Remember and Keep the Sabbath

Jews affirm the duty to observe the Sabbath (Shabbat) from Friday evening to Saturday nightfall as a day of rest and sanctity. It is commanded in the Decalogue, whose two versions ground it differently, in God's rest at creation (Exodus 20) and in the deliverance from Egypt (Deuteronomy 5), a doubling later readers have taken as showing the day carries both a cosmic and a historical meaning at once. Observance rests on the biblical prohibition of work, which rabbinic tradition defines through thirty-nine categories of creative labor (melakhot), derived not from a general notion of exertion but specifically from the kinds of work required to build the Tabernacle in the wilderness, on the reasoning that if those labors were suspended even for constructing a sanctuary to God, they must be suspended for the Sabbath itself.

Historians of ancient religion have long noted that a fixed, recurring day of complete rest, unconnected to a lunar phase or agricultural event, has no clear parallel in the surrounding cultures of the ancient Near East, and treat the institution as one of the more distinctive features of early Israelite religious practice. In exile and diaspora, without a Temple to anchor communal worship, Sabbath observance became one of the practices that carried Jewish religious life forward largely intact, a role many scholars credit as decisive for the tradition's long survival outside its own land.