Learn something new everyday: From Leon Kass (a Jewish scholar) on the ten commandments: Aside from their experience of manna, the Israelites may have had another referent for a “Sabbath day.” Before the coming of the Bible, many peoples in the ancient Near East already reckoned time in seven-day cycles connected with the phases of the moon. Among the Babylonians, these seventh days were fast days, days of ill luck, days on which one avoided pleasure and desisted from important projects out of dread of inhospitable natural powers. This was especially the case with their once-a-month Sabbath, shabattu or shapattu, the day of the full moon (i.e., the fourteenth day from the new moon). Against these naturalistic views, the Sabbath teaching in Exodus institutes a reckoning of time independent of the motion of the heavenly bodies, in which the day for desisting comes always in regular and repeatable cycles and is to be celebrated as a day of joy and benison. Readers of Genesis already know the basis of this way of reckoning time from the story of creation, whose target was precisely those Mesopotamian teachings. But the children of Israel are only now learning that time in the world—and, hence, their life in the world—will be understood differently from the way other, nature-worshipping peoples understand it. The Sabbath day, blessed by the Lord, has existed from time immemorial; but the creation- and humanity-centered view of the world enters human existence only through the covenant being here enacted with the children of Israel.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Jun 2013 04:00:22 +0000
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