Is the Sabbath still on Saturday?

Introduction

This question is often asked by the "Hebrew roots" crowd (who typically reject any form of Rabbinic tradition), who agree with the principle of keeping the Sabbath, but argue that the traditional Sabbath observed in Judaism today is on the incorrect date. They claim that there is no historical evidence that the Sabbath day commanded in the Torah takes place on our modern Saturday, and that those who practice Friday evening to Saturday evening Sabbath are blindly following Jewish tradition. In this article, I hope to investigate this claim by displaying the historical precedent for the Saturday Sabbath.

Did Yeshua keep the wrong Sabbath?

There is no way to prove that the Israelites in the time of Moses were keeping Shabbat on Saturday; however, we need only go back to the time of the life and ministry of the Master. Most people in the broader "pro-torah" movement would agree that Yeshua would not have kept Shabbat on the wrong day. Therefore, if the Jews in his day (1st century AD) were keeping it at the wrong time, we would expect Yeshua to have rebuked them for it. However, we see no such rebuke from Yeshua. In fact, when his disciples were accused of breaking Shabbat by plucking the heads of grain,¹ Yeshua never objected to this by saying, "They aren't breaking the Sabbath because today is not the correct appointed time." Instead, he agreed that his disciples were technically violating Sabbath law (Ex 24:21), but argued based on the rabbinic concept of "Pikuakh Nefesh" (lit. "saving a life") that one may transgress the Torah for the sake of preserving life. As Rabbi Yonatan explains:

"Rabbi Yonatan ben Yosef says: ‘You shall keep My statutes and My ordinances, which a person shall do and live by them’ (Leviticus 18:5), which means: And not that he should die by them. From here it is derived that the laws of the Torah were not given so that one would die as a result of fulfilling them, but that one should live by them. And it is taught: ‘Desecrate one Shabbat for his sake so that he may observe many Shabbatot." (Yoma 85b)

Based on this principle, Yeshua's disciples were preserving life by plucking grain so they could eat, which makes the transgression of Shabbat permissible.² However, the point remains that Yeshua's retort to the Pharisees' objection was not that they were observing the Sabbath at the wrong time.

When were the Jews of the 1st century keeping the Sabbath?

The ancient Roman calendar had an 8-day weekly cycle, with days numbered A-H, called the nundinal cycle. In 45 BC, the Julian calendar was introduced and was designed to replace its ancient counterpart to address certain inaccuracies in the solar year. Unlike the nundinal system, the Julian calendar had a seven-day week, which became increasingly prevalent after its adoption. The days of the week on the Julian calendar, starting from the first day, in Latin were:

• Dies Solis (Day of the Sun)

• Dies Lunae (Day of the Moon)

• Dies Martis (Day of Mars)

• Dies Mercuri (Day of Mercury)

• Dies Jovis (Day of Jupiter)

• Dies Veneris (Day of Venus)

• Dies Saturni (Day of Saturn)³

Frontinus, a Roman soldier who lived from 40 AD to 103 AD, wrote a book on military strategy called Strategematicon in 84 AD. In it, he wrote:

"The deified Augustus Vespasian attacked the Jews on the day of Saturn, a day on which it is sinful for them to do any business." (Frontinus Stratagem 2. 1.17)

This source displays that the seven-day cycles of the Jews according to the Jewish calendar, as well as the Romans according to the Julian calendar, were aligned in such a way that the Jews' Sabbath day took place on the Romans' Saturn’s day (the day on which the Romans purposely attacked them, as it was unlawful for them to make war). Similarly, Cassius Dio, a Roman historian of the 2nd century, wrote an extensive historical book on Roman History chronicling the Roman-Jewish war. In it, he records a story of General Pompey's attack on Jerusalem, where he says:

“Most of the city, to be sure, he took without any trouble, as he was received by the party of Hyrcanus; but the temple itself, which the other party had occupied, he captured only with difficulty. For it was on high ground and was fortified by a wall of its own, and if they had continued defending it on all days alike, he could not have got possession of it. As it was, they made an excavation of what are called the days of Saturn, and by doing no work at all on those days afforded the Romans an opportunity in this interval to batter down the wall.” (Cassius Dio Roman History 37.16.1-4)

"The Jews, indeed, had done much injury to the Romans, but they suffered far more themselves. The first of them to be captured were those who were fighting for the precinct of their god, and then the rest on the day even then called the day of Saturn.” (Cassius Dio Roman History 49.22.4-6)

"Thus was Jerusalem destroyed on the very day of Saturn, the day which even now the Jews reverence most.” (Cassius Dio Roman History 65.7.2)

According to these accounts, we can see that when the Jews of the 1st century (Yeshua's time) rested on the Sabbath, the Romans were simultaneously observing the day of Saturn. The two seven-day cycles were linked, with both weeks ending on their respective seventh day: the Sabbath and the day of Saturn.

The Gregorian Calendar

Now, let’s fast forward to October 1582, when the Gregorian calendar, introduced by Pope Gregory XIII, was created to reform the Julian calendar by addressing inaccuracies in the measurement of the solar year (the only changes being the adjustments of leap year rules to better align with Earth's orbit around the sun). After its completion, it was decided that, to transition from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, ten days needed to be skipped to realign the calendar with the solar year. Thus, Thursday, October 4, 1582, was directly followed by Friday, October 15, 1582. The transition from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar did not alter the seven-day week cycle; both calendars maintained a consistent seven-day week structure. The only adjustments made during the switch were focused on realigning the calendar with the solar year by modifying leap year rules and skipping a certain number of days. The names and order of the days of the week remained unchanged during this transition:

• Dies Solis became Sunday

• Dies Lunae became Monday

• Dies Martis became Tuesday

• Dies Mercuri became Wednesday

• Dies Jovis became Thursday

• Dies Veneris became Friday

• Dies Saturni (when the Jews were keeping Sabbath) became Saturday⁴

  
  

Conclusion:

The assertion that we have no evidence for the Saturday Sabbath simply isn't true. It's important to be intellectually honest and consistent when making claims that we shouldn't trust Jewish tradition for nonsensical reasons. Like it or not, it was the Jewish people who preserved the Hebrew text of the Torah, and it was the Jewish people who preserved the Hebrew language itself. If we are going to trust them to preserve the Torah, why shouldn't we also trust them with the appropriate way to keep it?

"1 Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision? 2 Much, in every way. For in the first place, the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God." (Romans 3:1-2 NRSVue)

Citations

[1] Matthew 12:8-12; Mark 2:23-28

[2] For further commentary on the grainfield incident, see First Fruits of Zion, Torah Club: Chronicles of the Messiah (Marshfield, MO: First Fruits of Zion, 2014), 393-418.

[3] Eviatar Zerubavel, The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 5–26.

[4] David Ewing Duncan, The Calendar: The 5,000-Year Struggle to Align the Clock and the Heavens—and What Happened to the Missing Ten Days (New York: Avon Books, 1998).