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“On the seventh day God finished the work that He had been doing, and He ceased on the seventh day from all the work the He had done. And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because on it God ceased from all the work of creation that He had done” (Gen. 2:2-3).
I.
The purpose of this paper is to determine what the Sabbath means in the texts of Jubilees and Philo's “On the Creation”. I have chosen to focus on this facet of Genesis not only because it is a fascinating concept in and of itself, that God ordains rest in appreciation for His creation, but also because both Jubilees and Philo both have a great deal to say about the Sabbath and its significance. In Genesis, the author presents the Sabbath day rather matter-of-factly, merely saying that the Sabbath day is holy because that is the day that God ceased to work and that God blessed the seventh day and held it to be holy. Little else is said concerning the Sabbath in Genesis proper – everything else is interpretation. And that is where Jubilees and Philo come into play. Jubilees wishes to demonstrate that the Sabbath is a special day because it is a day to show your appreciation of the jubilee, to maintain your unique Jewish identity, and to purify yourself. Philo has a different idea of what the Sabbath represents; he maintains that the Sabbath is a holy day because it comes as the seventh day, for the number seven is perfect, and that the Sabbath is a perfect day for reflection of philosophy and morality.
II.
Jubilees has two major sections on the Sabbath: “The significance of the Sabbath” and “The laws for keeping the Sabbath”, respectively. For the sake of brevity, I will be focusing on the first.
The first section begins with declaring that the Sabbath day is “a great sign” (Jub. 2:17). The Sabbath day to the author of Jubilees is a sacred day signifying sacred time; the Sabbath day is a veritable temple of time. This idea keeps in stride with the idea of the jubilee, which comes at the end of every forty-seventh year, or seven sevens. The Sabbath is therefore sacred and a great sign precisely because it comes at the end of seven days and this mimics the importance of the forty-seven-year Jubilee. The Jubilee is also “a great sign” because of the purity laws that the author of Jubilees tries so hard to exhibit. By resting on every seventh day, this allows one to be able to perform purification rituals and become sanctified before God. The author of Jubilees is consistent in that he focuses on the maintenance of purification. This is probably because he was trying to show that following the Hellenistic mode of life is against Jewish law and therefore should be banned. He wrote Jubilees with the intention of showing that the Jewish way of life must be preserved in the face of adversity by the Greeks.
The Book of Jubilees, too, throws in a reference to the patriarch Jacob in its discussion of the Sabbath. As it says, “Behold I shall separate for myself a people among all the nations. […] And they will be my people and I will be their God. And I have chosen the seed of Jacob from among all that I have seen. And I have recorded him as my firstborn son, and have sanctified him for myself forever and ever” (Jub. 2:20). What is the relationship between the Sabbath and Jacob? Jacob paradigmatically represents separation of the Jewish people from all others, for Jacob was commanded by Abraham to “'separate thyself from the nations' (Gen. 22:16) and this was to be accomplished by dietary separation as well as by avoidance of intermarriage (Gen. 22:16b, 20a)” [Endres, John. “Biblical Interpretation in the Book of Jubilees”. (Washington DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1987). p. 229.] . Jacob also seemingly celebrates the Sabbath in Genesis 28:2: “He came to a certain place and spent the night there, because the sun had set”. Jacob, therefore, is the patriarch of choice for the author of Jubilees as Jacob exhibits all the characteristics of the perfect Jew – separated, monocultural, and observant. So, to answer the question, Jacob's relationship to the Sabbath is that he observes the Sabbath day in Genesis 28:2 and, importantly for the author of Jubilees, Jacob maintains a cultural boundary between himself and others throughout Genesis, something the other patriarchs fail to do. He is thus a paragon for the meaning of the Sabbath day.
Philo's “On the Creation” holds a very different view of the meaning of the Sabbath day. Philo is very obsessed with the idea of the perfection of the number seven since the Sabbath lies on the seventh day. Philo dedicates twelve chapters, out of sixty-one, of his work “On the Creation” to precisely praising the perfection of the number seven. He calls the number seven “a festival for all people” and “superior to every form of expression” (Philo, “On the Creation” XXX:89-90). He holds that the number seven is so superior that one cannot say everything about the number as it is beyond human capacity (Philo, “On the Creation” XXX:90). Philo goes on to prove that the number seven is so great saying that, for example, it has a numerical harmony, it neither produces nor is produced (it is immovable), it represents the lifespan of man, it is musically harmonious, Ursa Major and the Pleiades have seven stars each, the body has seven major organs, and so on. Philo also places great emphasis on the fact that the Greeks, i.e. Pythagoras, Solon, and Hippocrates, considered seven to be a special number. (This shows the depth of learning of Philo and his cosmopolitan perspective; he embraced the Greeks rather than ignoring or despoiling them). Genesis 2:3 merely says that “God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy”. However, Philo takes this statement to its extreme, to the next level. He shows through all of his examples that the Sabbath day, the seventh day, is the holiest day of the week, for it is perfect, superior, and venerable in a multitude of ways. All of these examples stand as an allegory of the perfection of seven. By using things like the stars and body parts, Philo is trying to “paint a picture” of the perfection of seven. I conjecture that Philo uses allegory to explain the Sabbath day because he considers the Sabbath to be beyond human comprehension, just as the number seven is beyond human capacity. We can approximate what the meaning of the Sabbath is through our human minds and the allegories that the human mind produces, but we can never understand the Sabbath in-and-of-itself.
Philo also espouses his view that the Sabbath should be used for the purpose of moral instruction and the study of philosophy. As Philo writes:
“Abstaining from all other works which are done in the seeking after and providing the means of life, devoting that day to the single object of philosophizing with a view to the improvement of their morals, and the examination of their consciences” (Philo, “On the Creation” XLIII:128).
This is in line with Philo's appreciation of learning. Earlier we saw that Philo appreciates other cultures like the Greeks. It is unclear whether Philo is promoting Greek learning in this passage, but perhaps Philo is encouraging fellow Jews to take up the study of other systems of thought. Or perhaps Philo is encouraging the Jews to take up scripture. Or perhaps both. The text is unclear, but maybe consciously so. But what is clear is that Philo says that learning and ethics should occupy a person on the Sabbath. This is what God ordained by providing a day of rest.
III. The main reason why there are differences between Jubilees and Philo is that they are approaching the text of Genesis with different motives.
For instance, Jubilees and Philo have differing view on how to use the “free time” that the Sabbath produces. In Jubilees, the main use of this time is to purify yourself and to maintain a conscious distance from your neighbors. Jubilees' objective is to present the Sabbath day as a day set aside so one can maintain their Jewish identity. The Sabbath, therefore, represents a boundary between them and us. Philo, on the other hand, has a very different idea of how to use the “free time” the Sabbath provides. Instead of throwing up boundaries, Philo rather tries to break down boundaries as he promotes and encourages the intermingling of different cultures on the Sabbath day. His view is that the Sabbath was a day set aside for Jews so that they can learn about themselves and others in order to become better people as a result.
Also, Jubilees and Philo disagree about what the meaning of the number seven should be. To the author of Jubilees, seven is yet another boundary. Because seven sevens represents the jubilee year, a festival of Judaism, the number seven is charged with power, for that festival is a festival about Jewish identity (among other things). Philo takes the number seven and tries through any means possible, Jew or Gentile, to show the perfection of the number. He does not once in his treatise mention the jubilee year. He instead invokes proofs for the perfection of seven from a myriad of sources both Jew and Gentile. Philo really diversifies his sources, an act which the Jubilees would have never done. But it still is curious that Philo fails to mention the jubilee as a reason for the perfection of seven since the whole idea of the perfection of seven in Jubilees solely hinges upon the jubilee.
What is clear is that these verses are understood in divergent ways because of the prejudices of the authors. The author of Jubilees is against all forms of learning from other cultures. His goal is to inculcate into his audience the belief that separation is both necessary and key to maintaining Jewish identity. By solely hinging his argument that seven is perfect because of the jubilee, it shows that he wanted to use a solely Jewish interpretation upon why seven is holy. Philo approaches the text with a different set of prejudices, namely that cosmopolitanism is both good for the Jewish people and necessary in order to truly understand topics like the Sabbath, etc. Philo would disagree with the author of Jubilees because Jubilees is so against using other cultures to understand scripture. Philo embraces other cultures and their views and conflates their findings with scripture.
Citations
Anonymous. Book of Division, The. <http://byustudies.byu.edu/resources/Jubilees.pdf>. 06 Oct 2007.
Endres, John. “Biblical Interpretation in the Book of Jubilees”. Catholic Biblical Association of America. 1987.
Philo. “On the Creation”. Early Jewish Writings. 2001-2006. <http://www.earlyjewishwritings.com/text/philo/book1.html>. 06 Oct 2007.
