Table of Contents
A day of rest sounds like the most ordinary rule in the Bible, yet it reaches a surprising number of pages on this site. The Sabbath is in the Ten Commandments and in the manna story, but also in the Oahspe’s new calendar, in the week of Poseidon, in the names of the archons, and in old debates about Saturn and Constantine. These are the places where I found it.
The commandment
The fourth commandment as it stands in the King James Bible:
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
Exodus 20:8 (KJV)
In The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus Christ Jesus gives the commandment a wider meaning in his Sermon on the Mount:
God said,
25. The seventh is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God; remember it and keep it wholly set apart for works of holiness; that is, for works not for the selfish self, but for the universal self.
26. Men may do work for self upon the six days of the week; but on the Sabbath of the Lord they must do naught for self.
27. This day is consecrated unto God; but man serves God by serving man.
Levi H. Dowling, The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus Christ, Chapter 96:25-27
The rule is older than Sinai in the story. On Manna the Israelites gather just enough each day, with a double portion the day before the Sabbath, because none falls on the Sabbath itself. The same rhythm runs through the land laws: Slavery describes the Sabbath year, when every seventh year the land was not sown or harvested.
The Oahspe’s Sabbath
The Oahspe moves the holy day. In Book of Inspiration, Tae names the old year’s day the Most Holy Sabbath Day, a day of spiritual communion and praise, and the seventh day of the new year becomes the next sabbath day. Then The Book of Judgment passes judgment on the old law itself:
It was said of old: You should keep holy the Sabbath day. And it was defined what a man should not do on that day.
Oahspe, The Book of Judgment
The verses that follow keep the practice but leave it to each person to judge whether they will keep any day sacred.
The week of Poseid
In the Atlantis of Frederick S. Oliver’s narrator, all business stopped from the last hour of one week to the first hour of the next. On Strict religious customs of Poseid the narrator connects this with his own view:
Hence, I am today not less in favor of Sabbath observance, whether it be the seventh day or any other of the seven days of the week, as now constituted, or the eleventh and first, as in Atla.
Frederick S. Oliver, A Dweller on Two Planets
Saturn, Sabaoth and the sabbaths of witches
Some pages read the word itself. In the video Why Saturn is the real god of Judaism and Christianity, Jordan Maxwell links Shabbat with Saturn and Saturday. On Archons, the archon name Sabaoth, set beside Mars, echoes Sabbath and the title Yahweh Sabaoth, “of Armies.” Tracing the term “Witch” follows the word much later, to the idea of witches flying to sabbaths, promoted from the mid-15th century onward, especially after the Malleus Maleficarum.
Who kept it, and who moved it
The Essenes quotes an account in which members of the Essene Brotherhood came to John’s household every Sabbath and high day to pray, read and discuss matters of spirit. The move from Saturday to Sunday comes up in the video Constantine changing Christianity at Nicaea, where the conversation with Wes Huff finds no evidence that Constantine changed the day of worship, since early Christians already met on Sunday, the Lord’s Day.
Related pages
- Manna
- Book of Inspiration
- The Book of Judgment
- Strict religious customs of Poseid
- Archons
- The Essenes
For every page I tagged with Sabbath, see the Sabbath tag archive.
