Free The Sabbath World by Judith Shulevitz Page B

of a tribe called the Kenites, said to have been blacksmiths and worshippers of Saturn. This hypothesis “is both ingenious and fragile,” as one scholar writes, because we have almost no information about the Kenites, other than that they lived in the Sinai; we don’t know “whether they really were blacksmiths, or whether they knew of the week, or whether they venerated Saturn.”
    The evocative similarity of the Hebrew word
Shabbat
to an ancient Akkadian word,
shappatu
, the day of the full moon, an auspicious day “when the gods’ heart was appeased,” has tantalized many and probably has some relevance, but no one can quite say how much. So does the likeness of the Hebrew Sabbath to the Babylonian
ume lemnuti
, evil or inauspicious days, which fell on the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-eighth day of the month (and possibly also the nineteenth), and on which, according to the ancient texts, “the shepherd of the peoples [that is, the king] must not eat cooked meat or baked bread, must not change his clothes or put on clean clothes, must not offer sacrifice, must not go out in his chariot or exercise his sovereign power. The priest must not deliver oracles, and the physician must not touch the sick. It is an unsuitable day for any kind of action.”
    Suggestive as they may be, the
ume lemnuti
fall short of Sabbaths in many ways. For one thing, the Hebrew Sabbath required the participation of all the people, not just the king. Moreover, the Sabbath, which comes every seventh day regardless of the length of the month, was not grounded in the lunar calendar. It was severed from the phases of the moon, if it had ever been yoked to them.
    This lack of clear answers leaves us dissatisfied. When we go hunting for origins, we want objects, documents, dates, stones with worn inscriptions. We want to conjure up the archaeological dig in which proof of the Sabbath would have been waved triumphantly aloft. But the Sabbath is a ritual, not an artifact. It is not an object built in space; it is a performance enacted in time. What we do know is that it was during the Israelites’ sojourn in Mesopotamia and in the decades after, when a Persian king named Cyrus conquered the Babylonians and, incredibly, sent the exiles back to rebuild their land, that the Israelites began to collect their folktales and their legal and theological traditions and weave them into a book: the Hebrew Bible.
    If we want to look to the Bible to understand how our ancestors felt about the Sabbath, we have to remember that while the Bible teaches us our history, it is not history in any sense that we’ve ever been taught. Nor is it literature, exactly. It’s both and neither, a strange amalgam of prose and poetry, containing scene after scene of some of the most profound drama conceived by the cosmological imagination. Does the Bible tell of things as they were, elevating actual occurrences to a mythological plane? Or does it consist of brilliant imaginings, taut parables craftily distressed by some unknown genius to exhibit the grit and anguish of history? Is there a meaningful difference? “For a people in ancient times these were legitimate and sometimes inevitable modes of historical perception and interpretation,” Yerushalmi writes. Émile Durkheim invented the sociology of religion in the early part of the twentieth century by making the still controversial claim that religions “are grounded in and express the real,” by which he meant the reality of a collective or social experience. But, he added, “although religious thought is something otherthan a system of fictions, the realities to which it corresponds can gain religious expression only if imagination transfigures them.”
    The priests who wrote the Bible did so for many reasons, but one of the most important was to preserve and revive a way of life and a worldview that, for all they knew, was about to disappear from the earth. And so it is as a response to exile that we