the torah of moses: judaism in the bible 83
sanctify you. You shall keep the sabbath, because it is holy for you; every-
one who profanes it shall be put to death; whoever does any work on it
shall be cut off from among the people ... It is a sign for ever between me
and the people of Israel that in six days the Lord made heaven and earth,
and on the seventh day he rested, and was refreshed.’The requirement for the whole household to rest on the Sabbath is
asserted in the Ten Commandments: ‘Remember the Sabbath day, and
keep it holy ... The seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you
shall not do any work – you, your son or your daughter, your male or
female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns.’ This
weekly domestic dedication to God was to be one of the most distinct-
ive characteristics of Judaism.^18
‘You shall keep all my statutes and all my ordinances, and observe
them,’ God states in Leviticus, ‘so that the land to which I bring you to
settle in may not vomit you out.’ The land, quite often personified in this
way, is to be kept pure of idolatry: ‘you shall not follow the practices of
the nation that I am driving out before you. Because they did all these
things, I abhorred them.’ The land is to be allowed to rest at regular
intervals: ‘For six years you shall sow your field ... but in the seventh
year there shall be a sabbath of complete rest for the land.’ The land of
Canaan had been promised to Abraham and his descendants as an ever-
lasting possession:
The word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision ... He brought him out-
side and said ‘Look towards heaven and count the stars, if you are able to
count them.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be’ ... Then
he said to him, ‘I am the Lord who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans,
to give you this land to possess’ ... On that day the Lord made a covenant
with Abram, saying, ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the river
of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the
Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the
Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.’^19But the land was still essentially God’s, and we have seen that the first
fruits were to be offered in the Temple in gratitude. Explicit references
to the land itself as holy are hard to find beyond an elusive reference in
Zechariah to the glorious eschatological future when ‘the Lord will
inherit Judah as his portion in the holy land’, but the underlying notion
is evident: this was the land ‘which the Lord your God cares for’. It is of
course an odd fact that (as we have seen) this promised land is known