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question) occurs seven times in the N.T. John, also, uses the word sabbaton seven times
in connection with the healing of the impotent man (John 5: 9, 10, 16, 18; 7: 22, 23).
We shall never understand the bitter animosity created over the observance or
non-observance of the Sabbath, if we do not know something of the teaching of the
Rabbis, and the dominant place the Sabbath occupied in the life and heart of every
orthodox Jew.
"It had become the most distinctive and the most passionately reverenced of all
ordinances which separated the Jew from the Gentile as a peculiar people. It was at once
the sign of their exclusive privileges, and the centre of their barren formalism. Their
traditions, their patriotism, even their obstinacy, were all enlisted in its scrupulous
maintenance . . . . . Their devotion to it was only deepened by the universal ridicule,
inconvenience and loss which it entailed upon them in the heathen world" (Farrar).
Turning now to the first reference to the Sabbath in the Gospels, we read, in Matt. 12::
"And at that time Jesus went on the sabbath day through the corn; and His disciples
were an hungered, and began to pluck the ears of corn, and to eat. But when the
Pharisees saw it, they said unto Him, Behold, Thy disciples do that which is not lawful to
do upon the sabbath day" (Matt. 12: 1, 2).
The Rabbis by no means taught that on the Sabbath men should fast or practice
self-denial over their food; on the contrary, they interpreted the words "Thou shalt call
the sabbath a delight" to mean that extra food, and daintier food should be eaten:
"He that feasts thrice on the sabbath, shall be delivered from the calamities of the
Messiah, from the judgment of hell, and from the war of God and Magog" (Maimon).
The disciples were satisfying their hunger with a few ears of barley. The Pharisees
could not object to the nature of their food, except that it was poor and coarse, and the
fact that the disciples were hungry shows that they had observed the custom of abstaining
from food on the Sabbath day until the morning prayers of the synagogue were over.
Moreover, the Pharisees were not raising any legal objection to the disciples taking a few
ears of corn, for that was a lawful act:
"When thou comest into standing corn of thy neighbour, then thou mayest pluck the
ears with thy hand; but thou shalt not move a sickle unto thy neighbour's standing corn"
(Deut. 23: 25).
The whole question was the lawfulness or otherwise of plucking ears of corn on the
Sabbath. The tradition reads:
"He that reaps on the Sabbath, though never so little, is guilty" (Maimon).
It may well be objected that plucking a few ears of corn is not "reaping". But, in the
Rabbinical tradition the two things were classed together:
"And to pluck the ears of corn is a kind of reaping" (Maimon).