christian Sabbatarians regard as service to God, and therefore as specially appropriate to his day, was looked on as work. To save life was allowed; danger to life "superseded the Sabbath." The positive duties of its observance were to wear one's best clothes, eat, drink and be glad (justified from Isaiah lviii. 13). A more directly religious clemc It, it is true, was introduced by the practice of attending the synagogue service, but even this service was regarded as a meeting for instruction in the law rather than as an act of worship.

Attitude of Jesus and Early Christian Church.—The general position which Jesus takes up, that "the Sabbath is made for man and not man for the Sabbath," is only a special applica tion of the wider principle that the law is not an end in itself but a help towards the realization in life of the great ideal of love to God and man, which is the sum of all true religion. But Jesus further maintains that this view of the law as a whole, and the interpretation of the Sabbath law which it involves, can be histori cally justified from the Old Testament. In this connection He in

troduces two of the main methods to which historical criticism of the Old Testament has recurred in modern times: He appeals to the oldest history rather than to the Pentateuchal code as proving that the later conception of the law was unknown in ancient times (Matthew xii. 3 seq.), and to the exceptions to the Sabbath law which the Scribes themselves allowed in the interests of wor ship (v. 5) or humanity (v. II), as showing that the Sabbath must originally have been devoted to purposes of worship and humanity, and was not always the purposeless arbitrary thing which the Scribes made it to be. Modern criticism of the history of Sabbath observance among the Hebrews has done little more than follow out these arguments in detail, and show that the result is in agreement with what is known as to the dates of the several component parts of the Pentateuch.

In the early Christian church Jewish Christians continued to keep the Sabbath, like other points of the old law. Eusebius records that the Ebionites observed both the Sabbath and the Lord's day, the weekly celebration of the resurrection. This practice obtained to some extent in wider circles, for the Aposto lical 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 Sab bath 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. On the other hand Paul from the first days of Gentile Christianity, laid it down definitely that the Jewish Sabbath was not binding on Christians. Controversy with Judaizers led in process of time to direct condemnation of those who still kept the Jewish day (e.g., Co. of Laodicea, A.D. 363). For discussion of the difficult problem when and how the Christian Sunday superseded and took on some characteristics of the Jewish Sabbath see SUNDAY. (W. R. S. ; S. A. C.) Origin.—What was the origin of the Sabbath? What part did it play in the life of the Israelite nation before the exile? To these questions confident answers have been given, but the material upon which we can base our conclusions is not suffi ciently extensive or clear to warrant dogmatism. It is a note worthy fact that there is no evidence of Sabbath observance in the patriarchal period : there is, indeed, very little material that can be reckoned as pre-exilic.