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A Sabbath Day's Journey

By: Rev. Paul Landgraf
What is a Sabbath day's journey? First of all, it is a Jewish expression. We measure distances in meters or yards. The Jews had a certain distance that they could walk on Saturday before it would be considered work. So their synagogues that they went to on Saturday could not be very far away. The word appears only in Acts 1:12 and indicates a distance of about three-quarters of a mile.

With that in mind, I think it is important to remember the origins of Christianity. Just because we have an Old Testament, it does not mean that we call it the 'Outdated Testament'. Much of the Old Testament has a literary structure that we are not aware of because of our modern emphasis on chapter and verse divisions. Within many of these blogs, I try to get the reader to see a bigger picture, a larger perspective that often includes the Old Testament and the environment that was present when the New Testament was seeing the Light of the day.

Second, a Sabbath day's journey is intentionally short. These 'journeys' with a text, almost always one of the three readings for that Sunday, are deliberately brief discussions. This blog was never designed to be a comprehensive look at any text. Sometimes a specific word is studied in detail. But, as a whole, a blog entry, by itself, is meant to be quite brief.

Finally, since the term 'Sabbath day's journey' appears in Acts, it is meant to appeal to a wide variety of people. This blog is meant for those who cannot come on Sunday mornings. And it is also for those who do come on Sunday mornings but would also like a further study of the text. It is also for those who live somewhere else in the world (besides Drake and Freedom, Missouri, USA) and would simply like a further study of the text. It was meant to get these different groups of people to start thinking about the biblical texts. Part of the reason for this blog is that I am not able to have a bible class on Sunday mornings with either congregation, and so, to have a blog like this seemed like a good idea. I hope it is helpful for you, in whatever situation you may be.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. And thank you for taking the time to read this!

October 3rd, 2020

10/3/2020

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There is an aspect of the biblical languages that is usually overlooked these days. And I should, at the start, thank one of my teachers at Concordia Seminary, Dr. Paul Raabe, for his emphasis on such a thing.​

You could say that some of the writers of Old Testament poetry were really masters of the language. They were extremely careful with their words. And sometimes they would pick two words that were similar in sound but very opposite in their meanings. When one would hear the phrase in Hebrew, it would sound so nice. But its meaning would be so much the opposite. Something like that gets your attention quite quickly.

This happens at the end of the Old Testament text for this Sunday [Isaiah 5:1-7], the last half of verse 7 (English Standard Version):

‘…and he looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness, but behold, an outcry!’

The footnotes at the bottom of the text are somewhat helpful (unfortunately they do not appear in the bulletin insert for this Sunday). “The Hebrew words for justice and bloodshed sound alike.” And hopefully you could have predicted the second one: “The Hebrew words for righteous (sic) and outcry sound alike.”

What to do? Usually the translation follows the meaning of the words, and should not that always be the case? But perhaps there could be a set of words that would be closer in sound than another set.


To give you an idea of how they sound, here is my try at a phonetic spelling of these four words, along with the vast majority of the main definitions as they appear in Holladay’s A Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1971):

Mish-paht: 1. Decision by arbitration, legal decision 2. Legal case 3. Legal claim 4. Conformity
Mis-pah: breach of law
Tse-theh-kah: 1: Righteousness = blameless behavior, honesty 2. Righteousness 3. Justice (of a human judge) 4. Justice (characteristic of God the divine judge) 5. Righteousness = godliness….
Tse-ah-kah: Cry out, raise a cry of wailing, call for help

Dr. Raabe was very encouraging when he proposed one solution for the second pair of words that is below. Perhaps people could think of other possible translations that would be both close in meaning and in sound. I am proposing the first pair. And perhaps you could think of another for that one; it is certainly not as good as the one proposed by Dr. Raabe. 

'...and he looked for a judgment order, but behold, disorder; for what is right, but behold, a riot!'

Now to think about just one small passage of scripture for a while is certainly not a bad thing.
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