The "True" Meaning of the Sabbath?

Reflecting on Creation or Resting from Oppression?

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What if the Sabbath has less to do with God and more to do with humans?

Growing up Seventh-day Adventist, the meaning of the Sabbath was always the same whenever I heard it. Each and every week and with every televangelist sermon on 3ABN, it was consistently reported that the Sabbath was to be understood as “a memorial day for creation.” Sabbath, it was reminded, was a time for reflection on God and worship of him. It was a time intended for humans to turn away from ourselves and toward God.

This idea of the Sabbath as memorial stems from the version of the Sabbath commandment found in the Exodus 20 version of the Ten Commandments. There it states that one should not work on the seventh day because “in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it” (Ex. 20:11).

This is a clear allusion to the creation poem of Genesis 1 and anchors the Sabbath in the idea that if God rested on that day, humanity must imitate him. None of that, of course, says that the Sabbath is meant for worship. Literally, Exodus 20 suggests that if God needed or took rest, we should follow his example. But as you likely know if you’ve had enough conversations about such things, literalists don’t really read everything literally. It’s a selective process that they almost never acknowledge or defend.

So, as a result, instead of taking the text at face value, the reference to Genesis 1 has become “reflective” rather than “imitative.” Now the church rhetoric goes beyond the text and suggests that the reference to Genesis means that we must “remember” not to keep the day, but the history behind the day. Of course, this has simply in the end turned into an elaborate propaganda for “Creationism” and attempts by certain conservatives to attack any evolutionary discussion as fundamentally denying Seventh-day Adventist convictions.

But does it have to be this way? And is there any other way to think about the Sabbath from Scripture?

The Sabbath As Exodus

The passage in Exodus 20, while the most popular version of the Ten Commandments, is not the only one recorded in the biblical text. The book of Deuteronomy also records the Sabbath commandment. While it gives identical instructions, it provides an entirely different meaning for why the Sabbath should be kept.

Deuteronomy states that the Sabbath should be observed “so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day” (Deut. 5:14-15).

Here, unlike Exodus, the text is emphatically clear as to the reason for why the Sabbath was given: to remind you not of anything in Genesis 1, but the Exodus and the slavery they endured. The Sabbath was a weekly reminder to a free and prosperous people that they should not forget that the Exodus occurred because God sought to give his people rest (Ex. 5:1-5). The desire to keep people endlessly working was what Egypt was ultimately punished for (Ex. 5:5).

The worship God wanted from the Israelites was to “celebrate” a “festival” in his honor. Rather than something that would be seen as selfless, this would be something quite selfish for a group of enslaved people who were denied any rest at all or relaxation. The festival God wishes to give the enslaved was for the benefit of the enslaved, not himself (except that he would receive joy by giving joy to them).

The Sabbath as a memorial of this desire to give a festival of celebration, for Deuteronomy, was intimately tied to the fight against oppression and slavery. The Sabbath was a special gift whose purpose was not symbolically religious, but practically spiritual.

This aspect of the Sabbath is hard to ignore today. For this past Sabbath, in-particular, was the first Sabbath in the United States in which Juneteenth is now formally recognized as a federal holiday. On June 19, 1865, years after Abraham Lincoln’s declaration of freedom for slaves had been officially given, 250,000 slaves in Texas learned of the news, the last slaves in the United States who had not yet received the glorious proclamation.

They had longed for rest, and rest was given.

In light of this past Sabbath, more than ever, the voice of Deuteronomy needs to be given its due. It is the voice those freed slaves needed and valued.

Humans Decide the Meaning of the Sabbath

But of course, Exodus and Deuteronomy are not the only two versions of the Ten Commandments we know of. There is also a third, much earlier and quite different version, contained in Exodus 34. There, the command to keep the Sabbath is given without any explanation (34:21). You simply are to rest, no explanation for why needed.

This early command signifies that the Sabbath was one of the earliest distinctive beliefs of the Ancient Israelites. To this day, there is no consensus by biblical scholars as to what could explain socio-historically the reason that the Ancient Israelites had such a tradition.

And yet, this ambiguity is revelatory. The reason that Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 have the explanations that they do is because the Sabbath didn’t have a solidified reason for its observance. God commanded a working people to stop working, to take rest and find meaning in something other than an endless trudge toward productivity.

What that means is that Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 are human attempts to explain the meaning of God’s gift. For Exodus 20, the meaning is that God values rest so much that God himself rested and so we should do the same. For Deuteronomy 5, God hates the oppression that endless work provides so much that he gave a weekly Sabbath to force a remembrance of the need to rest and value human life beyond productivity.

Both meanings are correct and needed, as both sees an aspect of the Sabbath worth promoting. But when both meanings are valued, we can value also the third new meaning: that humans themselves help to shape and form the very utility of the Sabbath.

“The Sabbath Was Made For Humanity”

This dynamic of human involvement in shaping the Sabbath’s meaning is what stood behind Jesus’ words to the religious leaders in his own day. Take a look at the Gospel of Mark’s account:

One sabbath he was going through the grainfields; and as they made their way his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the sabbath?” And he said to them, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food? He entered the house of God, when Abiathar was high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions.” Then he said to them, “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath; so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath” (Mark 2:23-28)

There are, admittedly, a number of elements in this story that could shock us. First and foremost, Jesus’ initial reply seems almost flippant. “Well, Mr. Religious So and So, the biblical record states that David did much worse than my disciples are doing and guess what? God didn’t strike him with lightning and kill him for it!” That sort of exegetical process, at first glance, looks like the sort of thing most pastors would quickly dismiss as poor hermeneutics if one of their members tried it. Just because someone did something “bad” in the Bible and got away with it doesn’t make it an example of what we should do.

However, what appears to be a shallow exegesis ends up proving to be deep in the end. Jesus uses David as an example, not of breaking religious rules and getting away with it, but as an example of someone whose real life needs drove them to break religious rules so that they could survive. Human need, in other words, was more valued than religious orthodoxy.

Putting the emphasis on this aspect of David, Jesus provides an interpretive rule to guide all thinking about God’s will: “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath” (Mark 2:27). In other words, God didn’t make humans with the purpose in mind that we would observe and keep the Sabbath (which had priority), but that the Sabbath was made for humanity (who had the priority).

Jesus’ final words actually appear to hold a double meaning in the original Aramaic Jesus would have spoken them originally. When he says “so the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath,” it can mean both that “Jesus is lord of the Sabbath” but also “humans are masters over the Sabbath.” The phrase “Son of Man” in the Greek is a title of the Messiah, but in Aramaic it is indistinguishable from “human being.”

As such, Jesus’ words would have been understood both to establish the authority of his teaching, but to underscore that humans are masters of how to shape the Sabbath. The Sabbath is meant to bless humanity and we play a part in figuring out how to do it.

The reason that Jesus criticized the man-made rules about the Sabbath that the religious leaders of his day created wasn’t because they were man-made, but because they were doing the opposite of what God’s intentions for the Sabbath were: they weren’t blessing people’s lives.

Look at this indictment that Jesus gives the interpreters of the Sabbath: “And he said, ‘Woe also to you lawyers! For you load people with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not lift a finger to ease them’” (Luke 11:46).

Jesus condemns them not for creating man-made ideas about the law, but for the way they did it. They “load people with burdens,” meaning that these interpreters had made the law more difficult to keep, in such a way that things like the Sabbath no longer were blessing, but burdening. What was Jesus’ answer for what they should have done? He tells them that they should have “lift a finger to ease” the law. Put another way: the interpreters should have been more liberal in making the law less stringent, so as to ensure the blessing remained.

The point from this is simple: humans not only help shape the meaning of the Sabbath in every generation, but they are judged by Jesus on whether they have understood the liberate and blessed nature of what it signifies: rest from all that threatens to steal such rest away. In other words: oppression.

In our own day, the Sabbath needs to be reclaimed through the lens of the Exodus.

Sabbath is a day of liberation from all that oppresses us whether it be the demands of unfettered capitalism, the horrors of historical slavery, or the suffocation of fundamentalist interpretations that seek to make idols of God’s gifts.

Until we understand the Sabbath in this way, we don’t understand it at all.

When we make it into merely a time of passive reflection on what God did at some point in the distant past, we ignore (to our own detriment) the blessing that day is supposed to bring in our present by inviting our participation in God’s heart.

Matthew J. Korpman is an adjunct professor of biblical studies and theology and the author of the controversial book SAYING NO TO GOD: A RADICAL APPROACH TO READING THE BIBLE FAITHFULLY (Quoir, 2019). He’s a graduate of Yale Divinity School and holds four bachelor degrees, ranging from Religion to Philosophy.

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