THE WEEK OF SEVEN DAYS. 391 



ceeding ; if the people, when, in God's providence, he first took them 

 in hand, had been simple barbarians, having no measure of time but 

 the phases of the moon, it would manifestly have been less easy to 

 secure for rest and for religious purposes each seventh day. Why 

 each seventh day ? Why not the fourth or the fourteenth ? But if 

 the people had their almanac ready-made, and if they had been accus- 

 tomed in Egypt to measure the time by weeks and to find each day 

 of the week as weary as the rest under their cruel taskmasters, they 

 would readily accept and rejoice in a law which made the concluding 

 day of each week a day of rest and rejoicing. And in fact we find 

 in the Deuteronomy version of the fourth commandment this pertinent 

 exhortation : "Remember that thou wast a servant in the land of 

 Egypt, and 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 " (Deuteronomy v, xv). 

 Let us now turn for a moment to this same commandment as we 

 find it in the twentieth chapter of Exodus, and as it is commonly 

 cited. The most remarkable feature in the commandment, as here 

 given, is the reference to the six days' work and the seventh-clay rest 

 of the Almighty Creator. Upon this work of the creative week I 

 shall have more to say hereafter ; but at present let me observe that 

 the form of the commandment, beginning " Remember the Sabbath- 

 day to keep it holy," seems to imply that previous knowledge of the 

 week and the Sabbath, of which we have already found evidence. 

 It is very unlikely that the notion of a seventh-day Sabbath would 

 have been announced for the first time in such fashion ; in fact, we 

 have already met with distinct teaching on the subject. Let it be 

 added, however, that it has been supposed, and the supposition is 

 reasonable, that the argument for keeping holy the Sabbath-day, 

 founded upon the history of the Creation, which appears in the 

 twentieth chapter of Exodus, does not belong to the original form of 

 the commandment. The fact of its omission in Deuteronomy, and the 

 addition in that version of the commandments of an appendix to the 

 law of the Sabbath-day, which does not appear in Exodus, seems to 

 set us free to suppose that both the one addition and the other were 

 made subsequently, and did not belong to the commandment when 

 given from Sinai. Indeed, there is much internal probability to rec- 

 ommend the suggestion of Ewald (approved by Canon Cook in the 

 "Speaker's Commentary " as "deserving respect "), that the ten com- 

 mandments were originally given in the following terse form : 



1. Thou shalt have none other God before me. 



2. Thou shalt not make to thee any graven image. 



3. Thou shalt not take the name of Jehovah thy God in vain. 



4. Thou shalt remember the Sabbath-day to keep it holy. 



5. Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother. 

 G. Thou shalt not kill. 



