Did Job Keep the Sabbath?
An interesting question to answer could be:Did Job Keep the Sabbath, a patient man and a representative example of a strong believer in the Bible, keep the Sabbath? Job narrative is recorded within the Book of Job from the Hebrew Bible; this is probably one of the oldest interpretations of the Scripture. Unfortunately, the Bible doesn’t give us detailed information about how Job maintained his purity and righteousness; whether he observed the Sabbath resting, as described in the Torah, or not, remains doubtful.
In order to address this question thoroughly, we must first understand several key concepts: The facts of Sabbath, person of Job, and context of Biblical period.
Table of Contents
The Nature of the Sabbath
The idea of the Sabbath is fundamental in Jewish religion. The Fourth Commandment in the Book of Exodus considers the Sabbath a day of rest on the seventh day out of the week. It is a day on which nobody is supposed to work, but it is a day designated for prayer and meditation. The command to keep the Sabbath is given in Exodus 20:8-11 and recited once again in Deuteronomy 5: 12-15. The injunction to keep the sabbath is reiterated in the books of leviticus numbers and Deuteronomy.
The sabbath, in its purest form, is a holy mandate that God provided to the Israelites once they left Egypt – their place of abode before the time of Joseph. It was meant to be a day of sabbath for the Hebrews and their livestock, a day in which they were to recall God and his actions that lead to creation and deliverance. Sabbath was to be a corporate and individual religious experience – when all mankind could rest from labor to be with God.
However, the question arises: Did Job Keep the Sabbath, who was alive before the Law was given to Moses and before the seventh day of the week was legally instituted for Israel?
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Job’s Life and Context
Job as according to the Bible he is a man who dwelled in the land of Uz that is in today’s territory of Saudi Arabia. He was a very rich man who was honest with his money simple and God-fearing very much so into prayers. In Job’s case, the theme is mainly suffering. sinless ANYWAY undergoes severe tests in his life, everything takes away from him – wealth, health, wife and children. His friends visit him to console him only they say that he is suffering because he sins. In this case, however, Job never accepts his plight and remains innocent till the end of the book in which God restates and blesses him with more than the initial worth.
The Book of Job does not give an accurate time line concerning the life of Job. Some have assumed that Job was before the law was given in mount Sinai, which is by most scholars considered to be after the time of the patriarchs. Job himself is considered among the patriarchs although he lived at a period where the Israelites enjoyed somewhat a measure of religious freedom before the nation was formed.
Note that religious practices of people of the biblical times are to be considered when discussing Job’s faith and compliance with them. The physical concept of setting apart a certain day of the week as one unto the Lord, as a biblical commandment, was not possible for such as Job since it had not yet been legislated in the book of the law of Moses. However, the principle of deducing a portion of the day to have rest, to worship, and or glorify God may have been another principle that Job practiced even though it was not put in that fashion that it was in the late Israelite Laws.
Job’s Relationship with God
This paper focuses on Job’s relationship with God as being one of the core facets in his life. Peculiarly enough, throughout the whole book the main character, Job, remains devoted to God, though not without spiritual trials. Nonetheless, suffering remains deep, and the man does not reject trust in the omnipotent Lord. Faithfulness in suffering and not to curse God is evident from Job despite all the hardship that will be upon him.
It should be noted that at no point is Job depicted as a lawgiver or as a priest, but as a righteous man who wants to remain righteous before the Lord of lords, a man who still remembers that he is talking to God. Looking at Job’s actions, one is compelled to conclude that while he had ethics of the mediaeval order of moral and religious dos and donts, they given all the evidence, he did not receive them as commandments. This cannot have been boosted by the often hasty Babylonian’s desires and influences but perhaps on their faith in God and a desire to live right.
Actually the term ‘Sabbath’ is not used in the book of Job but we do read about the regular worship of the Lord by Job. For example, in Job 1:5, its says that Job, if he would sanctify his children, rise and offer burnt offering for them, so that their souls may be holy. This means that Job was religious in practicing some cultural endowment that indented on making his family materially holy as well as him before God. Although these actions do not ‘prove’ that Job kept the Sabbath they do indicate that Job cared about the worship of God and his devotion to keeping the Sabbath.
SIDENOTE 1 Why Sabbath Is Not Observed Today
The Book of Job reposes no overtones concerning the Did Job Keep the Sabbath, and such silence might be suggestive in itself. The actual commandment of the Sabbath was not given until later at Sinai when the Israelites left Egypt so it is unlikely that Job, prior to the giving of the law, would have thought in terms of not working on the Sabbath in the same way in which later generations would be commanded to do.
But this does not suggest that Job did not parcel out a sort of rest or worship on particular days. By presenting sacrifices and worshipping God we can note that Job had some sort of religious schedule, therefore we can deduce, he had time for rest. When we combine the fact that possibly Job worshiped under natural cycles of the earth, with other patriarchs before him the possibility is not far-fetched.
In Job, we have the double of the Book of Moses.
The law of Moses which list the commandment to observe the sabbath was not givin until after the exodus from Egypt a time long after jobs’s. The Mosaic Law is a textbook of rules and formalities governing worship, and it also introduced such elements as the Sabbath day. But Job dwelt in the land long before this law was given and so one cannot ascertain that he was able to keep the Sabbath in the same way that later generations of Israelites were.
One must mention that the patriarchs, including Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, are not depicted as observing the law givne to the Israelite, including the Sabbath. The book has them maintaining a covenant with God, covenant which involved sacrifices, altars, and other things considered observance of ger; all before the Law of Moses. This indicates that maybe Job also worshipped in this fashion although probably he did not regard the Sabbath as a legal prescription.
The Problem of Rest for All
One question that comes to mind when trying to decide if Job kept the Sabbath is the question of universal rest. Anyway, let us distinguish the Sabbath as a commandment from the principle of rest and worship in general and let us say that the principle of resting in honor of God and reflection exists not only in Judaism but also in many other religions and cultures of the ancient world ancient world. Thus, Job may have known that like other righteous men of his dispensation he had to devote time to rest as well as pray and meditate, even though there was no Sabbat.
AMS as shown in Job’s life is a problem of suffering, which points to the need for a renewal of what is spiritual in man. It might be that Job never had experienced the Sabbath in the way it was prescribed in the Torah but rather the principles that went with the practice of taking one day in the week to rest in God’s presence and to meditate on His faithfulness were ingrained in his life.
Conclusion
Did Job Keep the Sabbath keep the Sabbath? Addressing this question in diverse historical and cultural perspective of when the story of Job was written is not very easy. The official call for the observing of the Sabbath was even later, provided in the Law of Moses. But it can be also concluded that Job does not refuse to serve God, on the contrary, he worships God, prays, and makes sacrifices regularly. Strikingly, even though, the later concept of Sabbath is not yet introduced, Job has his schedule for devotion to the divine, which presupposed his ability to set apart time for God.
Perhaps the greatest issue in Job’s story is not the concept of whether or not he kept the Sabbath. Most evident is his loyalty to God and steadfast adherence to neither cursing God, nor covering his blood to spite Him despite his suffering and persecution; obeying God by adherence to the Torah, remaining good and exhibiting loyalty to God despite suffering, persecution and death. Though Job could not be said to have kept the Sabbath in the Biblical sense, his story constitutes one of the greatest depiction of faith, endurance, and an innate desire to find God.