As a lunar festival doubtless the Sabbath also went back to a very remote antiquity.  But with the Israelites the day acquired an altogether peculiar significance whereby it was distinguished from all other feast days; it became the day of rest par excellence.  Originally the rest is only a consequence of the feast, e.g. that of the harvest festival after the period of severe labour; the new moons also were marked in this way (Amos viii. 5; 2Kings iv. 23).  In the case of the Sabbath also, rest is, properly speaking, only the consequence of the fact that the day is the festal and sacrificial day of the week (Isaiah i. 13; Ezekiel xlvi. 1 seq.), on which the shewbread was laid out; but here, doubtless on account of the regularity with which it every eighth day interrupted the round of everyday work, this gradually became the essential attribute.  In the end even its name came to be interpreted as if derived from the verb “to rest.”  But as a day of rest it cannot be so very primitive in its origin; in this attribute it presupposes agriculture and a tolerably hard-pressed working-day life.  With this it agrees that an intensification of the rest of the Sabbath among the Israelites admits of being traced in the course of the history.  The highest development, amounting even to a change of quality, is seen in the Priestly Code.

According to 2Kings iv. 22, 23, one has on Sabbath time for occupations that are not of an everyday kind; servant and ass can be taken on a journey which is longer than that “of a Sabbath day.”  In Hos. ii. 13 (11) we read, “I make an end of all your joy, your feasts, your new moons and your Sabbaths,” that is to say, the last-named share with the first the happy joyousness which is impossible in the exile which Jehovah threatens.  With the Jehovist and the Deuteronomist the Sabbath, which, it is true, is already extended in Amos viii. 5 to commerce, is an institution specially for agriculture; it is the day of refreshment for the people and the cattle, and is accordingly employed for social ends in the same way as the sacrificial meal is (Exodus xx. 10, xxiii. 12, xxxiv. 21; Deuteronomy v. 13, 14).  Although the moral turn given to the observance is genuinely Israelitic and not original, yet the rest even here still continues to be a feast, a satisfaction for the labouring classes; for what is enjoined as a duty—­upon the Israelite rulers, that is, to whom the legislation is directed—­is less that they should rest than that they should give rest.  In the Priestly Code, on the contrary, the rest of the Sabbath has nothing at all of the nature of the joyous breathing-time from the load of life which a festival affords, but is a thing for itself, which separates the Sabbath not only from the week days, but also from the festival days, and approaches an ascetic exercise much more nearly than a restful refreshment.  It is taken in a perfectly abstract manner, not as rest from ordinary work, but