The Third Commandment

God creating the universe; from a 13th century English psalter.

“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. You shall labor six days, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to Yahweh your God. You shall not do any work in it, you, nor your son, nor your daughter, your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your livestock, nor your stranger who is within your gates; for in six days Yahweh made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day; therefore Yahweh blessed the Sabbath day, and made it holy.”

The Sabbath is a gift to man, as Jesus elsewhere asserts, rather than something that might go against our natural inclinations: who does not want a holiday? It seems odd, therefore, that it is in the Ten Commandments, as a moral imperative.

The commandment does go on to demand not only rest for ourselves, but for anyone in our employ, or under our direction. This may require self-sacrifice; it often seemed to under Ontario’s old “blue laws.”

But this does not explain why the commandment not only includes but leads with the need to rest ourselves.

It is perhaps therefore significant that unlike almost all the other commandments, it does not begin with the words “Thou shalt,” or “Thou shalt not.”

It begins with the word “remember.”

It is perhaps a call to what Buddhists call “mindfulness.” Although often misunderstood to mean attention to the immediately sensed, the original word translated “mindfulness” is actually closer to this English word: “remember.”

The Sabbath many be set aside for remembering. The sense of the first four words of the commandment may really be, “Remember on the Sabbath day, in order to keep it holy.”

Here in Exodus, in context of citing the commandment, we are reminded of the creation of the cosmos by God. When the commandment is reiterated in Deuteronomy, reference is made to the Passover and the escape from bondage in Egypt. We are called to remember these things.

“Remembering” here does not only mean our personal memories. It does not in Buddhist “mindfulness,” for to Buddhists each soul has memories of past lives in many realms of existence. And it demonstrably does not here—we do not personally remember either the creation or the exodus.

Limiting the memory to the personal is a modern convention, that Plato would have scorned as much as Jung. Memory in this Platonic sense assumes a vast store of innate knowledge. We are born, as Blake said, like a garden fully planted, programmed by the Creator.

But we need not go that far. Memory obviously includes not just personal sense experience, but all that we have read, or been taught, or even dreamt. It includes the stories that form us: the vast literary landscape of the Bible, the Odyssey, the Ramayana, Aesop’s fables, the legends, the fairy tales.