Labor

Labor and the laborer are invested in Jewish literature with a dignity scarcely paralleled in other ancient religions or social systems. Whereas the deities of all the nations of antiquity are depicted as spending their lives either in revelry and pleasure, like the Olympians, or in ever-lasting repose, like the Hindu god Brahma and the deified Buddha, God is represented in the Bible as the Pattern Worker, as the Maker and Ruler of the world who “fainteth not, neither is weary” (Genesis 1; Isaiah 40:28). Accordingly, man, made in God’s image, was placed in the Garden of Eden not for mere idleness, but “to till it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15); and when, lured into sin, Adam fell, work in the sweat of his brow was imposed upon him as a punishment, yet at the same time as a means of lifting him to a higher station of culture.

The Sabbath, too, was instituted by God, declares the Bible, for the purpose of blessing labor. Just as it formed the culmination and crown of God’s week of work at the Creation, so should the Sabbath be to man a means of hallowing his work on week-days (Genesis 2:3). It was the high conception of labor that gave the Jewish Sabbath, in contradistinction to the Babylonian Sabbath, the character of a blessed day of rest. When, groaning under Egypt’s yoke, the Hebrew slaves had no respite granted them (Exodus 5:5-8), the Sabbath secured to the toiling slave, and even to the brute in the service of man, the needed rest, and thus for all time established the dignity of labor (Deuteronomy 5:14-15). The same humane spirit prompted the law, “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn” (Deuteronomy 25:4).

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Author: Jewish Encyclopedia

Keywords: Labor

Source: Isidore Singer (editor), The Jewish Encyclopedia (12 Volumes), (1906).

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