Chapter 1: What is the significance of the 4th Commandment in ancient Israel?
In the book of Exodus, Yahweh liberates the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt, and he brings them to Mount Sinai to establish an intimate relationship with them. Israel will be his people, and he will be their God. This is a marriage, and the marriage vows are what we call the Ten Commandments. Now, most of these commands make sense to us on face value.
In fact, they make sense to any culture. Don't murder, don't lie, honor your parents. But today we'll look at the fourth command, which was utterly unique to Israel. How they set apart one day every week and treated it as different.
Remember the day of Shabbat to treat it as holy.
Chapter 2: How does the 4th Commandment relate to the creation narrative?
Six days you will labor and you will make all of your work. But the seventh day is a Shabbat of Yahweh your Elohim.
The command goes on to say to stop work on the seventh day because in six days Yahweh made the skies and the land, the sea, and all that is in them. And he rested on the seventh day. So the reason for this command is cosmic. It's connected to the story of God creating and bringing order to everything.
The seven-day creation narrative is clearly being hyperlinked here. God generates out of generous love something that is wholly contained within and sustained by God. But that thing needs to then go on a journey of sharing in God's own rest to become one with God.
On days one through six of the creation narrative, the narrator repeats the line, and there was evening and morning on that day. But jarringly, the seventh day doesn't end with this phrase, implying that we're still in the seventh day, and the moment of ultimate completion and rest for the cosmos is yet to come.
The Genesis 1 narrative is trying to teach us to think about all of history as being on this journey of we're laboring towards this great day of unity and rest and completeness and blessing and sharing in the harmony and shalom that is God's own essence.
And so the fourth command of resting on the seventh day is actually an invitation to reflect on the journey of the whole cosmos. We get to partner with God as God's image, but we have to remember...
Our work is not ultimate. It's not actually what has the final word about where this universe is going. There's a purpose and a worker that transcends us all. God's purpose.
When the Ten Commands are given a second time, the reason for the Sabbath shifts.
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Chapter 3: What is the civil and social perspective on the Sabbath in Deuteronomy?
Instead of focusing on this coming cosmic rest, it focuses on a coming liberation. Moses says, six days you do your work, seventh day you Shabbat, so that your slaves can get the same rest from work.
Your slave is not your slave on the Shabbat. You will remember that you all were slaves in the land of Egypt, and Yahweh your Elohim brought you out with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm. And so now the weekly Shabbat, every seventh day, is a liberation day.
Today, Tim Mackey and I talk about the fourth commandment, remember the Sabbath, with all of its cosmic and social implications. Plus, we'll look at how the early followers of Jesus balanced obeying the wisdom of the Sabbath with Sunday as Resurrection Day. Thanks for joining us. Here we go. Hey, Tim.
Hello, John Collins.
Chapter 4: How did the early Jesus movement interpret the Sabbath?
We're talking the 10 words. We're talking 10. 10 commandments, 10 words, 10 things that God said to the people of ancient Israel as they stood at Mount Sinai entering into a covenant. They got married. Israel got married to a God that day. Okay.
That'd be a cool theme study.
There's a Hebrew Bible scholar, Joshua Berman, who... who was trying to draw attention to how odd the story of God making a covenant with Israel at Mount Sinai would sound in the ancient world. Did it?
Yeah.
This wasn't a thing you would do? Yeah, he said in the ancient world, a story about a God getting married in a covenant with a human would sound as strange as a story to us would sound about a human getting married to a cat.
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Chapter 5: What does it mean to remember the Sabbath in a modern context?
That's his analogy.
That's helpful. Yeah.
It's good to know. It is strange. It's normalized growing up with the Bible and hearing metaphors like you are the bride and... the marriage of the Lamb, and these kind of things. But you just take one step back and you're like, what?
Yeah. Now, he's not saying there was no precedent for gods entering into some kind of partnership with humans. The idea of gods enlisting humans to do stuff for them and serve them, that's not new. But what's truly new is the mutuality.
about a God making God's self vulnerable to a human community to partner with and represent him, to be his kingdom of priests, and attaching God's name, thinking of our last conversation about carrying the name of Yahweh, your God, for a futile purpose or in vain. That's what's unique, that I am your Elohim, and you are my people,
And the reciprocity of partnership is truly unique, something unique that the Hebrew Bible is contributing to the history of human thought. And so what these 10 words represent are the first 10 terms of that covenant marriage partnership between Yahweh, the one who is, and the people of ancient Israel. Yeah. They're very contextual to ancient Israel.
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Chapter 6: How does the Sabbath command differ between Exodus and Deuteronomy?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. And actually what we're going to look at today, the command number four is a great example of a highly contextualized command to the life of ancient Israel.
That's true. The rest of these feel much easier to cross any cultural boundaries.
Exactly. In other words, the faced value reading, first reading, even in translation, commands one, two, and three, are pretty easy for contemporary readers, actually readers of any time in culture, to just be like, oh, yeah, I get it. No other gods, no idols, don't carry or take the name of God in vain. Yeah. Whatever that might mean.
There's a perception that they're pretty easy to just copy and paste into my cultural setting. Yeah.
Then the ones later will also feel the same.
Honor your father and mother. Don't kill. Commit adultery. Don't steal. Bear false witness. Don't desire.
And I think what makes the Ten Commandments then so enduring is how... transferable they are to any setting.
That's right. And that's a part of their intention in being set in front of all the other hundreds to follow.
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of the Sabbath for social equality?
The same command, keep the Sabbath. but the way it's worded and why you do it, totally different. So first, let's just read the Exodus version, make sense of it. Okay. Then let's compare it with the Deuteronomy version, make sense of it. And then we'll ask some of the bigger questions that arise from both.
Deal.
Okay, Exodus 20 version reads like this. Remember the day of Shabbat. So I'm actually not translating there. I'm transliterating the word Shabbat. That's how you say the Hebrew word. The day of Shabbat. The day of Shabbat. To treat it as holy. To consecrate or to sanctify are common English translations. Those are funky words. Those are funky words.
That mean to recognize and then treat something as sacred, one and only, set-apart, in relationship to the one and only set-apart God. So there's something sacred about this day because it has a unique relationship to the sacred, unique one and only God.
Recognizing and treating it with the sanctity that it has. And you can use a special word for that, like sanctify or consecrate.
Yeah, to consecrate it, to set it aside, recognize it, and then treat it as holy. These are all English ways of getting at what the Hebrew phrase is, lakad sho.
I'm imagining it's a mental state, a perception of what this thing is, but then also the way that you interact with it.
Yeah. There's a 24-hour period that in your mind you're to recognize that one's different.
Okay.
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Chapter 8: How can we apply the principles of the Sabbath today?
To be active. All right. Produce something. Okay. So for six days you'll labor and do your work, but the seventh day is a Shabbat of Yahweh your Elohim. On it, you will not make or do any work. Six days work, seventh day Shabbat. Shabbat means to stop. It's a Hebrew verb that means, well, the verb means to stop and then the noun means to a cessation or a stopping.
So what does it mean to remember this day and treat it as different than all the other days? Well, you're not going to work. You have all these days where you work. But then the Shabbat, you don't work. And that's because it's a Shabbat of Yahweh your Elohim. What does that mean? First of all, you get a list of who it is that's supposed to honor the holiness of this day of Shabbat.
It's you, your son, your daughter, your male slave, your female slave, your cattle, and the immigrant who's in your gates. Is that seven? Seven. Nah. Of course. Of course. Of course. So everyone. Everybody. Yeah. So it begins with you. All the pronouns in here are a second person masculine singular. Sorry. I'm so sorry.
My brain just like turned off. The moment I utter grammar terminology, you're just like, duh.
What world am I in? The you there is a single man. Okay. Meaning that the first layer of audience presumes an ancient patriarchal and traditional society and arrangement.
Okay.
Where the man is a patriarch, the head of a state and head of an extended family. And he's going to have sons and daughters. He's going to have male slaves, female slaves. Yeah, that's the presumed setting. So what's interesting is missing from this list that's going to come in another list that's similar to this later on is your wife.
Oh, the mention of your wife?
Yeah. Down in command number 10, where it says don't covet your neighbor's wife, that's the first on the list. And then it's like his male slave, female slave, ox, donkey. Well, but they can't have eight in the list, right? Exactly. My point is that the list has been trimmed so that it's precisely seven on the list.
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