The Sabbath Before Mount Sinai
By Roderick S. Owen
HE reason given in the fourth commandment for the observance of the seventh-day Sabbath, is that the Lord made the heavens and the earth in six days and rested on the seventh day, and therefore He blessed and sanctified it. In describing these days, the record says, "And the evening and the morning were the first day," "And the evening and the morning were the second day," "And the evening and the morning were the third day." On the fourth day God established the sun to be a light-bearer to the earth, and to rule, or measure, the day; and yet the fourth, fifth, and sixth days are described exactly as are the first three. Hence we conclude that the days of this primal week were all alike, and exactly such days as are now measured by the sun. The merest schoolboy can readily account for a period of seven days, each twenty-four hours in length, about one half of each being dark and one half light; but no scientific man will attempt, on scientific principles, to account for a succession of seven long periods of time, a thousand or a million years each (as some say), one half of each being dark and one half light,—that is, five hundred or more years dark, followed by five hundred or more years light,—and so on for six periods, then suddenly to be changed, by some unaccountable process, to periods only twenty-four hours in length, thus to continue to the present time. Since creation is the act of speaking things into existence out of nothingness, the Creator could have completed His work in a much shorter period of time had He chosen to do so. To deny this, would be to limit His creative power. In this recital we find the origin of the weekly cycle—a cycle recognized by all nations, both ancient and modern; and yet, unlike the day or the year, it is traceable to nothing in nature, and indisputably owes its existence to the Creator's work and rest. The seventh day is the distinguishing characteristic of this cycle. It occupies so important a place in it, that among the Hebrews it gave its name to all the days of the week, thus: the first day into the Sabbath, the second day into the Sabbath, and so on until the seventh day, which is called the Sabbath. We can see the significance of these titles for the days of the week when we remember that the word "sabbath" means rest, and that the Creator's rest was a rejoicing in His new creation. Hence each day's work must have constituted a step into that rest; and when at the close of the sixth day God ended His work, the heavens and the earth being finished, He entered with all His intelligent creatures into the fulness of His rejoicing, thus constituting that day His Sabbath, for in it He rested, and was refreshed. Therefore wherever the weekly cycle is found, the Sabbath must exist. We read that the Sabbath was made for man—mankind; and the steps by which it was made are: first, God rested; second, He blessed; third, He sanctified, or set it apart. "God is no respecter of persons." Having blessed and set apart the Sabbath for all men, He must have made it known to Adam, thus giving it to him, and through him to all his posterity. To have failed to notify man of the sanctification of the day, would have been to make Himself responsible for its desecration; and yet there are those who claim that the Sabbath was not made known until the law was spoken at Sinai, and that then it was given to the Jews only. This would indeed be a strange way to proceed,—to make, bless, and sanctify a day for all mankind, and then to say nothing about it until more than one third of earth's history had passed, and then to give it to only one small and comparatively insignificant nation. Against this idea we have the fact stated above; to wit, that nearly every known nation, ancient and modern, recognized the weekly cycle, and very many of them called the seventh day the Sabbath, or by an equivalent term. Instances of the Septenary Cycle
That men marked time by the use of this cycle before the Flood, is shown by the record of Noah, of whom we read in Gen. 8:6-12, that to ascertain the condition of the earth's surface he first sent out a raven, then a dove, a first and second time, and that in each instance he waited seven days, or a week. That the patriarchs enumerated time by cycles of sevens, in both days and years, is shown by the account of the experience of Jacob in Gen. 29:18, 27, where we find him working seven years as a compensation for each of his two wives, with a week of festivities intervening. This system of enumerating time we afterward find incorporated in the Jewish economy in the weekly cycle marked by the Sabbath; in the week of years marked by the seventh, Sabbatic year, or year of release; and in the seven weeks of years, followed and marked by the year of Jubilee. Coming down to the time of the deliverance of the children of Israel from Egyptian bondage, we find that Pharaoh charged Moses and Aaron with turning the people away from their work and making them rest—Sabbatize—from their labor. It is quite evident from the account given in Exodus, fifth chapter, that Moses was teaching the people to observe the Sabbath. To prevent this, Pharaoh ordered more work to be laid upon them, not furnishing them straw as formerly, but requiring them to gather stubble instead; and at last, to exclude the possibility of their keeping a day, he decreed that they must deliver a certain number of bricks every day, and the marginal reading of verse 13 conveys the idea that they could not deviate from this rule in "the matter of a day in his day." Thus as servants in Egypt they were not allowed to keep the Sabbath. Moses refers to this fact in Deut. 5:14, 15, where he urges the Israelites not to deal with their servants as they had been dealt with in Egypt, but to allow their servants to rest with them on the Sabbath day. In harmony with the thought of their knowledge of the Sabbath while in Egypt, we find it recognized as an existing institution shortly after they entered the wilderness; for thirty days before they reached Mt. Sinai, we find them observing the Sabbath in connection with the gathering of the manna, while God by a double miracle—that of giving the manna for six days and withholding it on the seventh, and by keeping it sweet on that day while it would spoil and become worthless if kept over any other day—was pointing out a definite day as His Sabbath. Thirty days after the giving of the manna, God spoke His law amid the thunders of Sinai; and then to the Sabbath was accorded its place in the very bosom of that code, which was given to that nation to be preserved by them, and by them to be passed on to other nations as the Creator's moral law for all time. Then have we not clearly found that the Sabbath was made for mankind? that a knowledge of it was given to all nations? that the blessing God placed in it was laid at the door of all peoples throughout all ages, to be accepted or rejected by them, as it is to-day? "God is no respecter of persons." His Sabbath is still for mankind, a hallowed blessing.