על עשרת הדברות כ׳On the Decalogue 20
א׳
1[96] The fourth commandment deals with the sacred seventh day, that it should be observed in a reverent and religious manner. While some states celebrate this day as a feast once a month, reckoning it from the commencement as shown by the moon, the Jewish nation never ceases to do so at continuous intervals with six days between each.
ב׳
2[97] There is an account recorded in the story of the Creation containing a cogent reason for this: we are told that the world was made in six days and that on the seventh God ceased from His works and began to contemplate what had been so well created,
ג׳
3[98] and therefore He bade those who should live as citizens under this world-order follow God in this as in other matters. So He commanded that they should apply themselves to work for six days but rest on the seventh and turn to the study of wisdom, and that while they thus had leisure for the contemplation of the truths of nature they should also consider whether any offence against purity had been committed in the preceding days, and exact from themselves in the council-chamber of the soul, with the laws as their fellow-assessors and fellow-examiners, a strict account of what they had said or done in order to correct what had been neglected and to take precaution against repetition of any sin.
ד׳
4[99] But while God once for all made a final use of six days for the completion of the world and had no further need of time-periods, every man being a partaker of mortal nature and needing a vast multitude of things to supply the necessaries of life ought never to the end of his life to slacken in providing what he requires, but should rest on the sacred seventh days.
ה׳
5[100] Have we not here a most admirable injunction full of power to urge us to every virtue and piety most of all? “Always follow God,” it says, “find in that single six-day period in which, all-sufficient for His purpose, He created the world, a pattern of the time set apart to thee for activity. Find, too, in the seventh day the pattern of thy duty to study wisdom, that day in which we are told that He surveyed what He had wrought, and so learn to meditate thyself on the lessons of nature and all that in thy own life makes for happiness.”
ו׳
6[101] Let us not then neglect this great archetype of the two best lives, the practical and the contemplative, but with that pattern ever before our eyes engrave in our hearts the clear image and stamp of them both, so making mortal nature, as far as may be, like the immortal by saying and doing what we ought. But in what sense the world is said to have been created by God in six days when no time-period of any kind was needed by Him for his work has been explained elsewhere in our allegorical expositions.