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Page:Colson - The Week (1926, IA weekessayonorigi0000fhco).djvu/24

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return from the Captivity Nehemiah[1] shews all the horror of the later Jews at its profanation. Again it is well known that there are two versions of the Decalogue, one in Deuteronomy and the other in Exodus, and that while they both include the ordinance of the Sabbath they give different reasons for its observance. In Deuteronomy the commandment is based on the deliverance of Israel from Egypt, though the connexion is not clearly brought out[2]. In Exodus it is based on the belief that God having created the world in six days rested on the seventh[3], and this of course agrees with the narrative in the first chapter of the Bible. The dominant, if not the universal, opinion among scholars, at any rate at present, is that this narrative belongs to the later stratum of the Pentateuch, and those who hold this view will probably conclude that, while the ordinance was of immemorial antiquity in Israel, its origin had been forgotten. The only[4] point in extra-Biblical sources which has been thought by scholars to bear upon this question is one which has been already cursorily referred to, namely, that in the Babylonian records we find that the 7th, 14th, 19th[5], 21st and 28th days of the month, or at any

  1. Neh. xiii, 15 ff.
  2. Deut. v, 15.
  3. Ex. xx, 11.
  4. The controversies about the word 'schaputtu' have not, so far as I can judge as an outsider, any bearing on the subject.
  5. The intrusive 19th is usually explained as due to the fact that it would be 49th from the beginning of the preceding month.