But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thine ox, nor thine ass, nor any of thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates; that thy manservant and thy maidservant may rest as well as thou. And remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the LORD thy God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched out arm: therefore the LORD thy God commanded thee to keep the sabbath day (Deut. 5:14-15).
In the Exodus version of the fourth commandment, the theocentric focus is clearer: God made the earth in six days and rested the seventh. God as the Creator is its primary message. This version is different. It has to do with justice: masters and servants. Egypt had been unjust; therefore, God had delivered His people out of Egyptian bondage. The Exodus version is clearly a cross-boundary law. This version, however, is clearly a land law. It has to do with the history of Israel. Unlike the other nine commandments, this one creates problems of interpretation based on land law vs. cross-boundary law.The Ten Commandments listed in Deuteronomy 5 are the same that appear in Exodus 20. There is only one variation: the reason given for the sabbath. In Exodus 20, the reason given is creational: "For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it" (v. 11). This reason rests on something that God did. The reason given in Deuteronomy 5 rests on something that the Israelites had been. The focus of Deuteronomy 5:15 is on the Israelites' experience in Egypt. What had been their condition? They had been servants. Egyptians had ruled over them. The implication is that the Egyptians had not allowed them to rest. Deuteronomy 5:15 contrasts with Exodus 20:11, but the contrast is implicit, not explicit. Exodus 20:11 tells us what God did. Deuteronomy 5:15 implies that the Egyptians did something else.
A Nation of Former Servants The exodus generation was a generation of slaves. They had grown up under bondage. Their thinking was shaped by their lifelong condition as subordinates. They had not been allowed to make important decisions for themselves. They had been told what to do under threat of physical sanctions. When Moses had challenged Pharaoh, Pharaoh's response was to add new work requirements: to find a substitute for straw in their brick-making. That is, their punishment was additional work. Moses had asked Pharaoh to allow the people time off for worship. Pharaoh's answer was to make them work even harder, despite the fact that their production would be less efficient, economically speaking. Work had been a negative sanction in Egypt's slave society.
The first case law in Exodus 21 has to do with slave marriages (vv. 2-6). The second case law governs the sales of daughters as servants (vv. 8-11). God caught their attention by announcing laws that were intimately connected with what their previous condition had been. They had been slaves; here were rules that protected slaves. The question arises: Why did God not offer in Exodus 21:11 the justification for the sabbath given in Deuteronomy 5:15? Second, why didn't He give the creational justification for the sabbath to the conquest generation? Wasn't the conquest generation more like God in His capacity as builder? Weren't they about to build a new civilization? But this is not what we find.
Moses in the first section of Deuteronomy 5 made the connection between the establishment of the national covenant at Sinai-Horeb and this generation. He spoke of God as having made the covenant with them personally. Here, Moses repeated the connection. Who had been servants in Egypt? Those listening to him. Yet chronologically speaking, this was incorrect. The generation of former slaves had died off. Their slave mentality had condemned them to wander in the wilderness for four decades. Their fear of confrontation had led them into sin (Num. 14). They had not been willing to accept God's assignment of military conquest. But Moses spoke as if all of his listeners had just come out of Egypt. "And remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the LORD thy God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched out arm."
The continuity of the covenant, as manifested above all in Passover, linked all successive generations of Israelites with the exodus generation. Passover was a rite of passage: passage out of bondage. Israel had no rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. The bar mitzvah is a modern rite. The Old Covenant had only two rites of passage: from the family of Adam into the family of Abraham (circumcision) -- clearly a matter of adoption -- and from the slave's life to the liberated man's life (Passover). Both rites were manifestations of God's grace. The first rite was a one-time event; the second was an annual event. The first rite placed a man definitively under the terms of God's covenant; the second was an act of covenant renewal. The Passover celebrated what God did immediately after the first Passover meal was eaten. The meal reminded Israelites of their slave condition. This is why they were required to eat bitter herbs (Ex. 12:8).
The conquest generation did not ritually enter the family of Abraham until Gilgal, on the far side of the Jordan (Josh. 5:5). Yet they had already begun to inherit in terms of God's promise to Abraham (Num. 21). Their willingness to fight was proof of their membership in Abraham's line of descent. Israel had been a family. Abraham's name had meant "father of multitudes." Israel had become a multitude in Egypt (Ex. 1:7). But Israel in Egypt was not yet a nation because she was a slave. Not until Israel swore covenantal allegiance to God at Sinai and received the law did Israel become a nation. Prior to this corporate covenantal event, Israel had been an extended family.
Now, for the second time, Israel received the Mosaic law. The people did not have to swear allegiance. This had been done representatively once and for all by their parents in Exodus 19. Moses had already pointed back to the events of Exodus 19, in preparation for the reading of the law. He would do so again upon the completion of his reading of the law (vv. 22-33). With the reading of the law, Moses renewed the national covenant. This public event was to be repeated every seventh year after they came into the land (Deut. 31:10-13).
The Day of Liberation Deuteronomy 5:14 speaks of strangers in the gates. The language refers to the existence of gates. Israel in the wilderness had no gates. The gate was a judicial boundary. As with any boundary, the gate separated insiders from outsiders. Those inside the boundary were under the rule of law that governed the jurisdiction. Inside this boundary, God said, all men must be treated the same. "One law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you" (Ex. 12:49).
The sabbath law governed everyone inside the national boundaries of Israel. This included strangers, manservants, and maidservants. It also included animals. One year in seven, it even included the land, which was to receive a year of rest (Lev. 25:4-5).
By giving a new reason for the sabbath, Moses established a sympathetic link among the listeners, their deceased parents, and all the servants whom the listeners might employ in the future. The sabbath became a day of liberation for all Israel, but especially those in bondage. The sabbath pointed to a future day of liberation. God had worked six days and had rested on the seventh. This pointed to Israel's day of liberation at the end of her week. The bondservant was not to be required to work on the sabbath (Deut. 5:14). The conclusion is inescapable: a day of liberation would come for Israel's bondservants.
Egypt had refused to honor the sabbath with respect to servants, which was the crucial test of sabbath-keeping. The Israelites had been forced to work without a day of rest. They had also not been allowed to worship God. Moses' challenge to Pharaoh was that the people be allowed to have time off from work in order to worship God. Pharaoh understood what this meant: a direct challenge to his status as a divinity in Egypt. If he granted this time of relief from work, he would have ritually acknowledged his subordination to the God of Israel. He refused to allow this.(1) Israel did not get her rest period until the day after Passover. Israel's day of rest was her day of liberation.
Egypt was condemned in God's eyes by the fact that the Egyptians did not allow their servants a day of rest. What He allowed Himself at the end of the creation week, Egypt did not allow for the slaves: a day of rest. The Egyptians had assumed that they owned all of the output of their servants. They had assumed that God owned none of this output. In short, they had assumed their autonomy from the Creator God. They had placed themselves under the bureaucratic rule of a supposed divine monarch, the Pharaoh, while extending his rule over their slaves. The legal condition of the slaves reflected the Egyptians' own legal condition: servants of Pharaoh. Their servants were their judicial representatives. This is why the sabbath law singled out servants. How men treat their servants is how their superiors will treat them. Their servants become their representatives. This hierarchical principle of subordinate representation governs one's placement among the sheep or the goats at the final judgment (Matt. 25:31-46).
The sabbath law in Deuteronomy 5 warned Israel: to ignore the sabbath law is to become like the Egyptians. The evidence of how well Israelites obeyed the sabbath law would be seen in how they treated their servants. So it had been for Egypt; so it would be for Israel. The sabbath was Israel's representative principle of liberation. If Israel refused to honor it, the nation would again come under the negative sanction of slavery. This was why Judah went into captivity to the Babylonians. The nation had not allowed the land its sabbath rest periods (Jer. 50:34).
Literal Texts for Less Literal Purposes There are discrepancies between the Exodus 20 account and the Deuteronomy 5 account. A minor one is the difference between the two versions of the law against covetousness. In the Exodus 20 account, the prohibition begins with the neighbor's property and moves to the neighbor's wife (v. 17). The reverse is the case in Deuteronomy 5:21. Similarly, the blessing attached to the fifth commandment in Exodus 20:12 was long life in the land. In Deuteronomy 5:16, the promise is more general: "that it may go well with thee, in the land. . . ." But the discrepancy between the two justifications for the sabbath is not minor. The two accounts are totally different.
How, then, are we to interpret Moses' words? "These words the LORD spake unto all your assembly in the mount out of the midst of the fire, of the cloud, and of the thick darkness, with a great voice: and he added no more. And he wrote them in two tables of stone, and delivered them unto me" (Deut. 5:22). If God added no more words than the words which Moses had just repeated, then what of Exodus 20:11? These surely were words in addition to Deuteronomy 5:15. If some archeologist in Israel should ever discover the fragment of the broken tablet on which the sabbath law appeared, what would it say? Would it repeat both justifications or just one? If only one should appear, then one of the written accounts of the giving of the Decalogue is incomplete. If one of the accounts is incomplete, then the words, "he added no more," cannot be taken literally.
This discrepancy cannot be a function of Moses' flagging memory. "And Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated" (Deut. 34:7). He was in the final stages of writing down the Pentateuch (Deut. 31:9). He would die within a few weeks, and possibly within a few days. The suggestion that he would not have remembered what God announced at the sealing of the national covenant, or what God wrote on the tables of the law for 40 days (Ex. 24:12, 18; Deut. 9:9), or what Moses wrote on the tables of the law for 40 days (Ex. 34:28), would be ludicrous.
Higher critics like to think that different editors revised the two passages. But what forger would have been sufficiently stupid to revise part of the Ten Commandments? The Decalogue was the heart of Israel's religion. Of all the passages in the Pentateuch to tamper with, the Decalogue would have been the last choice of a clever forger. Every torah scroll in the nation would have been different from his revision. Only at the time of the rediscovery of the law under Josiah would such a forgery have been possible (II Ki. 22). But what would have been the forger's motivation? Why not just re-write the seemingly deviant passage in the rediscovered scroll to make it conform to your scribal agenda? Why change one without changing the other? Why create a visible discrepancy? The higher critic must attribute a degree of stupidity to the forger that calls into question the intelligence necessary to become a successful forger. A forger this stupid would not have possessed the intellectual skills necessary to become a "redactor," according to the canons of higher criticism: a master of the existing biblical texts and a master of deceit.(2)
A Question of Covenantal Purpose
My assumption is that God did verbally announce both reasons for the sabbath at the original sealing of the national covenant, but the words on the tablets included only the more general justification: the creation account. The number-one question in the Book of Exodus is this: Who is Moses' God? Answer: the God of the patriarchs (Ex. 3:15). This was what God told Moses to tell the rulers of Israel (Ex. 3:16). This answer looked back to the stories found in the first book of the Pentateuch, the book of origins. This God was the God of creation, which Moses asserted in the opening words of Genesis.
At the time of the sealing of the national covenant, the Israelites had just passed through the Red Sea. This event would have been at the forefront of concern for any nearby pagan nation that might hear of this deliverance. Who are the Israelites? Who knows? Who cares? But a God who can part the waters of the Red Sea is a God to be reckoned with. What He did at the Red Sea pointed to His sovereignty as Creator. The God of creation rules over nature. A creation-based justification of the sabbath would have been understood by all nations. The Exodus justification of the sabbath is consistent with the purpose of the book: to announce the authority of God. This authority is absolute because He is the Creator.
The Deuteronomy version applies specifically to Israel's history. Moses in Deuteronomy was announcing a link between the generation of the exodus and the generation of the conquest. This link was covenantal-judicial: the Decalogue. It was also historical. Moses in Deuteronomy was making it clear to that generation that they were the heirs of all that had taken place in Egypt, before most of them had been born. The justification for the sabbath in Deuteronomy is historical-participatory. This fits Moses' covenantal goal for Deuteronomy better than Exodus' creational justification does, namely, to affirm point five of the covenant: inheritance. This is the primary theme of Deuteronomy.
Deuteronomy 5:22 reads: "These words the LORD spake unto all your assembly in the mount out of the midst of the fire, of the cloud, and of the thick darkness, with a great voice: and he added no more. And he wrote them in two tables of stone, and delivered them unto me." The degree of literalism in Moses' words here must be judged by two things: the context of his monologue on the Decalogue and the written record in Exodus. The context here was national covenant renewal and inheritance. The written record in Exodus was more universal: the authority of God as Creator. Conclusion: God and Moses wrote on the tablets what we read in Exodus 20:11, not what we read in Deuteronomy 5:15.
Conclusion The sabbath law explicitly governed the treatment of subordinates. The test of how a man honored the sabbath was how he treated his subordinates. This is true in both versions of the law.
The justification for the sabbath law in Deuteronomy 5 is different from the justification in Exodus 20. In the earlier version, God's creation week is used to justify the sabbath: a cross-boundary law. In the second version, Israel's time of bondage in Egypt is given as the reason. In the first version, God set the positive pattern for all superiors in history. In the second, Egyptians set the negative pattern. God gives men a weekly day of rest out of mercy. Israelites had to do the same for their subordinates. In both versions of the sabbath law, subordinates are the focus of concern. How men treat subordinates reflects their obedience to God's law. From God to the lowest subordinate, each ruler in the hierarchy is supposed to honor the sabbath principle of rest.
The day of rest is by implication the day of liberation. The day of rest is the model of the final liberation from bondage to sin. We labor today to enter into rest later, just as God did. "There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God. For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his. Let us labour therefore to enter into that rest, lest any man fall after the same example of unbelief" (Heb. 4:9-11). There have been periods of liberation throughout covenant history. Israel did not remain a slave to Egypt indefinitely. This implied that no nation or people will be in servitude to any other indefinitely. This also implied that servitude will eventually end. The definitive abolitionist act occurred in Christ's ministry, when He fulfilled the jubilee laws (Luke 4:18-21). With the abolition of the jubilee laws also went Israel's permanent slave laws (Lev. 24:44-46).(3)
The Hebrew sabbath was intended to relieve men from the bondage of labor once a week. By honoring the sabbath, they acknowledged publicly that they were not in bondage to the futile quest for more. The quest for more is a hard task-master. It knows no limits. The Hebrew sabbath announced: "Enough for now!" Until men are willing to believe this and act in terms of it, they remain slaves to one of two idols, either nature or history.(4) (Philosophy and religion are social phenomena -- idols of history -- that attempt to make sense out of nature and history.) Regarding a land ruled by either of these idols, it can accurately be said, as the fearful spies said of Canaan, "The land, through which we have gone to search it, is a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof" (Num. 13:32b).
The New Testament Sabbath
The New Testament's covenantal deliverance of God's people out of the Old Covenant was presented by the author of the Hebrews as an aspect of the sabbath (Heb. 4). This deliverance was achieved definitively by Jesus Christ in His earthly work, whose efforts serve as a model for our earthly labors: "For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his" (v. 10). Covenant-keepers enter God's rest definitively through faith in Christ: "For we which have believed do enter into rest" (v. 3a). They must strive toward this rest historically: "Let us labour therefore to enter into that rest, lest any man fall after the same example of unbelief" (v. 11). They achieve rest at the final judgment. This is in the future: "There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God" (v. 9).
One theological reason why the New Covenant sabbath is the first day of the week rather than the last is that Christ's entrance into the heavenly places as the high priest took place in the past. Our rest has been attained definitively and representatively through Christ. We look back in faith to His attainment of definitive rest on our behalf, even though we also look to the end of time for its final consummation. The first day of the week -- the eighth day(5) -- is our day of rest because of our testimony that, judicially speaking, we have already entered into our promised rest through Christ's representation on our behalf.
Footnotes:
1. Gary North, Moses and Pharaoh: Dominion Religion vs. Power Religion (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985).
2. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), Appendix C: "The Hoax of Higher Criticism." See also Gary North, Boundaries and Dominion: The Economics of Leviticus (computer version; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), Appendix J: "Conspiracy, Forgery, and Higher Criticism."
3. Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), ch. 31.
4. Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction: Christian Faith and Its Confrontation with American Society (Westchester, Illinois: Crossway, [1983] 1993), p. 11.
5. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), pp. 72-73.
If this book helps you gain a new understanding of the Bible, please consider sending a small donation to the Institute for Christian Economics, P.O. Box 8000, Tyler, TX 75711. You may also want to buy a printed version of this book, if it is still in print. Contact ICE to find out. icetylertx@aol.com