Ezra W. Zuckerman Sivan
Children who grow up in Shabbat-observing households learn to develop a fine-tuned, deeply embodied intuition for what is proscribed on Shabbat and what is allowed or even encouraged. But those of us who must coordinate our lives with people who are unfamiliar with Shabbat observance often struggle to explain the logic behind these parameters. Even our closest, most sympathetic friends who are given a sense of the beauty of the Shabbat experience, and even those who can appreciate that there may be something very valuable in a collective break from quotidian life every seventh day, may find it hard to grasp what is allowed and what is not.
We, in turn, often struggle to explain the method to our madness. It certainly does not help to explain that Shabbat proscriptions are derived from the 39 types of melakhah or ‘creative labor’ delineated by the rabbis. For one thing, anyone who is conversant with the Torah will reasonably ask where these 39 types can be found, and they will most likely not be satisfied by the claim that they can be derived from the set of actions taken to build the Tabernacle. After all, this idea is not explicit in the biblical text. Particularly if our friend is Christian, they may even begin to harbor the suspicion that the rabbis invented a legal framework out of whole cloth. It does not help that the rabbis themselves acknowledged that the laws of Shabbat are “suspended as if on a strand of hair” (Hagigah 1:8) without providing a rationale for why this is nonetheless theologically justifiable.
Meanwhile, if our friend is a scholar who is aware that the sabbath cycle is the historical foundation for the temporal platform we know today as the seven-day week,[1] they might also be puzzled. Such a scholar should expect that just as the origin of civil calendars has a straightforward logic (for dating contracts and public events requiring substantial investment and planning), and just as the origin of ancient market cycles has a straightforward (commercial) logic, the same would be true of the sabbath cycle. But what is the logic underlying the idea that Shabbat is based in Tabernacle construction?
In resolving this puzzle, observe first that the rabbis in fact had quite a good scriptural foundation for grounding the parameters of Shabbat observance in Tabernacle construction. As pointed out by many commentators, the Torah twice links Shabbat observance to Tabernacle construction – first in God issuing a warning to the people, through Moses, that they must not engage in Tabernacle-building on Shabbat (Exodus 31:13), and then in Moses providing a special preamble on Shabbat observance (including the news that its violation is a capital offense and that it is forbidden to light fires on Shabbat) before the command to build the Tabernacle (35:2-3). In addition, the term melakhah is almost never used in the Torah except in the context of Shabbat and Tabernacle-construction. This, moreover, is part of a much deeper set of literary connections (noticed by many commentators)[2] between the Torah’s account (in Genesis 1-2:3) of God’s creating the world as a place for humankind to dwell in God’s world and its account (in Exodus 35-40) of the building of the Tabernacle as a place for God to dwell in the human world. Finally, R. Yoel Bin-Nun has shown convincingly (and uncovered an independent tradition preserved in the Midrash Hagadol of David bar Amram al-Adani of 14th century Yemen) that the tradition of 39 categories seems to be anchored in the 39 newly constructed elements that are (twice) described in constructing the Tabernacle and the priestly vestments.[3]
Once we accept the premise that the Torah goes out of its way to ground the laws of Shabbat in Tabernacle construction, the heart of the puzzle comes more quickly into view. Or at least it should, perhaps especially if we don’t take the Shabbat for granted and instead imagine a world where the sabbath cycle (and week more generally) is unknown. This is the deeper puzzle that our Christian or scholarly friend might wonder about: the logic of the Shabbat-Tabernacle link. We might frame the puzzle as follows:
Say you were God and you were intent on establishing the Shabbat cycle as a perpetual institution when, prior to this, there had been no such institution– no continuous, globally synchronous, cycle of days, let alone one that pivots on a day in which ‘creative labor’ is forbidden.[4] There were many ways you could distinguish such labor from other activities. What would make you choose Tabernacle construction for this purpose rather than any other productive activity?
Another way of putting this question is to wonder why the Torah (or would-be inventor of the sabbath cycle) is so focused on construction workers. They are only a small fraction of society at any point in time. Why should their experience be paramount? One might be tempted to beg this question, by proposing that the link to construction– at least in the rabbinic interpretations of the 39 types of melakhah– is so diffuse that the link to construction is essentially invisible and unimportant. But then doesn’t that defeat whatever purpose the Torah had in linking Tabernacle construction and Shabbat? If it’s meant to be general, don’t link it to the Tabernacle!
In what follows, I will offer a resolution to this puzzle. In short, I will suggest that Tabernacle-construction is in fact an exquisite and inspiring choice for setting the parameters of Shabbat observance because it signals a deep message about the threat of authoritarian tyranny with Shabbat (and therefore the week) instituted as a bulwark against such tyranny. Put differently, a polity in which authorities are committed to Shabbat is one in which they are restrained in what they can demand and extract from the individuals and communities who are subject to their power. Put even more succinctly: Looming behind Shabbat is the threat of mass enslavement, with Shabbat as its antidote.
This message may not be very clear to us on a typical Shabbat. But it becomes tragically clearer in situations like Hamas captivity when Jews are prevented from observing Shabbat. And it is certainly clear in situations like Nazi concentration camps where Jews were forced to engage in nonstop work, especially of a demeaning or dangerous nature. Such conditions may be outside our personal experience, but they have occurred at many times in history. In fact, and as we shall see, the Torah itself describes how Israel was subject to such conditions when they were drafted into large-scale construction projects – with the glaring exception of the Tabernacle project. So what’s hard for us to see today would have been quite clear to the ancient audience for the Torah. And as we will see, the Rabbinic Sages were quite attuned to this message of the Torah’s as well.
The 19th Century West as Entry Point
To see the Tabernacle-Shabbat construction in a new light, it is useful to reflect on something else we may take for granted– how rare it is in the history of settled civilization for the question of how much time the common members of society[5] should devote to work to be prominent in public discourse.
To be sure, this question has significant prominence today, and it had even greater prominence in the 19th and early 20th centuries in the West. Starting with the early stages of the industrial revolution in Britain, various forms of this question rose to the fore. The question of how many days per week should be devoted to work would not become a major focus for another century or so, as it was not yet imaginable that it could be possible or feasible for work to be limited to as few as five days a week. But it is obvious that the entire 24-hour cycle cannot be devoted to work, at least not by a single person, and so the question of how many of those hours should be allocated to work was quite salient. In particular, the idea of “8 hours for work, 8 hours for rest, and 8 hours for what you will” was promoted by the Welsh capitalist and social reformer Robert Owen in the 1820s and adopted by the British and American labor movements by the 1880s, where it became a cause celebre. In the 1910s, Henry Ford became world renowned, in part due to his commitment to an 8-hour day. And it was finally enshrined into federal law in the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, together with the 40-hour week (with 150% pay mandated for hourly workers who go beyond these limits). Since then, the issue of the length of the work day has largely died down, though a series of 4-day workweek movements have arisen over the ensuing decades.
A few moments’ reflection is sufficient to explain why the question of how much time workers should work rose to such importance in the 19th century. Before the industrial revolution, the vast majority of workers worked in agriculture or occupations that were shaped by the economic and social rhythms of agriculture. Those rhythms can be extremely demanding, especially during high seasons when the work often exceeds the number of hands available and there is enormous time pressure to get the work done for fear of economic loss. We should thus not be surprised that of the three major pieces of legislation in world history that introduce restrictions on the work week, each pays special attention to the often overwhelming demands of farming. In particular, Constantine’s Sunday laws of the 320s CE and the U.S. Fair Labor Standards Act each provides a special carve out for agriculturists. For its part, the Torah insists (Exodus 34: 21) that Israelite farmers must observe Shabbat even during plowing and harvest seasons.[6]
Whereas the demands of agriculture on worker time were ancient and well-known by the early 19th century, there was something dramatically new afoot. On the one hand, the commodity capitalism of the 19th century entailed intense pressure for owners of “the means of production” (in Marx’s influential language) to extract as much labor as they could get from workers.[7] This was because capitalists would borrow significant sums to obtain the real estate and machinery necessary for extracting or producing commodities at high volume, with special intensity at periods when demand was very high. This pressure was so great because if a given capitalist did not supply the market at times when the commodity was scarce (and profits were therefore high), rivals were sure to get there first and drive him into bankruptcy. This dynamic would regularly lead to oversupply, with market crashes, the failure of producers and banks, and a starving proletariat. This in turn motivated workers to take any job they could get under as dangerous and onerous conditions as were available. And so the cycle restarted. Moreover, in addition to getting as much time from workers as they could, capitalists cared a great deal about the specific shifts that workers were in the factory. This is because both the scale and the complexity of operations was increasing, and workers needed to be present at the same time to coordinate their work with one another.
But these pressures on workers are insufficient to explain why the question of how much time to devote to work became so central to (and so contested in) public discourse. To flesh out our explanation, recall that the very same period of increasing industrialization was also the period of increasing democratization. In short, if the Industrial Revolution transformed peasants and craftsmen into workers, the American and French Revolutions transformed subjects into citizens. And these citizens were increasingly assertive of their rights, with growing attention to better working terms and conditions. Moreover, with the rise of modern and distributed communication technologies, citizen-workers were better able to organize and press their claims.
If the revolutionary conditions of the 19th century drove the question of the time devoted to work vs. non-work to greater prominence in public discourse than at any time in history, this was not the first time such questions were prominent. Notably however, each such case can be understood as resulting from the presence of some version of the 19th century conditions. In particular, not only are there cases where peasants or serfs revolted due to the onerous demands (including on their time) placed on them by landowners, but there are cases such as the textile workers of the 14th century Ciompi Revolt in Florence, whose grievances anticipate those of industrial laborers half a millennium later. Put differently, it is hard to see why such questions would be prominent in a given culture unless a production system had arisen that created strong incentives for employers to extract as much labor time as possible from regular people and the workers had some ability to “cry out” from the onerous work (Exodus 2:23) and be heard.
Corvée as Key Context for Exodus and Shabbat
As the reference in the prior sentence suggests, one way to read the opening chapters of the book of Exodus is as a critique of the employment system that most resembles capitalism before its rise: the “corvée” — a system in which a king or ruler taxes the time of peasants or commoners, by having them participate in public works projects for significant portions of a year. This system has gone by many names in world history, but historians have come to use this French term in the wake of the French Revolution; resentment about the corvée was a central theme in the cahiers de doleances (lists of grievances) that animated the revolution. There was nothing particularly unusual about the pre-revolutionary French version of this system. If we review the history of large scale, settled civilizations (from China to the Near East to Mesoamerica), any time we observe major public works projects, the basic assumption among historians and archeologists is that the work was done by workers who were drafted for months at a time (often outside the most intense periods of the agricultural cycle) by the king.
Accordingly, it is widely accepted among academic bible scholars[8] that the opening chapters of the book of Exodus are describing a corvée system, and the same goes for the construction of Solomon’s Temple in I Kings (6-7). In neither case do these systems exhibit the hallmarks of slavery as it was practiced in the Caribbean or United States,[9] in which workers were commodities to be bought and sold by private enslavers who frequently separated family members from one another. Nor do these systems exhibit the hallmarks of slavery common throughout history and particularly the ancient Near East as referenced elsewhere in the Torah, in which enslavement occurs via kidnapping (Genesis 37:28), conquest (Joshua 9:22-27) or debt peonage (Genesis 47:19). Rather, Exodus 1 describes a large-scale construction project run by the state for which workers (including native Egyptians) are drafted. And I Kings (5:27-28) is explicit in describing how this draft worked:
King Solomon imposed a labor draft on all Israel; the levy came to 30,000 men. He sent them to the Lebanon in shifts of 10,000 a month: they would spend one month in the Lebanon and two months at home. Adoniram was in charge of the labor draft.
In many attested cases of corvée in the ancient world, workers apparently supported the project and were treated humanely, and sometimes quite well.[10] Accordingly, corvée contracts in Mesopotamia exhibit reasonable terms of work (including regular days off, though apparently without giving all workers off at the same time).[11] The biblical stories of corvée deviate from these patterns, in that they describe suffering and/or resentment at the corvée, eventually leading to its failure and to a successful, divinely sanctioned rebellion by the workers.
To be sure, since I Kings does not describe working conditions or day-to-day rhythms under Solomon’s corvée, it is unclear whether it was harder on workers than typical ancient Near Eastern corvée systems. Seemingly not. Solomon gave workers one month off out of three (I Kings 5:28); he “did not reduce any Israelites to slavery ‘-v-d” (9:22) as he did non-Israelites (9:20-21). Moreover, the northern tribes’ petition for relief merely asks for a lessening of the workload, not the elimination of the corvée (12:7), which by then had been institutionalized and applied to other public works projects (9:15). Indeed, the northern tribes explicitly pledge to serve (‘-v-d) Rehoboam in perpetuity (12:7). It may thus be that the source of the northern tribes’ resentment was ultimately political, deriving less from any mistreatment than from the fact that they were subjected to corvée by a Judean monarch. Certainly, it didn’t help that the young and insecure Rehoboam rejected the elders’ advice to accede to the request (and frame his role as the people’s servant [‘-v-d]; 12:7) but instead accepted the advice of his fellow “children” of the court and responded with:
My father made your yoke heavy, but I will add to your yoke; my father flogged you with whips, but I will flog you with scorpions. (12:11)[12]
But if the biblical lessons about what is problematic about Solomon’s corvée are subtle and political, this is hardly the case for the Pharaonic systems described in Exodus. The Torah is clear (Exodus 1:8-10) that Pharaoh’s corvée is a ruse by which to subjugate the Israelites and thereby neutralize a political threat, one likely made more effective by the majority’s resentment towards an erstwhile pariah minority that appeared complicit in the majority’s prior enslavement.[13] And while the first incarnation of the corvée described in chapter 1 culminates in a program of infanticide (one that would ostensibly undermine the corvée by eliminating its male workers); in the Pharaonic corvée’s second incarnation eighty years later (Exodus 5), it culminates in a program that echoes Nazi concentration camps in its divide and conquer system of control and in its explicit effort to break the spirit of the workers. This is not typical corvée. Rather, the reader is treated to two dramatic illustrations of what can happen when an otherwise difficult but potentially fair system for mobilizing popular contributions to important public projects is warped and corrupted by tyrants bent on subjugation.
As I discuss in a previous Lehrhaus essay, chapter 5 of Exodus also hints at an antidote to this system – i.e,. the institution of Shabbat. Based on a midrash in which the Sages described this as a moment in which Pharaoh abrogated a sabbath cycle which Moses had persuaded his step grandfather, the previous pharaoh, to introduce,[14] I suggested that this chapter can be usefully labeled “Pharaoh’s anti-shabbat tantrum.”[15] The textual clues to this midrashic idea are abundant, from the fact that the first time a biblical character references the verb sh-b-t is in the context of Pharaoh’s incredulity that Moses and Aaron would be foolish enough to give the people a rest from their work; to the repeated insistence that work be conducted ‘day after day’; to the use of the rare sabbath-related root k-sh-sh to describe the pernicious social competition that threatens the Shabbat; to the strong intertextual links to chapter 16 (known traditionally as “parashat ha-man”), when a system of work (for collecting food, the manna) is instituted that resembles the rhythm of the brutal Pharaonic corvée in its daily gathering activity on the surface, but with major and radical differences: the workers were gathering life-sustaining food rather than useless bits of straw; they were not competing with one another because there was enough for everyone; and they enjoyed a full day of rest every seven days when they could enjoy the (divine) king’s bounty “without any fear.” (Micah 4:4; cf., I Kings 5:5).[16]
With these textual elements and themes in mind, the aforementioned midrash’s elaboration on Exodus 5 hardly seems fanciful:
It teaches us that they (the Israelites) had in their hands scrolls with which they would divert themselves/seek salvation from Shabbat to Shabbat. When Pharaoh said to them, “the work will (now) become (an even) heavier (burden) upon you such that you will do it and not be diverted/find salvation in false matters (Exodus 5:9)” (he means) ‘Don’t be diverted/find salvation’ i.e., you (can’t be allowed) to rest/exhale on Shabbat.[17]
The deep point here is clear: a king – or large-scale employer such as the 19th century commodity capitalist – who in his bid for control has so distorted the system of production such that it has become a system of pure subjugation – cannot afford to give the workers any extended time off. And he certainly cannot give his effective slaves off at the very same time, such that they have the capacity to engage in their own civil society’s activities and culture. They will soon come to conspire against the tyrant, won’t they? Such a tyrant may even see threats in the people’s engagement in diversions and cultural activities. Give them an inch and they will take a foot.
The Shabbat-Tabernacle Link as Commitment to Popular Welfare
Readers of the chapters describing the construction of the Tabernacle (Exodus 35-40; read this past Shabbat and the upcoming one) or of the instructions on building and consecrating it (Exodus 25-31) do not usually consider this project in the context of the opening chapters of Exodus. After all, the Israelites’ contribution to the Tabernacle construction is depicted as voluntary and indeed enthusiastic (36:7). But we should not take this enthusiasm for granted. On the contrary, the very fact that Exodus is bookended by construction projects invites us to consider each case as a counterfactual to the other. After all, each case begins with a king (Pharaoh in the former, God in the latter) confiding in advisors (Pharaoh’s court in the former, Exodus 1:9-10; Moses in the latter, 25-31) about his plans for a massive construction project in which the people will contribute their time and creative energies (and in the case of the Tabernacle, their valuables).
If it seems a stretch to link Pharaoh’s corvée systems with the construction of the Tabernacle[18] where no corvée is described, this link is strengthened when we consider that Solomon’s construction of the Temple was clearly a corvée system and that it is thematically and intertextually linked, both to Tabernacle construction[19] and to Pharaoh’s corvée.[20] The latter connection is clearer when we consider that Solomon’s corvée is linked to the devolution of Solomon’s kingdom into warring northern and southern kingdoms, each led by ruthless and godless leaders. As noted by many commentators, while on the surface the text of chapters 4-9 presents an inspiring vision of a unified, prosperous, peaceful, and god-fearing kingdom (punctuated by the Shabbat-resonant vision of each man living under his own vine and fig tree; I Kings 5:5),[21] the subtext presents a king who is becoming increasingly prone to concentrating power in himself backed by a cult of personality. Similarly, while we have seen that there may have been nothing explicitly problematic about Solomon’s corvée, it risked sowing resentment among northern tribes. The lesson is that even the greatest genius in the history of Israel’s leadership can fail to manage such production systems well – perhaps because he is too taken with his own genius and doesn’t appreciate that it will die with him.
The warnings associated with the biblical presentations of corvée should lead us to appreciate the message of the Torah’s depiction of Tabernacle construction and to be amazed by the significance of the Torah’s linking it to the parameters of Shabbat. In short, the Shabbat emerges as what modern game theorists call a “commitment device.” This is when a “player” who has multiple options for action chooses to give up one of those options in a way that thereby reduces his power and makes it harder for him to realize his ostensible goals. We should therefore not be surprised that there is no evidence in world history of a king instituting a general rest day for the entire populace, certainly not one that applies even during a corvée (or during high agricultural season, when large landowners and traders will be especially impatient). The issue is not merely that such a king will constrain the amount of labor time he can extract (and thereby suffer the inefficiencies of low “capacity utilization”). It is also that (as the midrash on Exodus 5 suggests), regular universal breaks increase the risks of rebellion.
But now consider a key implication. If you are a king (or a private employer) and you know that you are bound by a commitment to provide regular, universal breaks to your workers, you will surely treat them more benevolently, and indeed be solicitous of them to understand their needs and desires. It becomes important to you to figure out what it takes to prevent thoughts of rebellion from entering your workers’/subjects’/citizens’ minds and discourse. On the contrary. You will be more inclined to work with them to find how collective projects – which will always require sacrifices of time and creative energy – can be designed to promote the people’s understanding of its welfare.
In his landmark book Created Equal,[22] Joshua Berman makes a complementary point. He argues that whereas proclamations of debt release were widely used by ancient Near Eastern kings to reward their subjects for exhibiting the behavior he desired, the Torah is unique in mandating such releases on a set (seven-year) schedule outside of kingly discretion. For the latter, Berman writes,
the unscheduled and sudden nature of the enactments… would be crucial to their efficacy. Like the devaluation of currency in modern times, the proclamations of debt release cannot appear too predictable, or measures will be taken to circumvent them. By contrast, the Bible addresses debt release as prospective in nature, with the intention that the people will alter their affairs accordingly. Yet surely only a fool will extend a loan knowing that he would not be able to exact repayment. It would thus seem inevitable that credit would dry up within such a system. Yet this goes to the heart of a proper understanding of biblical ‘law’: the (codes) are themselves presented as a body of teaching. The purpose of biblical law is to shape the form of the polity, not merely to address cases and provide remedy.[23]
The resolution to the puzzle at the outset of this essay is thus straightforward. Why would the inventor of the week – on the Torah’s account, God and His agent Moses – define the parameters of the sabbath cycle via the construction of the Tabernacle? The answer is that the institution thereby encodes within it a powerful message about the dangers of tyranny and a device for addressing these dangers.
The Shabbat is thus a remarkable commitment device instituted in the name of a benevolent and far-seeing divine sovereign, one who realizes that a better social order can be built if they constrain their human agents and their successors from using all of their power to control and exploit the people. Indeed, as Berman suggests, the king in such a system has relatively limited capacity to use his discretion to reward workers with “release” for exhibiting the behavior he deems desirable (and which may not be in the public interests). But such constraints commit the king to granting a societal schedule that allows the people to regularly gather outside the king’s control. And it thereby redirects them to renew their culture and creative energy towards the public welfare.
Of course, the people can often be their worst enemy, given how pernicious competition among them can undermine social cooperation. Indeed, I have argued that while Shabbat-observing Jews have a strong intuition for how the Shabbat reinforces social cooperation and collective identity, the Torah hints that when the sabbath cycle was new, it would have exacerbated the fragility of such cooperation at a particularly vulnerable moment in the people’s history.[24] This explains why Shabbat-desecration was a capital crime, and why the Torah goes out of its way to describe how a Shabbat-violator (depicted as a threat to the social order known by modern social science as a “commons-raider”) received such punishment (Numbers 15:32-36).
A paradox thus emerges at the foundation of the Shabbat (and thus the week itself). On the one hand, the Torah mandates a shockingly strict level of enforcement of Shabbat rules by powerful authorities,[25] which is motivated by the effort to counter the “horizontal competition” that threatens the Shabbat (and the restoration of creativity,[26] social cooperation, collective identity, and faith in God it is intended to cultivate). But on the other hand, the Torah also mandates a shockingly strict set of limits on powerful authorities due to its recognition that the Shabbat and all of its benefits, including political ones, are also threatened by “vertical competition”– i.e, the tendency of powerful actors to exploit the common people. At the heart of the Shabbat is deep wisdom about both a) when and how public institutions can be used to constrain the people’s worst collective tendencies and shape their best tendencies; and b) when and how public institutions can be used to constrain political authorities’ worst tendencies and bring out their best tendencies.
Conclusion: The Inspiring Political Theology of Shabbat
The parameters of Shabbat observance – and the weekly cycle for which they laid the foundation – thus carry a powerful and inspiring message that is at once theological and political. This message is also deeply humanistic, in that it addresses humanity’s worst collective tendencies with a revolutionary solution. To be sure, the solution is hardly a failsafe. After all, Solomon’s failures occurred in a society that had been given the laws of Shabbat and presumably lived by them. Moreover, if the Torah’s model is meant to curtail the ability of human kings to exploit the people and it generally seeks to promote the people’s welfare, it hardly grants sovereignty to the people as modern revolutions claimed to do (even when they were more clearly giving power to the revolutionaries).[27] At the same time, though, it cuts the king down to size, building a set of institutions and norms that greatly constrain him and effectively render him an equal to his fellows.[28] In the Torah, there is a clear, abiding, sovereign: God.
In an insightful essay,[29] Matitiahu Tsevat argued that since the laws of the seven-year sabbatical cycle and the laws of Shabbat are linked by the same unique phrase “Shabbat to/for God,”[30] they must be motivated by a parallel theological principle. And while the Torah does not provide an explicit theological rationale for Shabbat, it does so for the sabbatical laws. As such, the former can be derived from the latter. In particular, since the sabbatical laws enshrine the principle that “the land belongs to God” — i.e., God is sovereign over the earth and the people are mere “sojourners on (it)” (Leviticus 25:23) — the Shabbat laws reflect a parallel principle:
Man normally is master of his time. He is free to dispose of it as he sees fit or as necessity binds him. The Israelite is duty-bound, however, once every seven days to assert by word and deed that God is the master of time…. In other words, God’s dominion over space and His dominion over time are largely two aspects of the same thing: His dominion over man and especially over Israel. There is, therefore, nothing incongruous nor bold in the conclusion that every seventh day the Israelite is to renounce dominion over time, thereby renounce autonomy, and recognize God’s dominion over time and thus over himself. Keeping the sabbath is acceptance of the sovereignty of God.[31]
Tsevat’s analysis is persuasive. It is certainly a core message of the Torah’s presentation of Shabbat that God is sovereign over the passage of time. But Tsevat’s rendition of the Torah’s political theology is overly austere and insufficiently humanistic, missing as it does the points developed in the foregoing essay.
The tragic truth is that human beings are never fully the masters of their time, as we face pressures due to our rival efforts to secure resources to ensure our survival and prosperity, and due to the fact that we are always vulnerable to powerful actors and institutions’ efforts to leverage and exploit our time. If one views the matter especially pessimistically, one could go as far as to counter Tsevat with the assertion that humans are ‘normally’ enslaved to one another’s’ efforts to control our time.
Against this predicament, the Torah teaches that God’s sovereignty is a bulwark against such slavery. In fact, it is no mere message, but an institution that was deeply implanted in the day-to-day routines of the people of Israel and remains its practice (and which then spread, after a fashion, to the rest of the world) to this day– despite our competitive tendencies and despite the best efforts of tyrants to run roughshod over it. Merely by continuing to provide a regular taste of the good life, it helps to cut the tyrants down to size and declare God’s benevolent and humanistic sovereignty.
[1] Although internet sources and even some scholarly sources claim that the week emerged prior to its earliest attestations in Israelite/Judean society, or that it was invented independently in Rome, there is in fact no evidence for these claims and very strong reasons to doubt them. This is covered in the book manuscript I am currently completing, and the interested reader can email me for more information. For now, the best source remains Eviatar Zerubavel, The Seven-Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week (University of Chicago Press, 1985). Archived.
[2] For contemporary overviews and syntheses see e.g., Nahum Sarna, Chapter 8 (“The Tabernacle”) in Exploring Exodus: The Heritage of Biblical Israel (Schocken, 1986). R Jonathan Sacks, “Two Narratives of Creation.” Covenant & Conversation, 2007. R Shai Held, “Building a Home for God.” Center for Jewish Leadership and Ideas, 2014.
[3] See Dr. R. Yoel Bin-Nun, “The Textual Source for the 39 Melachot of Shabbat.” TheTorah.Com. The Hebrew original may be downloaded at https://tanach.org/shmot/39Ryoel.doc.
[4] As I have discussed in previous Lehrhaus essays, the plain text of the Torah presents the seven-day week as a new invention that is first introduced in Exodus 16. This reading has a long pedigree in Jewish tradition (consider e.g., elements 10-11 in the text of Dayenu, Jubilees 50:1, and Nehemiah 9) and is best represented by R. Aryeh Kaplan (see his Day of Eternity, pp. 14-15) among modern commentators.
[5] That is, people who have no special status, pedigree, or authority that might give them an unusually high degree of control over their schedules.
[6] This verse is also interpreted as referring to sabbatical law (ee Rashi, ad loc) and to the ‘Omer sacrifice (Menachot 65b)
[7] The conditions of 19th century commodity capitalism are not representative of all forms of capitalism, which can be experienced as emancipatory in various respects. That is certainly true for the market. For an eye-opening example of how regular markets can be experienced as a source of liberation (from slavery), see Natasha Lightfoot, “Sunday Marketing, Contestations over Time, and Visions of Freedom among Enslaved Antiguans After 1800.” The CLR James Journal 13, no. 1 (2007), 109–35.
[8] Sarna, 1986. Op cit.
[9] Note in particular that the Israelites are not treated as chattel, and (accordingly) families are not broken up.
[10] As Steinkeller puts it, “the national building projects” undertaken under Mesopotamian corvée “functioned, at least on one level, as social events, whose spirit was akin to those of public festivals…” And “contrary to the common belief (which goes back to Herodotus, who thought the pyramids were built by an army of slaves numbering 100,000 individuals), these laborers were well treated and amply fed.” Piotr Steinkeller, “Corvée Labor in Ur III Times”. From the 21st Century B.C. to the 21st Century A.D.: Proceedings of the International Conference on Neo-Sumerian Studies Held in Madrid, 22–24 July 2010, edited by Steven J. Garfinkle and Manuel Molina, University Park, USA: Penn State University Press, 2013, 347-424.
[11] Natalia Kozlova, “Absence from Work in Ur III Umma: Reasons and Terminology.” 313-332 in Garfinkle and Molina.
[12] One could read this line as suggesting that Solomon had indeed maltreated the corvée workers. But especially given the hyperbolic nature of this line (referencing whipping via scorpions), he seems to be speaking in metaphorical terms. Again, it is telling that the narrator describes no such maltreatment (cf., the narrator of Exodus) and that the northern workers themselves do not describe such maltreatment.
[13] See Ezra Zuckerman Sivan, “Where is the Justice in the Tenth Plague?” The Lehrhaus, April 18, 2019.
[14] Exodus Rabbah 5:18; cf., 1:28.
[15] See Ezra Zuckerman Sivan, “Between Shabbat and Lynch Mobs.” The Lehrhaus, June 15, 2017
[16] The reference to the famous imagery of the good life under a benevolent king is licensed by the climactic call of Exodus 16:29 “to dwell under” the Shabbat. As I have noted, the only other uses of this phrase in the Bible are in reference to “dwell under a vine and fig leaf” of Micah 4:4 and I Kings 5:5. See Zuckerman Sivan, Ezra. “When Shabbat first provided a Taste of the World to Come,” January 28, 2021.
[17] Exodus Rabbah, 5:18.
[18] Some have noted formal similarities between the Tabernacle layout and the layout of the throne tent of Ramesses II; see, e.g., the visual comparison in Joshua Berman, “Was There An Exodus?”, Mosaic Magazine, March 2, 2015. These parallels pertain to the physical proportions and space demarcations of the two transportable structures, and to their visual symbology; they do not extend to the system of manpower management utilized to produce the components.
[19] For instance, see the use of vayakhel to refer to mobilizing the people at the inception of Tabernacle construction in Exodus 35:1, and at the inception of the dedication of the Temple in I Kings 8:1-2; and see the use of vayechal in the conclusion of each project (Exodus 40:33; I Kings 7:1). See also the descriptions of God’s dwelling (sh-k-n) in the temple/tabernacle (Exodus 25:8, 29:44; 40:35-38; I Kings 6:13 8:12)
[20] See especially the use of the same word mas to refer to the draft of the construction project in each case (Exodus 1:11; I Kings 5:27-28). It’s also notable that the same term is used for the storage cities (‘arei miskenot) commissioned by both Pharaoh (Exodus 1:11) and Solomon (I Kings 9:19).
[21] Zuckerman Sivan, “When Shabbat first provided…”, op cit.
[22] Joshua A Berman. Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought. Oxford, 2008.
[23] Op cit., 99-100.
[24] See especially Zuckerman Sivan, “Between Shabbat… ”Op cit. See also Ezra Zuckerman Sivan, “How to Curtail Pernicious Social Competition: The Legacy of Zelophehad and his Daughters.” The Lehrhaus (July 29, 2019). Ezra Zuckerman Sivan, “The Triple Threat to Social Order.” The Lehrhaus (June 14, 2023).
[25] Notably, these powerful authorities are not kings, but judges. And these judges are expected to follow in Moses’s footsteps (perhaps including his hesitation to employ capital punishment against the wood-gatherer without a divine directive that his successors would not be able to access) and his directive, “Justice, justice you shall pursue” (Deut 16:20). Accordingly, although the rabbis view Shabbat violation as a capital offense, they make the conditions for conviction too high to ever be practicable. See Makkot 1:10; Talmud Bavli, Sanhedrin 57a–59b, 72a, and 107a.
[26] In a recent address to Cong. Shaarei Tefilah in Newton, Mass., Emily Beck suggested that the juxtaposition of the edict to appoint of Bezalel and Oholiab to oversee Tabernacle construction (Exodus 31:1-11) with the injunction to “nonetheless (despite the imperative to build the Tabernacle) observe Shabbat” (31:13)” reflects the importance of Shabbat as a source of renewal for our creative energies.
[27] A fascinating irony is worth noting here. The French and Bolshevik revolutions each introduced radical experiments in the temporal organization of day to day life, the central element of the former being a ten-day cycle and the latter including a five-day shift cycle. These campaigns are also linked in that they were justified by an attempt to rid the system of religious backwardness and to promote the public welfare guided by scientific rationality. But there is in fact no scientific basis for preferring one cycle over another, and these campaigns were widely rejected by the people who cherished the weekly cycle, perhaps in part because it was theirs and could not be claimed by any flesh-and-blood ruler. See 28-43 in Zerubavel, Op cit.
[28] Berman, Op cit.
[29] Matitiahu Tsevat. “The Basic Meaning of the Biblical Sabbath.” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 84: 447-59. 1972.
[30] On Shabbat, see Exodus 16:23-25, 20:10, 31:16; Leviticus 23:3, and Deuteronomy 5:14. On the sabbatical year, see Leviticus 25:2-4.
[31] Op cit., 72. Cf., Berman, Op cit., 100-01.
Site Operations and Technology by The Berman Consulting Group.