Free The Sabbath World by Judith Shulevitz Page A

case in which the exile is discussed directly, rather than obliquely, the language is as skinless as meat. What does it mean to be starved, dehydrated, conquered, and deported? It is, say the poets, like being gang-raped: “The foe has laid hands on everything dear to her” (“her” is Jerusalem); “she has seen her Sanctuary invaded by nations.” It is like being forced into prostitution, then made to walk down a public thoroughfare in whore’s clothing: “All who admired her despise her, for they have seen her disgraced; and she can only sigh and shrink back. Her uncleanness clings to her skirts.” It is like having one’s father bash one’s head against the pavement: “He”—meaning God—“has broken my teeth on gravel, has ground me into the dust.”
    It was out of this abasement that Judaism as we know it was born, and along with it the Sabbath.
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    T HIS IS NOT TO SAY that the religion of the Bible, including the Sabbath, hadn’t existed before the exile. Clearly, it had, for hundreds of years. By the time the Babylonians carried off the Israelite priests, the form of worship they helped their people conduct was well established, though its origins and its earliest history remain mysterious.
    The Sabbath was at least as old as the cult itself, if not older, although, again, no one knows how old
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is, and whether the Sabbath was kept in a strict fashion or not, or exactly what keeping it would have entailed. Resting on the seventh day may initially have been no more than an accidentally savvy social arrangement—the wise management of land and human resources in an early, fragile agricultural society—and only later acquired theological connotations. (Two Sabbath-like land- and debt-management customs codified in the Bible—the sabbatical year and the jubilee year—suggest this origin. The sabbatical occurs every seventh year. During that year, farmers must leave their land fallow and all outstanding debts between Israelites must be canceled. The jubilee occurs every fifty years, on the year following seven sabbaticals. During a jubilee year, the laws of the sabbatical must be observed, but two more rules apply as well: All hereditary land must revert to its original owners or their heirs, and all Hebrew slaves, who were likely to have sold themselves into slavery to pay off their debts, must be freed.) Or the Sabbath may have expressed a taboo, a fear of arousing the wrath of an irascible god. The Sabbath may have been one of Israel’s festivals, a day of joyous feasting much like the day of the new moon. (Some have theorized that it was once the day of the full moon.) It may have been part of the popular religion, observed mainly through sacrifices in family compounds. Or it may have been a priestly matter involving formal Temple sacrifices. It’s even possible that the ancient Sabbath looked a lot more like the modern one than we have any right to expect. Already in the eighth century B.C.E .—two centuries before the exile—a prophet, Amos, sounds remarkably like a modern clergyman when he chides his peoplefor tolerating merchants who are too greedy to wait for the end of the Sabbath to start selling their wares.
    But all of these are speculations, because the prehistory of the Sabbath is just that: that which occurred before the histories were written. There is little physical evidence for the Sabbath outside the Bible. Nor can we compare it with similar institutions in the cultures that surrounded the spit of land that became the twin states of Israel and Judah, because, oddly enough, the Sabbath appears to have been the invention of the inhabitants of those two tiny nations. Many scholars have tried to link the Hebrew Sabbath to some analogous non-Hebrew practice, but their theories have turned out to be implausible or unprovable. There is some charm to the theory that the weekly day of non-work, whose most stringent prohibition forbade the lighting of fires, derived from the fire taboo