And remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the Lord thy God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched-out arm; therefore the Lord thy God commanded thee to keep the Sabbath day. ([Deuteronomy 5 : 15].)
Here are two distinct and contradictory accounts given of the origin of the Sabbath. According to the first, God instituted the Sabbath on the seventh day of time, immediately after his six days of creation. But if we are to believe the writer of Deuteronomy the Sabbath was set up as a memorial day of the Jews’ escape from Egyptian bondage; an occurrence that took place something like two thousand five hundred years after the year one, of creation. Both of these statements cannot be correct, as one excludes the other. And in view of the fact that man naturally learned to divide time into days, moons, and quarter moons we are strongly inclined to think that both of these ancient accounts are mythical.
“Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.”
The word holy has lost its original signification. The Hebrew word kadosh means “to set apart.” Parkhurst renders it, “to separate, to set apart from its common and ordinary to some higher use or purpose.” It is used in this sense in [Genesis 4] : “And God divided [i.e. separated] the light from the darkness.”
The vessels of the sanctuary were to be “Holy unto the Lord;” that is, they were to be kept strictly separate from other vessels, for the sanctuary.
The saba or Sabbath was a day of rest, and the command to keep it holy did not mean that it should be observed with solemnity, or kept by offering sacrifices or in the performance of other religious ceremonies. Other days were working days, but the Sabbath was to be a day of rest.
“The word holy,” says a modern writer on the Sabbath, “has now become so associated in our minds with Puritanical ideas of self-mortification and with modern religious forms of worship, that we are naturally misled by it from the meaning of the original. Many pious persons suppose that the command to keep the Sabbath day holy was equivalent to an injunction to attend a parish church, hear two or more sermons in the course of the Sunday and during the rest of the day to keep in-doors and read the Bible. The Jews, however, did not do this, for the Bible was not written, and sermons in its exposition (which would have wanted texts) could not well be preached. Nor does it appear from any passage in the books of Moses, that religious admonitions or discourses of any kind formed a part of the tabernacle service.”
The Jewish Sabbath was emphatically a day of rest. Work, therefore, was strictly prohibited; for “Whosoever doeth any work in the Sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death.” ([Exodus 31 : 15].)
This law was not so literal as subsequent interpreters have made it. We have an account of only one person being put to death for this crime. It is recorded in [Numbers, 15 : 32–36] that “while the children of Israel were in the wilderness they found a man that gathered sticks upon the Sabbath day.”
And they that found him gathering sticks brought him unto Moses and Aaron, and unto all the congregation.