The Biblical Sabbath is from Dawn to Dawn Rev. Travis Fentiman 2018 Brought to you by Reformed Books Online ReformedBooksOnline.com The Best, Free, Reformed Books and Articles Online We hope this work helps you to enjoy and glorify God To the only Savior, The Lord of the Sabbath “Hear ye Him.” Mt. 17:5 This work is licensed under the very sharing-friendly: Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License 2018 Please share this work in any godly way, shape, or form desired. 1 Table of Contents Introduction 3 I. The Old Testament 7 1. Days of the Week of Creation 7 The First Day 7 The Rest of the Days of Creation Week 10 Objections 12 Gen. 1:5 in History 14 2. Survey of the Old Testament 17 The Evening-to-Day Sequence 25 3. Gathering of Manna and the Keeping of the Sabbath 27 4. Fourth Commandment 28 5. Passover and the Day of Atonement 29 6. Closing of the Gates for the Sabbath in Nehemiah 33 Conclusion 35 II. Calendar Issues & the Later Jewish Practice 37 1. Calendar Issues 37 2. Later Jewish Practice 41 Septuagint 46 Philo 47 Josephus 51 Conclusion 54 III. New Testament 57 1. Survey of the New Testament 57 2. Evening-to-Evening? 60 3. Roman Civil Reckoning & the Gospel of John 62 4. Buying of Spices in the Gospels 65 Lk. 23:53, ‘The Sabbath was drawing near’ 66 5. The Resurrection 72 Mt. 28:1 & Evening-to-Evening? 73 Objection: 3 Days in the Grave; Day of Crucifixion; Synoptics & John 74 6. After the Resurrection 80 7. Midnight-to-Midnight? 83 Conclusion 85 IV. Reformed History 88 Conclusion 94 Bibliography 98 2 The Biblical Sabbath is From Dawn to Dawn Rev. Travis Fentiman1 Introduction As Scripture teaches that we are to “remember the Sabbath Day, to keep it holy,”2 so the question of ‘When does the Sabbath begin?’ is of concern to every person. This article will demonstrate in detail from Scripture that the Biblical, Sabbath since Creation has always been from, and is to be observed from, dawn to dawn. It is commonly assumed that the Old Testament teaches an evening-to-evening reckoning of the Sabbath, largely as this has been the dominant practice of Judaism since the rabbinic era. The numerous Jewish testimonies that will be quoted otherwise may be surprising. Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, one time chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary,3 has conceded that “…the [Biblical] festival calendar clearly alludes to a division of time that regards the evening as part of the day just ended…” and he speaks of “the talmudic innovation of reckoning a day from the eve before…”4 Many articles about when the Sabbath begins only bring into account about a quarter or a third of the available Biblical evidence, leaving their analyses fragmentary and their conclusions ill-founded.5 Hence, there is a need for a fresh, comprehensive 1 Fentiman is currently a probationer in the Free Church of Scotland (Continuing) and earned an MDiv from Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary (SC, USA). He lives in Vermont, USA with his dear bride and three children and is the webmaster of ReformedBooksOnline.com. 2 God instituted the Sabbath at Creation (2:1-4) upon the natural order for all people, He reiterated this moral precept in the 4th Commandment (Ex. 20:8-11) and the New Testament upholds this observance (Mt. 12:1-8; Lk. 4:16; Jn. 20:19; Acts 20:7; 1 Cor. 16:2; Heb. 4:9; Rev. 1:10). For reformed resources upholding the continuing moral obligation of the Sabbath, see https://reformedbooksonline.com/topics/topics-by-subject/the-lords-day/ To see that the Sabbath changed from the seventh day of the week in the Old Testament to the first day of the week with Christ’s Resurrection, see the resources at https://reformedbooksonline.com/topics/topics-by-subject/the-lords- day/change-of-the-sabbath-to-the-first-day/. 3 New York, NY. For a bio see http://www.jtsa.edu/ismar-schorsch All websites referenced in this article were accessed in April of 2018. 4 “Day Begins with Night” http://www.jtsa.edu/the-day-begins-with-night 5 Leon Morris says, “H.R. Stroes has a full examination of the Biblical evidence in an article entitled, ‘Does the Day Begin in the Evening or Morning?’ (Vetus Testamentum, XVI, 1966), pp. 460-75.” The Gospel According to John: the English Text with Introduction, Exposition and Notes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971) 158. While Stroes has a fuller coverage of the Biblical evidence than most, Morris’s claim is hardly the case. Samuele Bacchiocchi (Seventh Day Adventist; he takes a ‘Co-existence View’) likewise has one of the (relatively) fuller treatments: ”The Reckoning of the Day in Bible Times,” 3 survey and analysis, in one place, of all the relevant, scriptural material in order to establish this Biblical doctrine.6 In doing this, we will also show that the erroneous, rabbinic practice of keeping the Sabbath evening-to-evening was of a late-development. Arguments against the midnight-to-midnight view will be given along the way.7 To summarize the Biblical evidence, in short: the Hebrew word for ‘morning’ in Gen. 1 more specifically, and in context, means dawn, which closes the day’s activities after evening and begins the next day. This morning-to-morning reckoning is confirmed by above 30 scriptures in the Old Testament. The first explicitly recorded, regular observance of the Sabbath by Israel (in the wilderness, Ex. 16:22-30) was prescribed by the Lord to be morning-to-morning. The Fourth Commandment does not explicitly mention when the Sabbath begins, assuming that the hearers already understand this information or that it can be known by the light of nature. The Levitical calendar for numbering the holy days of Israel, and its sacrificial system, reckoned according to natural days. The calendrical counting of the Passover and Day of Atonement were no exceptions to this, though their holy rites started in the evening. Nor does the prescribed beginning of these holy rites reflect upon the timing of the observance of the weekly Sabbath. Lastly, in the Old Testament, the passage about the closing of the gates of Jerusalem by Nehemiah in the evening before the Sabbath is too ambiguous to make certain conclusions on, though we find it to favor the morning reckoning. The Gospels and Acts continue this reckoning by natural days in numerous verses and account the hours of the day from sunrise, as did the Jewish Temple. Mk. 1:32, about persons bringing their loved-ones to Jesus to be healed on Saturday evening, is inconclusive for an evening-to-evening reckoning of the Sabbath, and the influence of the rabbis upon the common people for such a reckoning has often been over-estimated. The most plausible passage for an evening-reckoning of the Sabbath in the New Testament, concerning the events of Jesus’ burial and the buying of spices on Friday evening (Lk. 23:50-56), is found to be incompatible with an evening-reckoning and consistent with the morning-view. The Resurrection accounts assume continuity with a morning reckoning, and are clear, from the larger Scriptural context, that Jesus rose at dawn, which was the beginning of the first day of the week. Jn. 20:19 speaks of Jesus meeting with his http://www.groverproctor.us/sb/sb-day.txt For the numerous articles which have a much more inadequate coverage of the Biblical data, see the bibliography. 6 “It is a holy labor (saith one) to inquire after the beginning of holy rest.” Thomas Shepard, “The Beginning of the Sabbath” in Theses Sabbaticae in The Works of Thomas Shepard, vol. 3 (Boston: Doctrinal Tract and Book Society, 1853), Thesis 1. 7 The noon-to-noon view is hardly credible and hence will not be considered here. For arguments against it, see the appendix to Greg Price, “When Does The Sabbath Begin? Morning or Evening?” Price takes a midnight-to-midnight view. http://www.reformedpresbytery.org/books/sabbath/sabbath.htm 4 disciples on that Resurrection Day in the evening, accounting it to be the first day of the week. Acts 20:7-11 evidences a morning reckoning of the Sabbath by the apostolic Christians. As extra-Biblical evidence is often brought into this question and deserves to be considered, so this article will give one of the fullest surveys and analyses of the extra- Biblical data available, and show that there are significant reasons to believe that there was a morning-to-morning keeping of the Sabbath by a significant portion of the Jews in the first century. The strongest, datable evidence for a certain, evening-to-evening Sabbath in Israel during the first century is not found in the Word of God, but in the ancient Jewish historian Josephus. How this bears on the complex, historical picture will be treated of in the conclusion of this article. The witness of Christian, reformed theologians from the Reformation and puritan eras, as well as individuals from later periods, will also be surveyed on the topic. While affirming that other modes of time-reckoning besides from dawn are morally lawful and pragmatically useful, especially in living in civil societies that often reckon time variously, yet the Fourth Commandment holds out God’s resting on the First Sabbath in Creation Week (Gen. 2:2-4), from dawn-to-dawn, as an obliging example to us (Ex. 20:11). The beginning and ending of the Day which God positively8 sanctified with his resting thereon and his blessing is not indifferent or to be relegated purely to civil custom.