Jon D. Levenson. HDS Photo/Evgenia Eliseeva

Bulletin: Your second chapter investigates the origins of the Hebrew word šabbāt and its connection to “the seventh day.” Have the two always been linked?

Levenson: The second chapter of Israel’s Day of Light and Joy is the most technical and the most speculative, and many readers may wish to skim it or skip it. But I felt I had to deal with the question you rightly ask.

In the Bible, the Hebrew noun šabbāt, “Sabbath,” is often connected with the verb šāḇat, which means to “stop.” Only the verb, for example, appears in the account of the seventh day of creation in Genesis 2:1–3, though obviously it is šabbāt for which the text serves as an etiology. But, historically speaking, does the noun derive from the verb? The truth is, there are morphological curiosities about the noun (I’ll spare you them as well) that can be explained if we assume that its origin lies instead in the Akkadian word šabattu (or šapattu), which, mirabile dictu, also happens to refer to a holiday of sorts—the day of the full moon or 15th of the lunar month. This has led a number of scholars to suspect that in some relatively early biblical texts, in which šabbāt follows and is paired with the word for the new moon or first day of the lunar month, šabbāt actually refers to a monthly, not a weekly, occasion and should not be translated “Sabbath” at all. On this theory (and that’s all it is), it was only later that šabbāt came to denote the last day of the recurring seven-day sequence that we call the week.

All this is suggestive but very speculative, though, curiously, much European scholarship tends to take it as established fact. If it is a valid reconstruction, it raises the question of how a monthly event became a weekly one. The week is, after all, independent of the phases of the moon; the lunar month is 29½ days long, and the Sabbath can thus fall on any date of the month. My own guess (hardly a conviction) is that the šabattu may at some point have lent its name and even some of its character to an already extant Israelite “seventh day.” But, given the data we have, we just can’t know one way or the other. (The traditional assumption that šabbāt always referred to the seventh day of the week is also a speculation, by the way.)

Bulletin: Has the Sabbath always been understood as a day of joy and feasting?

Levenson: Contemporary Sabbath-observant Jews have every reason to think of the day as one of feasting and joyous celebration. Rabbinic law (halakhah) requires three meals on the Sabbath—one on Friday night after services, another at Saturday lunch, and a third before the Sabbath is out on Saturday evening; rich fare is served. And the tradition also includes the singing of table hymns at each of the three. (The title of my book is drawn from one traditionally sung at the first meal, which in turn derives from Esther 8:16.) Rabbinic tradition also mentions Friday night as especially appropriate for marital relations.

So, it may come as a surprise that there is substantial evidence for fasting on the Sabbath in antiquity and also for abstinence from sex. The book of Jubilees, for example, which is not canonical in the rabbinic tradition, ordains the death penalty for anybody fasting or having sex on the Sabbath. Does a group so strictly forbid something no one does? Josephus, the historian writing toward the end of the first century CE, described even greater stringencies practiced by the Essene sect (in those days the Jews had a lot of sects). “They do not venture,” he wrote, “. . . even to go to stool.” (Surely, I hasten to note, this stands in glaring contradiction to the moving words of Moses to Pharaoh in Exodus 5:1—words that have reverberated through the centuries—“Let My people go!”) There is, in short, substantial evidence for a more ascetic understanding of the holiday—which just might be a carryover from the ill-omened Mesopotamian šabattu. Already in 1898, Morris Jastrow, an important early figure in American Jewish studies, speculated that Isaiah 58:13–14 marked the change from the ascetic šabbāt to the familiar festive occasion. That oracle follows a denunciation of fasting and instructs its hearers to treat the Sabbath as a “delight.” In my judgment, his old proposal remains a tantalizing possibility.

Bulletin: How and to what extent was the Sabbath observed in biblical Israel?

Levenson: I don’t know of any good evidence to support the notion that the Sabbath was widely observed before the Exile (sixth century BCE). No inscriptional evidence to support that hypothesis has as yet turned up, and some inscriptions from the Exile or soon thereafter strongly suggest it was either unknown or ignored in the communities in question. Within the Bible itself, narratives about early figures are curiously silent on the subject. Based on the story of King David in Samuel and Kings, would you have ever suspected that he—or, for that matter, the authors of the narratives about him—had even heard of the idea that a highly restrictive sacred occasion occurred every seventh day? This is not to say that no one practiced the Sabbath early on, only that the overwhelming impression is that it was not generally observed until some point well into the Second Temple period.

Bulletin: The prohibition against work on the Sabbath appears in two different versions of the Decalogue. How significant are the differences between the two?

Levenson: One version, probably the better known, is found in Exodus 20:8–11; the other is in Deuteronomy 5:12–15. The differences begin with the first words, “Remember” versus “Observe.” The deeper divergence lies in the explanations offered. In Exodus, Israel’s Sabbath is a memorial of God’s having rested on the last of the seven days of creation (Exod. 20:11), whereas in Deuteronomy the commandment is grounded in his having taken them out of Egypt (Deut. 5:15); it is the exodus, not the Sabbath, that Israel is there enjoined to “remember.” The question of the historical relationship between these two passages has occasioned a vast amount of scholarship but no enduring consensus. Even the question of whether the commandments total ten is less than clear. It is interesting to note how much elaboration the sabbatical commandment displays relative to most of the others.

The affinity of the version in Exodus with the opening creation story of the Bible (Gen. 1:1–2:3) is patent. As surprising as this may sound, most references to the Sabbath in the Hebrew Bible make no allusion to creation. The Deuteronomic version is less cosmic and more social. It focuses on the familiar biblical concern for the subordinate and vulnerable members of society—slaves, farm animals, and the landless alien. The affinity of the seventh day with the seventh year (eventually named “sabbatical year”) and the Jubilee year, which occurs after seven sabbaticals, is obvious. In both of these, the land lies fallow, observing a year-long Sabbath, as it were.

Within the rabbinic tradition, the two versions of the sabbatical commandment are equally normative, equally the product of divine revelation. Referring to the difference in their first words, a Talmudic text claims, “ ‘Remember’ and ‘Observe’ were spoken in one utterance—something the mouth cannot utter and the ear cannot hear.” Even within the context of ancient Near Eastern culture, though, the difference between creation and emancipation may be less than first appears to be the case. Creation is itself an act of liberation from the disordering and death-dealing reign of chaos, and in the Babylonian creation poem, Enuma Elish, the creation of humankind frees the lower gods from drudgery and enables them to rest. In Genesis 1, revealingly, humankind, males and females together, are created “in the image of God/the gods” (language elsewhere used of kings) and enjoined to rule over the other animals—quite the opposite of the lowly peons created in comparable ancient Near Eastern cosmogonies.

Bulletin: What are some of the misconceptions regarding the Decalogue’s prohibition against work on the Sabbath?

Levenson: The most common misconception seems to be that “work” is limited to gainful employment or one’s occupation, so that one fulfills the commandment simply by taking a day off to relax and have fun. In the Bible, it’s clear that a wide range of activities, such as lighting a fire, gathering sticks, or carrying merchandise into town, was thought to desecrate the Sabbath. The Mishnah (the rabbinic collection of law promulgated in the early third century CE in the Land of Israel) lists 39 categories of prohibited activities, each of which then has its subcategories. What’s much harder to do is to describe the positive spiritual reality (ideally) made present and protected by these abstentions. In the absence of such a reality, the prohibitions come across as archaic and pointless and lend themselves too readily to the old self-serving Christian caricature of Torah-observance as oppressive and anxiety-inducing. One can, of course, counter this by speaking about the theology of the Sabbath and the positive reactions it elicits among those who practice it. But in the last analysis, I agree with the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig’s observation about Torah observance in general: “For we know it only when—we do.”³

Bulletin: You draw attention to “a much-neglected aspect of the Sabbath as it appears in biblical and rabbinic sources—the exclusive relationship between it and the people of Israel” (165). What is missed by overlooking this aspect?

Levenson: Significantly, the injunction to sanctify the seventh day is not mentioned in the opening creation story of Genesis but first occurs in the story of the manna in Exodus 16. The institution is never presented as universal, as if all humanity were somehow obligated in it and thus liable for its violation. In fact, Exodus 31:13 interprets the Sabbath as a sign that God sanctifies the people Israel—the holy day for the holy people, the holy people for the holy day—and midrash speaks about the relationship of the seventh day to the Jews as that of wife to husband (another manifestation of consecration). Whatever is to be said for various derivatives of the Jewish Sabbath (e.g., the Christian Sunday, mandatory days off from work, the “weekend,” the “digital Sabbath” of which some have spoken over the last decade or so, etc.)—and I think much can be said for them—they are quite different from the traditional Jewish institution. That is an institution very much rooted in a particular communal history and particular documents and traditions. At the deeper theological level, it derives from the Jewish people’s acceptance of the covenant the God of Israel offered them. Its distinctive character and rhythm are defined by normative liturgical practice and historical tradition and cannot, as I see it, survive detachment from them.

As a marker of Jewish identity, Sabbath-observance entails significant risks, most obviously that of antisemitism, something that has surged in recent years, especially after October 7, 2023. There is something shallow about efforts to universalize the Sabbath while evading the obligations, sacrifices, and risks that accompany it for Jews.

Something J. Coert Rylaarsdam once said to me comes to mind here: “Universalism is an idea in the mind of God. Its human form is called ‘imperialism.’ ”

Bulletin: You draw on ritual theory several times. How does it serve you as an explanatory tool?

Levenson: One study that I have found especially helpful is Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity, by Adam B. Seligman, Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett, and Bennett Simon. In its own words, it argues that “ritual creates a subjunctive, an ‘as if’ or ‘could be,’ universe,” as distinguished from an “ ‘as is’ vision of what often becomes a totalistic, unambiguous vision of reality, ‘as it really is.’ ”⁴ Whether this is really true of ritual in general, it strikes me as extremely helpful in understanding the Jewish Sabbath in particular—a day that re-presents Edenic innocence and preenacts what rabbinic tradition calls the “World-to-Come.” In my fifth chapter, “Sharing His Majesty’s Repose,” I argue that in the Bible the notion of “rest” is associated with the victorious God’s enthronement after successfully overcoming formidable challenges and that the Sabbath brings about ritually a participation in that otherwise exclusively divine experience. The hardcore empiricist, with “a totalistic unambiguous vision of reality, ‘as it really is,’ ” will be inclined to dismiss this as playacting or some kindred evasion of reality. But within the religious vision I detect in these ancient texts, for one day out of every seven the Sabbath creates not only that subjunctive universe but also, in their rabbinic subset, a foretaste of the age in which the subjunctive will have become the indicative.

But that brings me to a point on which I think Ritual and Its Consequences falls short. It speaks of the vision of the world presupposed by ritual as “tragic.” “From the point of view of ritual,” its authors write, “the world is fragmented and fractured. That is why the endless work of ritual is necessary, even if that work is always, ultimately, doomed.”⁵ In the traditional Jewish theology of Sabbath, however, the ritual is thought to enact a preview of the redeemed world in which that work—all work—will have become unnecessary and tragedy, very real in our current unredeemed world, will have been reversed. Critical scholars of religion step outside their purview when they brand this or any eschatological vision as false and the Sabbath or any other ritual as “doomed” to fail. In this instance, the authors have willy-nilly shown themselves, in the final analysis, to be closer to what I just called “the hardcore empiricist” than to the ritual performers themselves.

Bulletin: Would you have liked to cover other areas in your book that you did not have space to address?

Levenson: Oh, yes, several—the downgrading of the lunar dimension of the ritual calendar and the upgrading of the week, a totally non-lunar phenomenon; whether the deprivation theory, according to which the heightened status of the Sabbath is due to the loss of sovereignty in the Exile, is valid or instead a carryover from Christian supersessionism (I suspect the latter); and the nature of the Sabbath among the enigmatic Therapeutae whom the ancient Jewish philosopher Philo describes and its possible connection with the practices of other Jewish groups, to name just three. But sometimes you just have to stop and take a rest.