A Sacrifice of Time: Work, Worship, and the Embodiment of Sabbath in Ancient Judaism

This thesis examines some of the primary practices and rituals associated with the Sabbath as described in literary texts from ancient Judaism and nascent Christianity in the Second Temple period and later. The material is analyzed from the perspectives of ritual studies and embodied cognition/conceptual metaphor theory in order to show how ritualized practices such as the periodic cessation of normal activity (i.e. work) and the performance of other, distinct rituals (i.e. praises; blessings) metaphorically produce meaning, knowledge and identity from the embodiment or practice of Sabbath in different contexts. Furthermore, the bodily performance of different activities that differ from those performed on other occasions contributes to the production of religious experience and construction of temporal experience. The first part focuses on several prohibitions regarding the performance of "work," practices related to its cessation, and how these functioned as an embodied metaphor of Sabbath as attention to the deity as well as situations where breaking Sabbath "rest" preserved this embodied knowledge of the seventh day. A second part examines positive commands of worship and in particular practices of blessing and praise for the Sabbath and deity. Furthermore, this section highlights a conceptual metaphor of "praise as sacrifice" in ancient Judaism and how some practitioners used intuitive knowledge of this metaphor to fulfill commands for Sabbath sacrifices apart fromtemple sacrifice. The final part examines the experience of the Sabbath day through ritualized practices that are often characterized as a time of profound union with angelic analogues. Ritual practices associated with Sabbath in different contexts functioned as a means for transcending the profane time of the mundane and for shaping communal identity.