QUESTION AND ANSWER

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jul 14, 1881

QUESTION AND ANSWER.

Is it true that the words the Sabbath, as found in the writings of Moses, might with equal propriety be rendered a Sabbath? This question is suggested by reading a Sabbath Manual which is quite popular in my neighborhood, and which conveys the above idea.

ANS. It is not. The testimony of the Scriptures relative to the Sabbath, in Hebrew, Greek, and English, is as definite as it is possible for language to express. We all know how definite the testimony of our English version is, relative to this subject; and we may rest assured that the translators understood the laws of language sufficiently well not to have expressed it in this definite manner, if the original had not been equally definite. Mr. Wm. B. Taylor, in a discussion upon the Sabbath question with J. N. Brown, D. D., thus comments upon the Hebrew of the fourth commandment: "The command is not to keep a seventh

proportion of our time, but to remember the Sabbath-DAY which is yom ha-shibingi, day the seventh, the day in which God rested; the only day that can be the Sabbath of the Lord thy God, as the Bible tells not that he even kept any other Sabbath. The fourth commandment is not general in description; it is as specific as language can make it. It designates a particular day by its proper name, and by the only name it had. 'Day ha-shibingi is the Sabbath.' Frequently as the Sabbath law is repeated, in no single instance does it describe a seventh portion of time, or even a Sabbath-day as its object: day the seventh is its inexorable demand."

The Septuagint, a translation of the Old Testament from the original Hebrew into Greek, made by seventy two learned Jews, six from each tribe, about 285 years before Christ, is probably the best expression of the sense of the original Hebrew that has ever been given. It was highly esteemed in the time of Christ, most of the quotations which he and the apostles made from the Old Testament being taken from this version. A literal translation of the fourth commandment as found in this book, would read as follows:—

"Remember the day of the Sabbath to hallow it. Six days you shall labor and perform all your works; but the day the seventh is the Sabbath to the Lord your God: you shall not do in it any work, you nor your son, nor your daughter, your servant, nor your maid-servant, your ox, nor beast of burden, nor any of your cattle, nor the stranger sojourning with you. For in six days the Lord made the heaven, and the earth, and the sea, and all the things in them, and rested on the day the seventh; for which reason the Lord spake well of the day the seventh, and consecrated it."

It is easy to see, therefore, that nothing can be further from the truth than to represent the testimony of the word of God respecting the Sabbath, as in any degree indefinite; and no one will do it, unless to serve some unworthy purpose.