138 Htttton Webster 



a death when, frequently, a real fear exists of eating food affected 

 with the death contagion.^- On other critical occasions, also, the 

 eating of food is thought to be injurious and hence ought to be 

 avoided. Thus fasting may be enjoined during an eclipse of the 

 sun or moon, or during a thunderstorm. Abstinence from food, 

 either partial or complete, marks several of the tabooed days pre- 

 viously considered (supra). Such well established facts suggest 

 that in the earliest period fasting may have also marked the 

 Hebrew Sabbath. ^'^ This hypothesis seems first to have been ad- 

 vanced by the "judicious" Hooker,^* who observes that "it may 

 be^a question, whether in some sort they [the Jews] did not always 

 fast on the Sabbath." He instances a statement of Josephus that 

 the sixth hour or noon was the time when " our laws require us 

 to go to dinner on Sabbath-days."^^ Various pagan writers also 

 refer to the Sabbath as a day of fasting.^" It is, of course, well 

 known that in the first century of our era, and long previously, 

 the Sabbath was a day of gladness, celebrated with feasting and 

 good cheer. The notion that it was a fast day must have arisen 

 from a misunderstanding of the Biblical rule forbidding cooking 

 on the Sabbath. Yet it seems difficult, with Professor Wester- 

 marck, to explain the curious rule which forbids fasting at new 

 moon (supra) and on the seventh day otherwise than "as a pro- 

 test against a fast once familiar to the Jews on this occasion, but 

 afterwards regarded as an illegitimate rite."^' The foregoing 



^ Cf. supra on the cessation of work after a death. 



^^ Cf. Jastrow, in American Journal of Theology, 1898, ii. 325; Wester- 

 marck, op. cit., ii. 310 sq. 



" Ecclesiastical Polity, v. 72. 



^ De vita sua, 54. 



^ Suetonius, Octavius, 76 ; Justin, x.xxvi, 2. The latter speaks of the 

 Sabbath having been consecrated as a fast day to commemorate a seven 

 days' fast of the Israelites in the deserts of Arabia. The various classi- 

 cal texts bearing on the Jewish Sabbath are collected by T. Reinach, 

 Pontes reruni judaicarum, i. 104, 243, 266, 287. See also M. Wolff, " Het 

 oordeel der Hellensch-Romeinsche schrijvers over oorsprong, naam, en 

 viering van der Sabbat," Theologisch Tijdschrift, 1910, xliv. 162-72. 



^^ Moral Ideas, ii. 310. Cf. Schtilchan Aruch, i. 91, 117. Perhaps the 

 fasting originally occurred only at new and full moon and was never ex- 

 tended to the weekly sabbath. 



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