Rest Days; A Sociological Study 141 



tants bought and sold with the men of Tyre."' These practices 

 indicate that the ancient taboos were then relaxing their hold and 

 that the Sabbath bade fair to become a social institution, divorced 

 from supernatural sanctions. 



It is doubtless true that the Exile tended to augment the relig- 

 ious importance of the Sabbath, since even in heathen lands it 

 could be observed by a people who now had neither state nor 

 temple. In the Exilic literature great significance is ascribed to 

 the Sabbath"'^ and in post-Exilic law it is regarded as a sign be- 

 tween Jehovah and the children of Israel that Jehovah is their 

 God. It is impossible, however, to follow those critics"'' who 

 assume that the rigor of the Sabbatarian observances after the 

 Exile forms an entirely new development, and that the priestly 

 Sabbath represents something very different from the Sabbath of 

 the Book of the Covenant or of Deuteronomy. The increased 

 significance of the institution led naturally to a revival of the old 

 taboos with which the day had been always invested, taboos which 

 otherwise might have been expected to disappear with advancing 

 culture and the decay of supernaturalism. The like has happened 

 elsewhere amongst peoples of archaic civilization. It is not im- 

 possible that closer contact with Assyria and Babylonia from the 

 eighth to the sixth century B.C. did something to revitalize the 

 older superstitions and to give to the Sabbath once more an aus- 

 tere character."' The day, however, seems never wholly to have 

 lost all traces of its severe and sombre origin in a tabu season ; it 

 is significant in this connection that whilst the Hebrews had their 



^^ Nehcmiah, x. 31; xiii. 15-16. Ezekiel dwells constantly on the pro- 

 fanation of the Sabbath in his catalogue of the sins of the Israelites (xx. 

 13, 16, 21, 24; xxii. 8, 26; xxiii. 38. For the prohibitions of burden-bear- 

 ing and marketing on the Sabbath see Amos, viii. 5; Jeremiah, xvii. 21-22. 



** Cf. Isaiah Ivi. 2 sq., Iviii. 13. 



°' T. K. Cheyne, Jezvish Religious Life after the Exile, New York, 1898, 

 p. 66; C. G. Montefiore, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion 

 as Illustrated by the Religion of the Ancient Hebrezus,' London, 1893, pp. 

 229 sq., 338 sq.; Wellhausen, Prolegomena, 115; W. R. Smith, "Sabbath," 

 Encyclopaedia Britannica^ xxi. 124. 



™ Cf. Hirsch, " Sabbath," in Jewish Encyclopedia, x. 590 ; Bohn, Der 

 Sabbat im Alteii Testament, 8 sqq., 89 sqq. 



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