Exodus 18:1 – 20:23
Not Saying a Word
This week’s Torah reading includes the well-known commandment to “remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8-11). About this commandment the prophet Isaiah particularly stressed the importance of a person’s attitude in keeping Shabbat. (His words may be familiar today to those who recite it as part of the Sabbath morning kiddush):
If, you keep the Sabbath separate from your usual ways, turning aside from your own affairs on My holy day; and if you consider the Sabbath a delight and honor the Lord’s holy day; and if you honor it by not going about your ways, or taking care of your own affairs, or speaking a word…(Isa. 58:13)
The things mentioned in this sentence are all clearly intended to prevent the Sabbath from sliding from the extraordinary world back into the ordinary one. Keeping that separation does not happen on its own, Isaiah says. It has to be cultivated. But what could Isaiah have meant by forbidding “speaking a word”? Could the prophet be suggesting that people spend the entire sabbath in stony silence?
One answer is found in an unusual source, the Book of Jubilees, a Jewish composition of the early second century BCE. While Jubilees was ultimately excluded from the biblical canon, it remains a valuable source of information about Jewish beliefs and customs in ancient times. Here is what its (anonymous) author has to say about not speaking a word.
Anyone who mentions anything connected with work on it (that is, on the sabbath)—that he is about to go off on a voyage (after the Sabbath), or (mentioning) any selling or buying—or who draws water on it that he had not prepared for himself on the sixth day; or who lifts any load…is to die. (Jub 50:8).
In other words, Shabbat requires people to avoid anything that might breach the boundary between ordinary speech and Shabbat. Similarly, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls warns in greater detail about different sorts of forbidden speech:
And on the sabbath day, let no one speak a vain or empty word, nor press his fellow about an unpaid debt, nor let him judge concerning matters of craft or work to be done the next morning. (Damascus Covenant 10:17-18).
Similar to these are the Mishnah’s terse prohibitions:
A man may not hire workers on the Sabbath [to work for him on the next day], nor even instruct his fellow to hire workers for him. (M. Shabbat 23:3)