Posts
1. In my reading today of Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah, Jacob Neusner (or somebody, since I’m in a part of the book in which Neusner quotes blocks of scholarly sources) refers to the Sabbath laws in Exodus 16: the Israelites cannot cook (Exodus 16:22-26) and must remain in their homes (Exodus 16:29-30) on the Sabbath day. The context here is God giving the Israelites manna in the wilderness.
I remember when my Dad had a debate on whether or not we should keep the annual holy days (e.g., Days of Unleavened Bread, Feast of Tabernacles, etc.). A Sabbatarian pastor wrote a book saying that Christians are under no obligation to do so, and his argument was that Christians who claim to keep the holy days don’t do them according to the Bible: they don’t make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, for instance. My Dad argued that the Sabbatarian pastor himself did not keep the Sabbath according to the Bible. My Dad pointed out that Exodus 16 banned the Israelites from leaving their homes on the Sabbath, yet the pastor left his home every Sabbath to go to church. (I also saw him kindle a fire on the Sabbath, notwithstanding Exodus 35:3!) My Dad’s position was that Christians should keep the Sabbath and the holy days in “newness of spirit”: we still rest on the days and use them as opportunities to learn and to honor God, but we’re not bound by the Old Testament regulations concerning them.
At first, for some reason, I was a little surprised that my Dad believed that the Israelites couldn’t leave their homes on the Sabbath on account of Exodus 16. Maybe I thought (somewhere in my mind) that such a law only applied to the wilderness sojourn, when the Israelites were receiving manna. Now, I read a scholar saying that Judaism views Exodus 16 as authoritative.
That makes a degree of sense. First, in Exodus 12:16, the Israelites are prohibited to work on the first and the seventh Days of Unleavened Bread. These are Sabbaths. And yet, Israelites can prepare food on those days. In my opinion, Exodus 12:16 specifies that the Israelites can prepare food on these particular Sabbaths because they are not allowed to do so on the weekly Sabbath. The Sabbaths of the festivals are not entirely the same as the weekly Sabbath, in terms of what is allowed and forbidden.
Second, there’s the Jewish eruv. Because traditional Jews cannot leave their homes on the Sabbath, the rabbis devised a way to allow for freer movement—so they can go to synagogue. Basically, the Jews make their entire neighborhood into one “home”, if you will. And so one can go to a nearby synagogue, without technically leaving one’s “home”. That seems to assume that Exodus 16′s ban on leaving one’s home on the Sabbath is viewed as authoritative within traditional Judaism.
By the way, that Sabbatarian pastor doesn’t believe in keeping the Sabbath anymore!
2. Now for my reading of Avi Hurvitz’s A Linguistic Study of the Relationship Between the Priestly Source and the Book of Ezekiel. Hurvitz discusses the use of the Hebrew word amith, which means “neighbor”. According to Hurvitz, it appears in early biblical Hebrew, but very, very rarely in later biblical and rabbinic Hebrew. On page 76, he says that its appearance in Zechariah “should not be taken as a neologism signalling the birth of the word in the Hebrew language and its literature, but should be understood as an archaic remnant of a dying word.” P uses amith a lot. Ezekiel, however, does not. Again, Hurvitz concludes that Ezekiel draws from P, rather than vice-versa.
And Hurvitz may also be making a point about the date of P: that it’s pre-exilic. Some people may believe that amith first appeared in the post-exilic Book of Zechariah, and then P—a post-exilic document—picked it up. But Hurvitz disagrees. He notices that Ezekiel and rabbinic literature shy away from amith, and so he concludes it was on its way out in Israel’s post-exilic period. Consequently, P had to be early (pre-exilic?) to be using amith!
3. On page 43 of Introduction to Reading the Pentateuch, Jean-Louis Ska states:
“The Deuteronomic Law is more theological than the Covenant Code. Thus, Deuteronomy 15 mentions YHWH three times (15:14, 15, 18). Twice it speaks about blessing (15:14, 18). In addition, it connects the law regarding slaves to the experience of the Exodus, that is, to salvation history (15:15). Just as the Israelites were slaves in Egypt and were liberated by YHWH their God, so they must now liberate their own slaves and must not send them away empty-handed.”
