Baruch J. Schwartz, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The Sabbath in the Torah Sources

Abstract:

Most studies of the biblical Sabbath are historical: they aim to determine when and where the weekly cessation from labor originated and to arrange the texts in accord with a developmental theory. Few scholars have diverged from this, notably M. Tsevat, who attempted to find a common feature underlying all of the texts and thus to ascertain the “basic meaning” of the Biblical Sabbath, as distinct from the (in his view) secondary meanings assigned to it by the legal texts. This paper will consider the Sabbath laws from the strictly source-critical perspective, and will show that each of the three sources J, E and P has its own unique and independent view of the Sabbath, whereas the view of D is characteristically dependent upon that of E. The return to simplicity in the source-division, the acknowledgment of J, E and P as independent documents, the exercise of greater precision in assigning the texts to their respective authors and the avoidance of resorting to a ubiquitous and omnipotent “redactor” combine to provide solutions to a few of the critical and exegetical issues in Genesis 2, Exodus 16, 20 and 31 and Deuteronomy 5, and enable us to observe a little-known feature of J.