The Bible Commentaries and Others: Sabbath Rest

Sabbath Rest

SABBATH REST At the beginning of creation the Spirit of God was hovering over the watery chaos (Gen. 1:2) without apparent rest. After six days, however, God had made the universe according to his will and rested on the seventh (Sabbath) day (1:31–2:3; Heb. shabbat, “rested”). The earth reverted to chaos when God unleashed the Flood as a punishment for human sin, preserving only the family of Noah (one of the possible meanings of whose name is “rest”), whom alone God had found righteous in that generation (6:7-9; 7:1). After the Flood Noah released a dove from the ark, but the creature at first found no rest upon the waters and returned to Noah (8:9).

When the Israelites were in bondage in Egypt, they were permitted no rest, but after their liberation they were commanded both to rest on the Sabbath day and to give rest to their bondservants on that day (Deut. 5:14-15). In keeping the Sabbath they were to enter into God’s creation rest (Exod. 20:8-11) and delight in God’s works (Isa. 58:13-14). Furthermore, when they entered the Promised Land, they were to give the land sabbatical rest one year in seven (Lev. 25:1-7), lest they be chased out of the land, so as to give the land rest as it lay desolate (Lev. 26:33-35, 43), while Israel itself in such a situation would have no rest, but would pine in her iniquity (Lev. 26:36-39; Deut. 28:65-67). For the Israelites themselves, entering the Promised Land can be spoken of as entering God’s rest (Deut. 12:9), though through unbelief the generation which left Egypt was divinely prevented from entering this rest (Ps. 95:7-11).

When Israel occupied the Promised Land, the people and the land enjoyed rest when their enemies were subdued (Josh. 1:13; 21:43-44; Judg. 5:31), and God himself was spoken of as resting after the wilderness journeys in the Temple at Jerusalem (1 Chron. 28:2; Ps. 132). Yet the true resting place of God is not a material structure but the hearts of the contrite (Isa. 66:1-2); and Israel, though in the Promised Land, was exhorted to rest in God and find strength (Isa. 30:15).

In Ecclus. 24:1-8 the Wisdom of God seeks rest in the watery chaos of the nations (cf. Gen. 1:2), but finds it only in Israel, while in the NT the Spirit of God rests upon Jesus Christ (as had been prophesied of the Messiah in Isa. 11:2) at his baptism (John 1:32; cf. Mark 1:9-10), a thought further emphasized in the apocryphal Gospel of the Hebrews (cited by St. Jerome in his commentary on Isa. 11:2). According to Matt. 11:29, humans can also rest in Jesus Christ, in contrast to Judaism, which had become a religion of heavy burdens.

Heb. 3:7–4:11 interprets Ps. 95:7-11, with its implied promise of rest for the people of God after Joshua’s conquest, as referring to something which is available to Christian believers. This could be either rest from works (hence rest of conscience, 4:3, 10), or the coming heavenly rest (cf. Rev. 14:13).

In various Jewish and Christian apocalyptic writings, as well as in talmudic sources, the age to come is described as a perpetual Sabbath, and in Heb. 4:9 a similar Sabbath “rest (sabbatismos) for the people of God” is mentioned. Here the concept of a temporal Sabbath observed by physical rest has been transformed into an eschatological rest, entered into by faith (Heb. 4:2ff.). Faith itself, on this construct, is in this life a rest from the need to work out the means of one’s own redemption; the reward of faith is at last to be experienced as an eternal Sabbath respite from the bearing of one’s cross while a pilgrim in the world. Observance of the Sabbath is thus, as rest, proleptic of the believer’s ultimate reward.

The early Church observed the Sabbath with worship and rest, though without as many legal proscriptions as pertained in Judaism. However, because of Jesus’ conflicts with the Pharisees concerning their Sabbath observance (Mark 1:23-38; cf. Matt. 12:1-8; Luke 6:1-5), his resurrection on “the first day of the week,” and St. Paul’s injunctions not to relegalize the Sabbath (Col. 2:16), historians have inclined to the belief that the movement in Christendom toward setting aside Sunday as the day of worship began in the 1st cent. In Acts 20:7 and 1 Cor. 16:2 the “breaking of bread” and collection “for the saints in Jerusalem” are associated with the first rather than the seventh day. Yet widespread Sunday observance was not in effect until the 2nd cent., and it was not until the 4th cent., when Constantine decreed that certain types of work should not be done on Sunday, that the day began to reacquire certain Sabbath characteristics.

St. Augustine largely allegorized the significance of the Sabbath, defining it in terms of “the peace of rest, the peace of the Sabbath, which has no evening” (Conf. 13.35.50, noting the absence of the refrain “and the evening and the morning …” after Gen. 1:31). The Sabbath is therefore figuratively “eternal life” (Conf. 13.36.51), anticipated here in those “reasonable creatures” who try to orient their lives toward “the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God, and of one another in God” (De civ. Dei 19.17; cf. De Genesi ad litteram, 4.9). Augustine was on this model led to see world history as divided into six temporal ages, of which the last would be followed by the millennial reign of the faithful with Christ (Rev. 20:1-7; cf. 2 Pet. 3:8). Later commentators elaborated a schema in which human history was expected to last for 6,000 years before the millennial Sabbath began.

During this same period, there was debate within the Roman church concerning whether one ought to fast “on the Sabbath”—i.e., Sunday—“and to receive the eucharist daily”—i.e., not merely on Sunday (St. Jerome, Ep. 71.6). The tendency toward sabbatarianism increased over the next centuries until the Decretals of Gregory IX (1234) made it an ecclesiastical law that Sunday should be a day of rest.

Luther and other Reformers tended at first to reject the sabbatarian emphasis, following Augustine in spiritualizing the Sabbath commandment and arguing that any day might do for rest or worship. Calvin, however, emphasized the biblical precedent for worship and assembly “to hear the Law, and perform religious rites” as well as “rest … and the intermission of labor.” Examining many passages in which “this adumbration of spiritual rest held a primary place in the Sabbath” (Inst. 2.8.28), he defends a more strict sabbatarian practice in his own time against some of the other Reformers who criticized this emphasis as a form of revived “Judaism” (2.8.32-33). In so doing, along with some 16th-cent. Anabaptists, he helped lay the foundation for the sabbatarianism of 17th-19th cent. biblical literalists, some of whom, like modern Seventh Day Adventists, eventually returned to a “seventh day” observance.

In medieval and Renaissance English literature, spiritual analogies are more prevalent than an emphasis on literal sabbath observance. In Spenser’s Faerie Queene there is an implied analogy in the Redcrosse Knight’s schedule of service—“six yeares in warlike wize” to “that great Faerie Queene,” followed by a sabbatical (1.12.18). On the other hand, when severe Puritan enforcement of strict sabbatarianism a generation later provoked King James to issue The Declaration of Sports (1618), declaring morris dancing and the maypole as suitable entertainments for Sunday, it was sufficient offense to many that they emigrated, via Plymouth and the Mayflower, to Massachusetts in 1620. Hawthorne (in The Scarlet Letter) recalls their establishment of strict Sabbath observance in the New World. The relationship between sabbatarianism and millenarianism in American thought, from the chiliasm of Cotton and Increase Mather through Thomas Shephard’s Theses Sabbaticae (1649) to Jonathan Edwards’s History of the Work of Redemption, has been well documented. The eschatological dimension of the subject occupies the attention of Thomas Bromley in his The Way to the Sabbath of Rest (1759). The same connection is found vigorously argued in a different scheme by the Adventist William Miller in his Evidence from Scripture History of the Second Coming of Christ, about the Year 1843, exhibited in a course of lectures (1836).

By contrast, the English clergyman George Herbert’s poem “Sunday” is a summation of the Augustinian tradition. His concession to Calvin is his focus on a specific day of worship and rest (which he presents as a metonym, “the fruit of this, the next world’s bud”): his good country parson will keep himself and his parishioners informed “how Sundayes, holy-days, and fasting days are kept” (A Priest to the Temple, chap. 17). William Cowper provides an excellent example of the growth of sabbatarian rigor in later Calvinist and evangelical circles, typically contrasting the proper use of Sunday with prevalent abuse, even by “a pastor of renown”:

Love, joy, and peace, make harmony more meet

For sabbath ev’nings, and perhaps as sweet.

Will not the sickliest sheep of every flock

Resort to this example …

… and justify the foul abuse

Of sabbath hours with plausible excuse?

If apostolic gravity be free

To play the fool on Sundays, why not we?

If he the tinkling harpsichord regards

As inoffensive, what offense in cards? (“Progress of Error,” 140-49)

Elsewhere he speaks of “Sabbaths profaned without remorse” (“Bill of Mortality, 1793”) as the unmistakable mark of a reprobate (cf. The Task, 4.650-58). Yet for the elect:

The groans of nature in this nether world,

Which Heaven has heard for ages, have an end.

Foretold by prophets, and by poets sung,

Whose fire was kindled at the prophet’s lamp,

The time of rest, the promised sabbath comes.

Six thousand years of sorrow have well-nigh

Fulfilled their tardy and disastrous course. (The Task, 6.729-35)

Among the strictest Sabbatarians in Britain were the Scottish Covenanters, best known to readers of English literature through Sir Walter Scott’s Old Mortality. The subject of Sabbath observance was highly sensitive in Scotland. The preference of Robert Burns for “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” with its “ease and rest to spend” in a simple family meal, hymn singing, and conversation, after which “the priest-like father reads the sacred page,” instead of the “simmer Sunday morn” in which “Orthodoxy raibles” (“The Holy Fair”), was controversial.

In the 19th cent. generally liberalized views, sometimes supported by references to Jesus’ admonitions against the legalism of the Pharisees, became more popular (e.g., Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, Letter 11). In the 20th cent. the opposite pole from sabbatarianism is reached in the luxurious self-indulgence depicted in Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” (to which A. M. Klein’s “Saturday Night” is a satiric answer). “Sunday,” by Howard Nemerov, captures more traditional analogies (“He rested on the seventh day, and so …”) in modern guise, yet argues that

It’s still a day to conjure with, if not

Against, the blessed seventh, when we get

A chance to feel whatever He must feel,

Looking us over, seeing that we are good.

The odds are six to one He’s gone away;

It’s why there’s so much praying on this day.