Free The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination by Daniel J. Boorstin

in the Babylonian Sabbath and their seven-day week. But for the Hebrews the Sabbath, like circumcision, became a sign of the Covenant. The Commandment to keep the Sabbath and its meaning came through Moses.
    And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying … Verily my sabbaths ye shall keep: for it is a sign between me and you throughout your generations; that ye may know that I am the Lord that doth sanctify you.… Ye shall keep the sabbath therefore.… Six days may work be done; but in the seventh is the sabbath of rest, holy to the Lord.… Wherefore the children of Israel shall keep the sabbath, to observe the sabbath throughout their generations, for a perpetual covenant. It is a sign between me and the children of Israel for ever; for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested, and was refreshed. [Exodus 31:12–17]
    These were the words that the Lord spoke to Moses and then affixed on the “two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God” (Exodus 31:18).
    The ideas of a Creator-God, of the Covenant, and of man’s godlike qualities were woven into a single texture of belief. In a popular table-hymn for the Sabbath by the Spanish-Jewish philosopher Abraham Ibn Ezra (c.1050–1164), “I keep the Sabbath, God keeps me: it is an eternal sign between Him and me.” Biblical scholars suspect that the Hebrews did not observe the Sabbath until Moses brought God’s Commandment to them. And it was Moses who made the idea of Sabbath inseparable from the Covenant between God and man, and from the belief in a Creator-God. As Martin Buber puts it, the Sabbath enjoined by Moses affirmed “the God who ‘makes’ heaven and earth and in addition man, in order that man may ‘make’ his own share in the creation.”
    In the Jewish tradition, the Sabbath began at sundown on Friday and lasted till sundown on Saturday, in the pattern of the biblical days. “And the evening and the morning were the sixth day” (Genesis 1:3). During the Babylonian exile and in later generations, the Sabbath became a binding custom, sustaining the community sense of the Jews even when they were dispersed, far from Temple or synagogue. For the Sabbath observance was moved into the home, and the covenant with the God of Moses was celebratedin every family. The differing attitudes toward observance of the Sabbath have become a touchstone of the different sects of Judaism, and have divided the community of modern Israel. At times the commandment to rest on the Sabbath was interpreted so strictly that Jews refused to take up arms to defend themselves on that day. And they became an easy target for enemies who knew their customs. Those in the Jewish community who refused such a suicidal interpretation of the Sabbath insisted that “the Sabbath was made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath.”
    Through the five Books of Moses (the Pentateuch) Moses led Western man’s effort to understand the Creation and find a human share in its processes. The Bible reports that Moses “wrote all the words of the Lord” (Exodus 24:4), but some modern biblical scholars credit Moses with recording only a fifth of the text. This would still include crucial parts—the Ten Commandments, the Covenant, and its interpretations.
    Moses’ heroic role in our story of creators was as prophet of the single Creator-God. The Mosaic God probably contained some Egyptian elements, including perhaps the belief in a single creator as well as elements of the word and idea of Yahweh. There were also relics of the earliest Hebrew beliefs—the special contractual relationship between this God and his people, the revealing of the god in storms and mountains, and the idea of the God of the Fathers. But by insisting on a single Creator-God, Moses was himself a kind of creator. A messenger of the new. “To believe in ‘One God,’ ” Josiah Royce observes, “means, in general, to abandon, often with contempt or aversion, many clear