Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy; six days you shall labor and do all your work; and the seventh day is a sabbath to YHWH your God; you shall not do any work,  . . .  Exodus 20:8-10  J. Green translation

Work – Work/worship/serve is the combination of meanings associated with the Hebrew word avad.  But this isn’t the word used in the fourth commandment.  The word used in this commandment is melakah, a word that means “work, occupation, business, workmanship or service.”  Six days you shall take care of business, but not on the seventh day.  Seems clear enough, right?  Well, maybe not.

As an interesting aside, we might notice that melakah has the same assumed root as the word mal’ak and mal’ak is used not only for messenger but also for angel (all those who carry a message).  Does this suggest that work is also a form of message-bearing?

TWOT[1] distinguishes melakah (work) from ‘amal and yaga’ (toil).  Work emphasizes effort that involves skill and benefits, as opposed to toil which it seen as burdensome labor.  Melakah describes not only the effort but the results.  This commandment prohibits three things on the Sabbath:  what we do that is associated with skill, what we do that provides benefits and what we do that could involve saying something about us to the watching world that would dishonor God.

With this broad definition, the next obvious question is, “What are those kinds of things?”  The Bible specifically mentions nine activities.  Only nine.  But Judaism expanded these nine to 39 classifications and from there to hundreds of rulings on particulars in works like the Tractate Shabbat.  Of course, there were good motivations behind these expansions.  No one wanted to accidently violate a commandment so everyone wanted to know the details.  These details are included in the oral Torah, eventually written down in rabbinic material.  This process tells us something about the culture we encounter when we read the Bible, particularly the New Testament.

Martin Hengel’s study of the influence of Hellenism on Judaism contains this remarkable statement:  “From about the middle of the third century BC all Judaism must really be designated as ‘Hellenistic Judaism’ in the strict sense, and a better differentiation could be made between the Greek-speaking Judaism of the Western Diaspora and the Aramaic/Hebrew-speaking Judaism of Palestine and Babylonia.”[2]  Hengel continues, “The Jews were the only people of the East to enter into deliberate competition with the Greek view of the world and of history,  . . . after 70AD they suddenly broke off from giving accounts of their history and concentrated entirely on developing fundamentally ahistorical halacha and haggada  . . .”[3]  The destruction of the second temple precipitated this break but the foundation for it was laid hundreds of years earlier in the rise of rabbinic theology.  An example of Hegel’s observation can be seen in the dozens of rulings regarding the proper application of melakah.  Judaism in the time of Yeshua was already on its way toward this concentration of halacha and haggadah.  It is simply impossible to read the texts of the New Testament without understanding this background.

Judaism today is not the same faith that we find in the older books of the Tanakh.  It has been transformed since the destruction of the Temple.  That doesn’t mean we cannot learn a great deal from Jewish insights and investigation, but it does mean that we have to probe as best we can behind the cultural transformation that occurred after the fourth century BC in Israel.  In other words, we have to look toward the cultures of the ancient Near-East (like Mesopotamia, Babylon and Egypt) if we are going to understand words like melakah as they were understood by the chosen ones who stood before YHWH at Sinai.

We have a lot to learn, don’t we?

Topical Index:  Sabbath, work, melakah, Judaism, halacha, Exodus 20:8-10