The Jewish Sabbath, as we all know, was held by the Jews to go back to at least the time of Moses. Whatever we may think of the truth of this tradition, or of the date of the Decalogue in which the observance of the Sabbath is enjoined, it is certain that by the eighth century when Amos and Hosea wrote, it was a well-established institution. Both these prophets refer to it, Amos[1] as a day on which trading or bargaining was unlawful, Hosea[2] as one of the festivals of which the wrath of Jehovah would deprive Israel. In both these cases it is coupled with the New Moon, a point which may possibly have some significance as I have already noted. So too Isaiah[3] a little later makes Jehovah say that the Sabbaths and New Moons of degenerate Judah have become abominable in his sight. Jeremiah again, a century or more afterwards, speaks of the Sabbath as an ancestral, though often neglected, ordinance[4]. A later prophet, the author of Isaiah lvi and lviii, puts the obligation of the Sabbath still more emphatically. After the
