Most scholarly writing about the Sabbath is concerned with topics that this paper will address only in passing.¹ Some writers consider the Sabbath's historical origins in relation to ancient Israel's cultural neighbors. These writers show that many of those cultures had instituted cycles of time of seven days based on the cycles of the moon, had used words similar in etymology to the word "Sabbath," and had set apart certain days (nearly but not exactly every seventh day) as days on which no work would be done because of the bad luck attendant on those days. Israel's Sabbath is taken by these writers as a response and a replacement to such superstition and idolatry of the moon, for in Genesis 1, it is clear that the God of Israel had created the moon. The moon's cycles are disregarded in favor of a strict cycle of seven days.² More generally, the juxtaposition of the narrative of the Creation with the announcement of this new kind of Sabbath (Genesis 1:1-2:3) serves as a corrective to anyone who might think either that the heavenly bodies are to be worshiped for their perfect motion in the heavens or that the natural world is to be obeyed as a divine being with its own agency. The Sabbath is not derived from the heavenly bodies but instituted by God for a specific reason or set of reasons.

This first set of writers finds a place among a second set of writers who emphasize the Sabbath's positive meanings for Israel rather than its meanings in relation to the wrong ideas of other cultures. The days of bad luck are seen to be redefined as days of rest, peace, joy, and celebration of God as the omnipotent Creator, who has established a world so sufficiently abundant that work need only be done for six days out of seven. Many of these other writers see the Sabbath as the first part of a wide-ranging "rest tradition" in the Bible. The "rest tradition" includes God's concern to give peace and freedom to the oppressed (notably in Israel's release from the hard work in Egypt), the abiding of God in the tabernacle and the temple, the peace that God gives from fighting one's enemies, the rest from wandering that is one benefit of the Promised Land, the institution of sabbath months and years and "sabbaths of sabbaths" (the Jubilee tradition) and, particularly in the New Testament, the eschatological rest of the saints in Heaven.³

But these themes and institutions take us farther afield than I would like to go in this paper. Here I seek a more abstract understanding of the basic elements of Sabbath, with a foundation resting more on the relation of God to the Sabbath than on the relation of the Sabbath to Israel. I do not start, as Karl Barth does, at the even more abstract level of theological considerations about the nature of time and the nature of man.⁴ That kind of analysis, if it could be done well at all, would more likely come out of an understanding of the Bible as a whole. As for my project, scholars are divided about whether God's Sabbath in Genesis "functions as a Sabbath etiology,"⁵ but I side with those who begin their investigations of the Sabbath by examining the Genesis account. My goal is first to identify the basic elements that make the Sabbath what it is, and then to see just how far these elements go toward explaining the presence of Sabbath language in several parts of the book of Exodus.

Coming as it does at the end of the narrative of Creation, and after several verses mentioning the completion of all of God's work, God's Sabbath of Genesis 2:3 has rightly been identified as a symbol of completion. (The number seven often carries the same implication.) But it seems also to be something profoundly more important. The Creation narrative emphasizes division and demarcation. Looking ahead, many of the laws and commands instituted in Exodus and later can be traced back to a general prohibition against crossing boundaries.⁶ God's Sabbath, then, seems most consistent with Genesis 1 when we find in it a principle of division.

What does this Sabbath divide? It divides the work of God in creation "for the purpose of making" (2:3) from the work of God in "history" (2:4).⁷ It separates the initial Creation narrative from the second one, which flows into the narrative of the Garden and beyond. God's Sabbath divides His two kinds of work from each other, clearly, with no overlap.⁸ It is characterized as a period of inactivity in order to clearly distinguish the first set of actions from the second.

In this sense the "rest tradition" has only half an understanding of the Sabbath. The Sabbath of Genesis 2:3 completes one narrative, but the overall story remains incomplete. The Sabbath does not conclude all of God's activity. God does not run out of energy because of the six days of Creation. God instead will continue His work in a new way. The Sabbath marks a kind of solemn, cosmic shift in God's activity.

The Sabbath is the boundary day. As such the Sabbath embodies the principle of separation. This makes the Sabbath the quintessential holy institution. It is sacred not because it symbolizes the completeness of Creation, but because its essence is one of separation.⁹ This day is set apart, because on it God sets apart the first week from the second week, because God chooses to be known here (in part) as the God who separates and who seeks to keep the divisions clear.¹⁰

Israel will be instructed not to confuse or cross the boundaries between one week and the next. Israel will be given its own Sabbath day, a boundary day, on which all productive activity must cease. On this day Israel might think of God as Creator and the giver of abundance and rest, and rightly so, but there will be other festivals to commemorate God's mighty deeds of liberation and provision. More importantly, Israel might also consider the Sabbath as a solemn day of meditation to memorialize the time between the end of one era and the beginning of another, to know God as the Divider, the one who makes things holy. As Israel slowly awakens to its place as a holy nation, the holiness of the Sabbath becomes more and more relevant to Israel's own identity.

Even after several readings, much of the symbolism of the tabernacle's detailed construction (if indeed it is symbolic) remains opaque. I would like to try to illuminate just a few of the details and to explain a small part of the narrative. In doing so I may provide a rationale for the structure of the concluding chapters of Exodus.

One of the most significant parts of the tabernacle is the curtain, because it "must make a division for you [plural]¹¹ between the Holy and the Most Holy" (Ex 26:33).¹² Like the tent cloths (26:1) and other items, the curtain is to be made of blue thread and various other materials.¹³ It is not outlandish to propose that the blue thread represents the heavens and the waters, which are important parts of the divisions on the second day of Creation (Ge 1:6-8).

If the curtain with the distinction it makes is so important, then why are the instructions of Exodus 26:33 absent in the retelling (36:35-36)? Every detail of the instructions of making of the curtain is followed by Bezalel (or one of his fellow weavers), but Bezalel does not hang the curtain under the hooks or bring the ark within the curtain. It is not simply the case that Bezalel is waiting for the proper day to start setting up the tabernacle. I propose that Bezalel, as a craftsman, is completely inappropriate to be the one to perform this task.¹⁴ The one who builds the materials, the maker, and the one who organizes them into their proper relationships, the governor, must be two separate people. Only Moses is qualified for this task. It is Moses who fulfills the commandment of 26:33 (in 40:20-21).

Indeed Moses is the one to do all of the final organizing in 40:16-33, on the first day of the second year (40:17). The activity of making, for which Moses blessed the makers, had been completed by the end of chapter 39. The activity of organizing begins in chapter 40. Between the two kinds of activity is God's otherwise mostly superfluous instruction to proceed to put everything in order. It seems that God is stressing the distinction between the two kinds of work: first making, then organizing. There is a space of time between the completion of the work sometime during the first year, and the setting up of the tabernacle at the beginning of the new year. These divisions between the activities of making and governing constitute a striking sequel to God's Sabbath, which divide and bound God's two identical kinds of activities in Genesis.¹⁵

In the law codes of Exodus 23:12-19 and 34:21-26, the Sabbath appears juxtaposed with the three festivals in which the people shall "go up to see the face of YHWH." The first of these, the festival of unfermented cakes (matsot), is instituted by God prior to the liberation from Egypt (12:14 ff.). Both because of its proximity to the Sabbath law in Exodus 23 and 34 and because of Sabbath-like elements in this festival in Exodus 12, it is worth investigating the festival of matsot as in part a precursor institution designed to prepare Israel for the institution of the Sabbath.

God makes clear that this festival is to "serve as a memorial for you [plural]" (12:14). Undoubtedly, much has been written elsewhere about just what is being remembered by this festival. What is of interest here is that like the other two festivals (first-fruits and last-fruits), the festival of matsot celebrates a change in state, a boundary. After the exodus, the people of Israel no longer will do the work of making bricks but will move on to a new kind of activity.¹⁶ What kind of institution would be most appropriate for the celebration? If what is most important is the change of state from brick-making work to a new kind of activity, and if God's Sabbath is the original symbol of this kind of shift (even though Genesis 2 lacks the symbols of oppression and freedom that are involved here), then it seems fitting that Israel should in some way consider the Creation and Sabbath while it celebrates its matsot festival.

This reasoning seems to account for the temporal details of the festival and perhaps also the rule about matsot and leaven.¹⁷ The festival is to be repeated continually from generation to generation, with cyclical regularity. The people are to go evening by evening in counting the days of the festival (12:18), just as the Creation narrative counts the days from evening to evening. Israel is to refrain from leavening bread for the entire week; that is, no bread is to be made. Furthermore, Israel is celebrate not one but two boundary days (the first¹⁸ and seventh), on which an even stricter rule is applied: no work is to be done at all,¹⁹ except insofar as matsot is prepared for eating (12:16). Anyone who eats what is leavened will be "cut off," set apart from Israel in a negative way (12:15, 19),²⁰ while he who does not eat what is leavened will be set apart from the first kind in a positive way, as a member of the assembly of Israel (12:19).

Perhaps most important to the present subject, each of the two boundary days is named as a holy day (12:16). Will Israel understand, can Israel at this point possibly understand, what it means to respect the sanctity of the holy days? Israel in fact has no hope to understand God's words to Moses except insofar as Moses relays the words to them. When Moses speaks to the people about the festival, during the exodus itself (13:3-10), Moses makes several important mistakes, temporal and thematic.

Temporally, Moses delays the institution of the festival. According to Moses, the festival is not to begin until God has brought the people into the promised land (13:5). God seems to correct this mistake when the festival ordinances are repeated in 23:14 and 34:18.²¹ Also, God had said that the whole seven days (or at the very least, the first day) would be a festival (hag) and that the two boundary days would be specially holy, but Moses names the seventh day as the hag and ignores the idea that the boundary days are holy (13:6). The only symbol of holiness that Moses mentions is the strict instruction (more strict than in God's formulation) that "no leaven is to be seen with you within all your boundaries" (13:7). Worse, instead of repeating God's instruction that there should be no work (12:16), Moses twice uses the word work to describe the celebration (13:5). Without the instruction about the holiness of the two holy days and without the instruction not to work, the people are left with an impoverished view of the full meaning of the festival of matsot.²² The historical part of the festival (that is, celebrating the exodus) is clear enough, and part of the surface meaning of the festival (eating matsot and celebrating in general) is fairly straightforward, but the spiritual meaning of the festival--among other things, understanding what holiness is and how to respond to it--has been left obscure to the people of Israel.

This is Israel's ambiguous spiritual context, with which we may profitably approach the institution of the Sabbath for Israel. Before moving forward, let us also set the dramatic context. The first real peace of Israel after 430 years comes at the springs of Elim after the final escape (15:27). In addition to abundant water in twelve springs, Elim has seventy palm trees; both items symbolize peace, and both numbers (twelve and seventy) symbolize completeness. The people for the first time are said to set up camp. God is already bringing the healing mentioned in 15:26.

This peace is also a kind of boundary condition between the wanderings beforehand and the wanderings afterward. It is another precursor of the Sabbath as I have described it, not just a peaceful rest as the "rest tradition" notes, but a kind of refreshment and preparation for another kind of work ahead. It is not rest for its own sake, but for the sake of further action.

For Israel, the further action consists of the test of faith and of respect for what is holy that Israel is about to undergo. The departure from Elim sets up quite nicely the uncertainty of the outcome of this test (16:1). Israel now is in a "between" state, in the wilderness "which is between Elim and Sinai," exactly one month after the Passover (that is, the fifteenth day of the second month beginning with the month of Abib). Israel, refreshed at Elim, is ready for the test.

I recognize that a significant part of Israel's test "as to whether they will walk in my [God's] law or not" (16:4; cf. 16:28) consists of Israel's relation to God, that is, to Israel's faith in God's abundant provision and Israel's trust in God's promise. One result of the experience with the manna is that Israel "will know that I am the Lord your [plural] God" (16:12). But the explicit part of the test consists of Israel's relation to God's law, the test whether or not Israel will respect the Sabbath. These ideas are connected, for if the people really trusted in God's provision, they could respect the Sabbath without anxiety. But it is important to remember that the festival of matsot has already been established; this festival already celebrates God's provision and trustworthiness, while God's attempt to teach Israel about holiness through this festival has gone ignored by Moses. What seems to be most at stake for Israel in the institution of the Sabbath is what Moses has neglected: an increased sense of (1) God's holiness as it is expressed through God's law, (2) what holiness is, and (3) what the proper response to holiness should be.

In this narrative Moses does recognize at least minimally that God's law is holy, if we can take him at his word. When the chiefs of the assembly report that the manna has doubled on the sixth day, Moses remembers that this is what God had promised in 16:5, and says that the next day will be shabbaton shabbat-qodesh ("a Sabbath, a holy rest").²³ Moses also says that the observance of the Sabbath is to (or for) the Lord. Nevertheless, some of the people do not believe Moses, and they search for manna anyway (16:27). These people trust neither God nor Moses, nor do they have any sense of the sanctity of the Sabbath. As a result, God must make more clear that the Sabbath is to be kept holy and that too much activity on the Sabbath will profane it. In what looks like an increase in the strictness of the Sabbath law, then, God commands that each person must "remain in his own place" on the Sabbath day (16:29). With this added command, it appears that the people learn that the Sabbath is the day of rest, for they do rest (16:30). But it is not at all assured that the people remember Moses' words that the Sabbath is holy, or that they even know what holiness is.

It is important that the people remember God's provision, which Aaron memorializes as an omerful of manna in a jar (the doing of which, according to Moses, God has commanded). But this serves to make the manna seem more holy than the Sabbath. One reason the Sabbath is so hard to keep is that the manna jar can be filled once for all time, but the Sabbath must be observed every seventh day forever. Furthermore, the people appear to be more impressed by the abundant manna on the sixth day than by the absent manna on the seventh day. Even if the Sabbath has been understood as a day of rest, it has not yet been understood (except perhaps by Moses) as a day of holiness. More instruction about the Sabbath is needed. Just as the people will only depart from the wilderness of Sin "by stages" (17:1), more symbolic preparation may be needed as well.

Exodus 19 provides good symbolic instruction to the people about holiness, if they are attentive enough to understand the symbols. I will give only a brief treatment of part of the chapter. In 19:10-13, God tells Moses how he should make the people holy: they must clean their mantles so as to be ready for the third day. If holiness must recognize a clean break between one state and another, and if the first day and the last day are only partial days, a middle day--a boundary day--is essential to the symbol of sanctification.²⁴ Therefore it is fitting that the people must be made ready for the third day.²⁵ Exodus 19 is also the chapter in which the boundary between the people and God on the mountain, and keeping the mountain sacred (19:23), become important. These concrete, visual signs of purification and sanctification serve as a useful preparation for understanding the holiness of an abstract temporal object such as the Sabbath.

This is about as far as I will investigate the relation of the Sabbath to the people. My related aim, as I stated earlier, is to examine the relationship of God to the Sabbath as this relationship is expressed in Exodus. One goal of the preceding paragraphs is to show that the issue of the meaning of the Sabbath is very important to Israel's understanding of holiness, without which Israel could not understand its role as a holy nation. Rest is only one part of the Sabbath, while holiness may be the greater part. In the following paragraphs, I try to see how far the themes of holiness and division, the idea of a sacred period between two kinds of activity, can account for the placement of the passages that refer to the Sabbath. In some cases only the theme of rest is evident, but in others the themes of holiness and division are significant.

In the Decalogue (Exodus 20), it is common to remark that the commandment to observe the Sabbath (20:8-11) marks a transition between the commandments regarding God and the commandments regarding other people.

The explicit reason for the holiness of the Sabbath is that God pronounced it to be holy, but it is not enough to say that God blessed it simply because He rested on that day. It feels inadequate to remember it for the sake of mere rest, the day on which nothing happened. We should want to know what it means that God rested. I have suggested that it means that God chose to stress the distinction between the six days of working by creating and all of the following days of working by governing the creatures. In other words I have said that the holiness comes not through mere inactivity but in the shifting of attention from one kind to other kind. The next step is to notice that if this commandment is counted as the fourth of the ten, it is also the first of the series of seven. As such the Sabbath obeys its own rule; it divides on the basis of two kinds, leaving six commandments (representing days, to stretch the metaphor) on one side. It is not only the end of a series of seven, but it can also be the beginning of a series of seven.

It is important to note that in this passage, the theme of God's abundant provision is absent, unless the Creation itself is counted. The theme of provision is separable here, as it was not in the passage about the manna. Other "rest tradition" themes are absent here--there is no joy, peace, protection from enemies, eternal worship, or promise of land (nor is there the opposite in any of these cases). The theme of completion remains, though, supported in part by the apparently full list of seven kinds of beings who ought not to work.

The reverse is the case in the Sabbath formulation of Exodus 23:12. Holiness is not mentioned,²⁶ and division is practically absent from the verse. Instead, relief and refreshment are the salient ideas.

The Sabbath here looks more like an act of mercy for those who serve. Nevertheless, I have said that relief, refreshment, and healing are not merely good in themselves, but good also because they facilitate further action.²⁷ And is there anything that this formulation of the Sabbath divides? Just as the Sabbath separated (or provided a transition for) the duties to God and the duties to man in Exodus 20, here the Sabbath does the same, but in the reverse. Preceding 23:12 are rules for treating alien residents with mercy and for giving the land its own rest;²⁸ after 23:12 are expositions of the rule against false gods and of the festivals to the Lord. This division is not between making and governing, but it is a boundary all the same.

In the repetition of this set of instructions in Exodus 34, the Sabbath commandment (34:21) divides the commandments about the three festivals. But otherwise the verse seems only to stress that the Sabbath is of a greater value than plowing and harvesting. The point here may be that any pride attendant on food production is to be interrupted by a periodic remembrance of God as the only true Creator. The same point may hold for the mention of the Sabbath at 31:12-17 and 35:1 in connection with the building of the tabernacle.

But the mention of the Sabbath at 31:12-17 does much more than limit the pride of the tabernacle builders.²⁹ Coming at the end of God's long set of instructions to Moses, it again occurs that verses about the Sabbath serve the literary purpose of dividing sections of the text. Also, this time the Sabbath is referred to as an everlasting covenant. The passage uses the usual covenant language: "between me and between the sons of Israel . . ." (31:17). The Sabbath in fact is a very appropriate institution to make into a covenant, because both covenants and Sabbaths, in my reading, are things "between." Both are institutions that make clear the difference between one thing and another but which also connect them in some way.

Also in this passage, God finally makes about as clear as possible the status of the Sabbath in relation to holiness and to Israel. As I described above, what is to be understood includes: (1) God's holiness as it is expressed through God's law, (2) what holiness is, and (3) what the proper response to holiness should be (these three topics fold into one another). God does give a more complete account of these items here, even though many of these words have been said piecemeal before. The Sabbath draws its meaning, God repeats, from the Creation narrative, because God both rested and refreshed Himself before taking further action in the world (31:17). God is the one ultimately responsible for making the people holy (31:13). The Sabbath is holy both to God (31:15) and to the people (31:14); it is a holy institution incumbent upon the people wherever they are. Holiness for the people is that which, when profaned, results in death, and that which, when not respected, results in being cut off from the rest of the people (31:14-15). Holiness therefore is both what sets apart (for example, God and the Sabbath are both holy in this way) and what is set apart as the good part or as one of the good parts (this category includes the Sabbath too). The proper response to holiness is to do whatever is possible to keep the holy things holy and to keep the good things separated from the bad things.³⁰ The sign of keeping the Sabbath holy is to model³¹ what God has done: to remain at rest on the Sabbath day so as to keep in mind the distinction between Creator and creature and the distinction between making and governing. Though the latter distinction is only implied in these verses, it looms large here at the end of the instructions regarding Moses' role as governor of the building of the tabernacle. Perhaps, after all this preparation and many false starts, Moses is finally ready to truly hear what God is saying to him about Israel's place regarding holiness and the Sabbath.

Perhaps this is why, after Moses finally comes down the mountain for the last time in Exodus, he begins his speech with instructions about the Sabbath. For the first time, Moses might really know something about the essence of the Sabbath, and we might believe that he speaks the words as though he is saying them truly for the first time:

I think we might see Moses' complete reversal from shabbaton shabbat-qodesh in 16:23 to qodesh shabbat shabbaton in 35:2, putting the "holy" part of the phrase first, as a marker of Moses' more solid understanding of the Sabbath. But something is unsatisfying about the third verse. When did God say anything about fire? Something is amiss. More instruction may be needed . . .

God is not only the God of division, but also the God of reconciliation and peace. In Genesis and Exodus we have seen little about God's permanence and we have seen relatively few instances of reconciliation or reconstruction or healing. Symbols of permanence are dangerous because any symbol of permanence would have to be permanent itself, and it might be mistaken for the divine, just as the heavenly bodies may sometimes be mistaken for the divine. But fire may be a fitting symbol. Indeed, in the final verse of Exodus (40:38; cf. 13:21), God sends fire over the tabernacle as the marker of His presence. In Leviticus 6:8-13, the law of the burnt offering, God commands that the fire on the altar must never go out; it must be tended every day (cf. Ex. 29:42 and note 11 above). At the end of Exodus, Moses thinks he is grasping something about fire, and it just may be that God has some instruction for Moses in this domain as well.