Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a counterpoint to the previous article in the Declaration that recognizes the right to work and to do so in fair conditions. After affirming the human right to work, Article 24 reads, “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.”1 It is a recognition that human beings are not intended to work incessantly, nor should they be required to.
At its simplest, the practice of keeping the Bible Sabbath as a weekly cessation of work counts “among the first laws to protect the rights of laborers”2—and it is a practice that fits with Article 24. But the Bible’s concept of the Sabbath was much more than a regular day off.
In his classic study of the Sabbath in the modern world, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel urged that “there are few ideas in the world of thought which contain so much spiritual power as the idea of the Sabbath.”3 Such is the spiritual power of the Sabbath that it also has significant social and economic implications. Even if ignored or misunderstood today, the Sabbath was a key Jewish contribution to the antecedents of human rights from the ancient world. “No ancient society before the Jews had a day of rest.”4
The practice of the Sabbath as described in the Bible—the weekly observance of the seventh day of the week as a day for religious activity, worship, growing relationships, and resting from other labors—was a unique innovation among ancient religions and cultures. Not only was it a defining religious habit, but in the Bible’s understanding, it was a rhythm embedded—and blessed—in the Creation of the world and so understood as part of what it means to be human. Remarkably, in the story of Hebrew liberation from slavery, Sabbath was included as one of the Ten Commandments given to the people by God (see Exodus 20:8–11) as a foundational ethical imperative and embedded in the legal framework of the fledgling nation (see Exodus 23:12 and Leviticus 25).
remembering our Creator and Redeemer
In comparison with many of the religious practices of the ancient and modern world, the Sabbath was a practice rooted in equality. Rather than undertaking difficult and expensive pilgrimages to a holy place or being required to make sacrifices only the wealthy could afford, Sabbath as time was available and accessible to all. Heschel points out that the first holy object in the history of the world was not a mountain or an altar. Referring to the first time the word “holy”—qadosh—is used in the Hebrew scriptures (see Genesis 2:3), he comments, “How extremely significant is the fact that it is applied to time.”5 While holy places tend to become contested, conflicted, and controlled across religions, cultures, and history, the Sabbath is a “sanctuary in time . . . a truce in all conflicts, personal and social, peace between man and man, man and nature, peace within man.”6 Rightly understood and celebrated, the Sabbath is a practice of spiritual and relational connection.
More than any other law or regulation, the Sabbath commandment reminded the Hebrew people of their experience of slavery and referenced this as their motivation for fulfilling their duties to those whose rights might otherwise be forgotten: “Remember that you were once slaves in Egypt, but the LORD your God brought you out with his strong hand and powerful arm. That is why the LORD your God has commanded you to rest on the Sabbath day” (Deuteronomy 5:15).7
In contrast with the appeal to rescue from Egyptian slavery, the Bible’s first—and better known—rendering of the Ten Commandments gives this alternative Creation rationale for the Sabbath as a pre-existing, ongoing, and human spiritual practice: “For in six days the LORD made the heavens, the earth, the sea, and everything in them; but on the seventh day he rested. That is why the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and set it apart as holy” (Exodus 20:11). Notably, the Sabbath is the most detailed of the Ten Commandments, not only in its practice and rationale but also in its application.
The focus on the benefits of the Sabbath to these outsiders is repeated beyond the Commandments: “You have six days each week for your ordinary work, but on the seventh day you must stop working. This gives your ox and your donkey a chance to rest. It also allows your slaves and the foreigners living among you to be refreshed” (Exodus 23:12). In this formulation, the master was to rest so that the servant and the foreigner also would be allowed to rest. It was a day for their benefit, and in The Lost Meaning of the Seventh Day, theologian Sigve Tonstad argues that this focus was unique among ancient cultures of the world—“no parallels have been found in other cultures.” The Sabbath commandment, he explains, “prioritizes from the bottom up and not from the top looking down, giving first consideration to the weakest and most vulnerable members of society. Those who need rest the most—the slave, the resident alien and the beast of burden—are singled out for special mention. In the rest of the seventh day the underprivileged, even mute animals, find an ally.”8
In this way, the Sabbath should never be an isolated spiritual practice. Rather, those who remember and observe the Sabbath—as the fourth commandment states it—will be recalibrated each week into a greater appreciation of all life. While the work mandated for the other six days of the week is important, it is the seventh day that is transformative—and, in turn, must reprioritize and inform the work of the other six days. Borrowing from Jewish thought, “all days of the week must be spiritually consistent with the seventh day. . . . The Sabbath is one day, Shabbesdikeit [the spirit of Sabbath] is what should permeate all our days.”9
honoring God and your fellow man
Rejected and displaced largely amid anti-Jewish sentiment in the early Christian era, the Sabbath is an almost-forgotten spiritual practice in much of the contemporary world, but “the Sabbath is surely one of the simplest and sanest recommendations any god has ever made.”10 Embedded in the history and laws of the Hebrew nation, the principles and practice of the Sabbath were remarkable spiritual, social, and economic innovations in the ancient world and should be considered among the earliest sources from which the modern understanding of human rights began to flow. It also might be a spiritual practice worth reconsidering and redrawing for the human rest and social recalibration it offers in a frantic, always-connected, unequal, and polarized world. In Jewish and biblically Christian faith, “it is eternity within time, the spiritual underground of history.”11
Tragically, too much of the history of the Jewish people has been instructive in the cause of human rights for the wrong reasons. Indeed, it was the aftermath of the Holocaust and its horrors that led to the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. But in the roots of the Jewish faith tradition—and pre-eminently in the practice of Sabbath, including the practice of those Christians who continue to follow this biblical command—are still to be found meaningful insights into the dignity and worth of human beings and their living together in community for the wellbeing of all people and all nations.
It is laudable that the Universal Declaration’s Article 24 recognizes the need for rest. Keeping the Sabbath fills that need, but it goes much deeper than taking a day off. Honoring the seventh-day Sabbath will draw you into a deeper relationship with your Creator, your Savior, and your Friend.
Nathan Brown is a book editor at Signs Publishing Company.
2. Milton R. Konvitz, ed., Judaism and Human Rights (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1972), 133.
3. Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951), 101.
4. Thomas Cahill, The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinksand Feels (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010), 144.
