Sabbath

Abstract

In Judaism, the Sabbath is the seventh and the sacred day of the week, a recurring seven-day temporal unit. The concept of Sabbath influenced the Christian Sunday and the Muslim Friday, and with the expansion of both, the seven-day week became a globally common temporal unit. As such, the Sabbath is identified with two highly influential ideas: the seven-day week institution of cyclical temporality almost disconnected from nature, and the dichotomy of sacred and profane days. The Jewish Sabbath is famously introduced by the first biblical story of creation, as God sanctifies the seventh day and rests from his labor of creation. Therefore, some etymologists suggest the Hebrew word Shabbat is derived from rest (Shevita), and some point to its similarity to the number seven (Sheva). However, the information in the Bible regarding the Sabbath is limited and deals mainly with the prohibition of labor. It is only by the Second Temple period and later in rabbinical writings that the Sabbath is seen as a day of communal worship, complex practices, rituals, and limitations that are not directly related to cessation from work. The academic scholarship on the Sabbath, which is the focus of this bibliography, usually concentrates on contextualizing the elements of the Sabbath to specific periods and locations. Thus, academic scholarship does not present the Sabbath as a whole, but instead picture it as a multilayered social institution, gradually developed across thousands of years, with no clear starting point and, of course, as ever changing. Already by the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, the “Sabbath question” was an urgent scholarly discussion regarding its Mesopotamian origins, its parallels in other cultures, and the idea of the week. Through these debates, the specific Jewish concept became a universal category for thinking of time, society, and religion. Moreover, the academic scholarship created a direct link between the Jewish concept of Sabbath and the Christian concepts of Sunday and the seven-day week. Therefore, instead of leading to difference and confrontation, as in earlier periods, the Sabbath became a Judeo-Christian idea, separating this group from the rest of the world. In the second half of the 20th century, scholarship shifted from the big question of origin to more minor aspects of it, shading light on the different stages of Sabbath development, like the Second Temple period, classical rabbinic writings, and Kabbalah. It seems that the last centuries present the popular current phase of the Sabbath as a rest day in capitalist and secular modern societies. A unique case here is the formation of the modern State of Israel, which recreated the Sabbath as a national rather than a religious category, being another intriguing turn in the relationship between the Sabbath and Jewish identity.