Biblical Sabbath

The Sabbath is a weekly day of rest or time of worship given in the Bible as the seventh day. It is observed differently in Judaism and Christianity and informs a similar occasion in several other faiths. Observation and remembrance of Sabbath is one of the Ten Commandments ("Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy") considered to be the fourth in Judaism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and most Protestant traditions, and the third in Roman Catholic and Lutheran traditions. The Biblical Hebrew Shabbat is a verb meaning "to cease" or "to rest", its noun form meaning a time or day of cessation or rest. Its Anglicized pronunciation is Sabbath. A cognate Babylonian Sapattum or Sabattum is reconstructed from the lost fifth Enūma Eliš creation account, which is read as: "[Sa]bbatu shalt thou then encounter, mid[month]ly". It is regarded as a form of Sumerian sa-bat ("mid-rest"), rendered in Akkadian as um nuh libbi ("day of mid-repose"). The dependent Greek cognate is Sabbaton, used in the New Testament 68 times. Two inflections, Hebrew Shabbathown and Greek "σαββατισμός" (Sabbatismós), also appear. The Greek form is cognate to the Septuagint verb sabbatizo (e.g., ; ; ; ). In English, the concept of sabbatical is cognate to these two forms. The King James Bible uses the English form "sabbath(s)" 172 times. In the Old Testament, "sabbath(s)" translates Shabbath all 107 times (including 35 plurals), plus shebeth three times, shabath once, and the related mishbath once (plural). In the New Testament, "sabbath" translates Sabbaton 59 times; Sabbaton is also translated as "week" nine times, by synecdoche. The name form is "Shabbethai" a name appearing three times in the Tanakh. The Sabbath Year or Shmita (שמטה, Shemittah, literally "release"), is the seventh (שביעי, shebiy'iy) year of the seven-year agricultural cycle mandated by Torah for the Land of Israel, relatively little observed in biblical tradition, but still observed in contemporary Judaism. During shmita, the land is left to lie fallow and all agricultural activity—including plowing, planting, pruning and harvesting—is forbidden by Torah and Jewish law.