May 23rd, 2020

The First Reading for this week, the Seventh Sunday of Easter, is Acts 1:12-26, and this is the only time and place you will hear the expression, ‘a Sabbath day’s journey’. This text is always the first reading, no matter what year it is of the three-year series, and verse 12 of the text, the verse that contains that phrase, goes this way (in a very literal translation):

      Then they [the apostles, the ‘men of Galilee’] returned into Jerusalem from the                  mount of the one being called the olive grove, which is near Jerusalem, having a              way of a sabbath.

Since this blog has that name, I thought it would be good to look into that phrase a little more closely. There are some things in The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia [published in 1988 by Eerdmans in Grand Rapids, Michigan] that were new to me:

     The distance the rabbis allowed a Jew to travel on the Sabbath without breaking the       law. The phrase occurs only in Acts 1:12, where it describes the distance the disciples       traveled when they returned from the Mt. of Olives to Jerusalem after the Ascension.       Defining travel as work proscribed on the sabbath (cf. Ex. 16:27-30), the rabbis                   limited such travel to 2000 cubits (3000 ft. [914 m.] by Hellenistic measure, 3600 ft.         [1097 m.] by Roman measure) from one’s domicile. The figure seems to have been           based on Josh. 3:4, which says that the distance between the ark and the people               during the wilderness sojourn was 2000 cubits. Here it was assumed that this was           the distance necessary to attend worship in the tabernacle, and that such necessity         legitimated the distance involved. We do not know when this interpretation was             finalized, but it seems to have been accepted by the time of Christ. Later Jerome (Ep.      To Algarsiam x) stated that a sabbath day’s journey was 2000 ft. (610 m.); according         to the Egyptian measure it was 1000 double-steps.

     In any case the scribes invented ways to increase a sabbath day’s journey up to a            distance of 4000 cubits. One could deposit food at the 2000-cubit limit before the          sabbath began and declare that spot a temporary home, or one could select a tree
    or a wall 2000 cubits from one’s true residence and declare this one’s home; thus            one could travel an added 2000 cubits on the sabbath. Again, one could declare the        whole town in which one dwelt one’s domicile, and so journey 2000 cubits beyond          town limits from any point in the town. Boundary stones, supposedly marking such         village limits, have been found near Gaza. Rabbinical interpretation sometimes               understood Nu. 35:5, which measured the suburbs of Levitical cities as 2000 cubits,          as also bearing on a sabbath day’s journey [volume 4, page 252].

The attempts to get ‘around’ that limit are interesting. But that is nothing new. There are new ‘laws’ that are attached to this new virus that are being questioned by some and wholeheartedly rejected by others. People enjoy freedom, but true freedom only comes from the gospel of Jesus Christ (for more detail on this, see the 1520 writing of Dr. Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian; this year is that writing’s 500th anniversary, and the document merits some serious attention; also, there are a substantial number of bible verses mentioned within the document, and the reading of it could be considered a bible study).

To get back to the subject, this phrase, ‘a Sabbath day’s journey’, did not have to show up at all in the New Testament. The distance could have been measured in stadia, as it is done other times. And it was not even the Sabbath when Jesus ascended!

This phrase prepares the reader and/or listener for a Jewish perspective on the Jesus story. That is what we have pretty much throughout the work. Even though in Acts 13:46 Paul states that ‘we are turning toward the Gentiles’, they continue to go to synagogues. Even in Rome, at the end of the book, Paul speaks to ‘the first [i.e., the leaders] of the Jews’. And, at the VERY end, he is described as ‘proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching the things concerning the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness unhindered (Acts 28:31).’ There is no more talk of limits with THAT text.