F irst let me clarify the objective. Some claim that the words used in Leviticus 23 for rest, Sabbath and so on are all clear and precise and unambiguous. I am claiming that they are not and that they are defined by the context. In other words, I am challenging them to give me one clear precise meaning of each word that can be used everywhere in the Bible without being ridiculous, or redundant and still retain the commonly used understanding. Notice that I am not claiming to know exactly what the words mean, as a matter of fact I am saying that I don't, but neither does anybody else, so avoid the chapter as a proof text . This article is part of a longer proof for timing Pentecost which is is itself critical to the Pattern for life given by God .

I have added a brief introduction to the book of Deuteronomy so that readers may contrast the importance of Deuteronomy compared to Leviticus in providing clear explanations. The article can be found here . Let me emphasize that in my opinion the coverage of issues in Deuteronomy supersedes the corresponding areas as given before.

Leviticus 23

Leviticus 23:11 is ambiguous and cannot be used to establish Pentecost on its own. What is more reasonable is to use an unambiguous record as proof and then see if Leviticus 23 will fit. For example you cannot conveniently define for yourself shabbath as Saturday just so that you can define the wave sheaf day as the day following a weekly Sabbath (Saturday) and consequently a Sunday. Those who present that argument ignore a significant body of contradicting evidence in the Bible. Start with Exodus 20:10.

But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God...(Exodus 20:10)

Notice that God here defines when His day is and then He uses a word to describe more details about it. It has to do with a cycle of seven. He says that this kind of Sabbath occurs every seven days but He does not say it is the only kind of Sabbath . Did God create a new word here or is He describing something to Moses that he can understand in familiar terms. It was probably a familiar word that was applied. God never gave the Sabbath day a name. Look back at Genesis 2:2-3 [KJV], And on the seventh [eshbioi] day [ium] God ended his work which he had made; and he rested [ushbth] on the seventh [eshbioi] day from all his work which he had made. ³ And God blessed the seventh [eshbioi] day [ium] , and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested [shbth] from all his work which God created and made.

The core of the word translated sabbath is scattered throughout the book of Genesis hinting at its original meaning, but some people would not realise the root of the Hebrew word for Sabbath is found in Genesis because of how it is translated. The word Sabbath or anything sounding like it is not found in the KJV in Genesis. I challenge you to show me where the root word is in Genesis 13:6, 16:3, 19:30, 34:22, 36:7 from the English translation.

1. Is it the name of the day like Saturday?
2. Can it refer only to Saturday?
   
3. Can it mean only rest?
4. Is it God's special word that can be used only for special things?
5. Is it a general word used in the Hebrew language for various things?
6. Does the Sabbath and the Sabbath day mean exactly the same thing?
7. Is it the description of the day?
8. Are all Sabbaths holy?

Is it the name of the day like Saturday?

The Hebrews had no names for days. Throughout the Bible the Hebrews identified this day by number. It had no name. The common understanding is that the Hebrew treatment of the days of the week is as follows. Getting back to Exodus 20:10.

Here the day is identified by number, seventh day , and then described according to the function, the sabbath of the LORD thy God , that God gave it. The function is shortened to rest. It would not make sense to say the Saturday of anybody because it is the name and would be the same for every instance.

Now look at the days of the week. I got this from http://www.jewishcalendars.us/search-jewish-calendars.html

That site does not appear to exist any longer but the same information was later found on Wikipedia, where It goes on to state:

The names of the days of the week are modeled on the seven days mentioned in the creation story.[69] For example, Genesis 1:8 "... And there was evening and there was morning, a second day" corresponds to Yom Sheni meaning "second day". (However, for days 1, 6, and 7 the modern name differs slightly from the version in Genesis.)
The seventh day, Shabbat, as its Hebrew name indicates, is a day of rest in Judaism. In Talmudic Hebrew, the word Shabbat (שַׁבָּת) can also mean "week",[70] so that in ritual liturgy a phrase like "Yom Reviʻi beShabbat" means "the fourth day in the week". editors of Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaHebrew calendarWikipedia, the free encyclopediahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_calendar#Weekstimestamp 18:43, 3 May 2023‎

Here we have dogmatic evidence that the word is ambiguous . It has more than one meaning. It can refer to the week or the day which explains its use in Leviticus 23:16. The word has come to be the name of the day but it did not have that meaning to Moses. This is in addition to the original usage as in Genesis 2:2-3 and Exodus 20:10 where it was a description i.e. God described the same day in two ways. We understand that now the name of the day is Yom Shabbat or sometimes it is shortened to just Shabbat but that shortened version does not mean that this is how God used the word in the Old Testament. I have done an examination of its use in the Bible and found that the word yom or ium always accompanies the Shabbat when it specifically refers to Saturday. It is referred to as the rest day not the rest or just rest . It would be like saying the first or first; unless you specify day it can be the first tooth-extraction or first place in a race. God uses this technique to clearly distinguish between two days when one day is not a Sabbath [like Passover on a Thursday] and the other is a Sabbath [like First of unleavened bread on a Friday] but not a Saturday. The context of Genesis 2:2-3 and Exodus 20:10 shows that He identifies the day by number and goes on to describe it, not name it, but the word has stuck as the name also. He goes on to define how to celebrate it:

Notice that in v11 the word day was added in the Hebrew . In Hebrew the phrase is constructed more like day of sabbath (another description) because it could be years of sabbath, months of sabbath or whatever. It would not make sense to say Saturday day as would be the case if Sabbath was a name or if the word always referred to a day.

About Hebrew

Ancient Hebrew did not have the written vowel sounds that it has today. History recognises this situation existed at the time of the first monarchy of Israel. Consider this quotation about the ancient Hebrew alphabet.

Paleo-Hebrew script (Hebrew: הכתב העברי הקדום‎), also Palæo-Hebrew, Proto-Hebrew or Old Hebrew, is the name used by modern scholars to describe the script found in Canaanite inscriptions from the region of Biblical Israel and Judah. It is considered to be the script used to record the original Ancient Hebrew language, including the texts of the Hebrew Bible in its original script. Old Hebrew, like the Phoenician alphabet, is a slight regional variant and an immediate continuation of the Proto-Canaanite script, which was used throughout Canaan in the Late Bronze Age.[1] Hebrew is attested epigraphically from about the 10th century BCE,[2][3] and no extant "Phoenician" inscription is older than 1000 BCE.[4] The Phoenician language, Hebrew language, and all of their sister Canaanite languages were largely indistinguishable dialects before that time.[5][6] The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet is an abjad of 22 consonantal letters...

Editors of Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaPaleo-Hebrew alphabetWikipedia, the free encyclopediahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo-Hebrew_alphabetversion 09:13, 6 January 2021‎

The Gezer calendar is one of the pieces of evidence for this. There was a description of it on wikipedia,  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gezer_calendar , when I last checked.

To clarify what I am saying I will direct you to Quora website @ 2020/05/18 https://www.quora.com/Does-the-Hebrew-language-really-have-no-vowels for a comment written by Jeff Benner in response to the query Does the Hebrew language really have no vowels?

You may find different spellings for the Hebrew letters in English. For example Vav is sometimes written Vau and so on. This is again an issue with vowels.

He points out that the modern Hebrew alphabet has twenty-two letters, all of which are consonants, but the nikkudot (vowel pointings) are added above and below the consonants to represent the vowel sounds. To decipher the words remember that Hebrew reads right to left. His example is the Hebrew word for God, which is elohim and is written like this:

However, the nikkudot were invented about 1,000 years ago and prior to this the Hebrew language was written with only the twenty-two consonants, but four of those letters, the aleph, vav, hey and yud, doubled as consonants and vowels.

Notice that one of those is the a sound that is in Sabbath but you will not find that letter in the word. Because not all vowels were represented by a Hebrew letter, many of the vowels were just known by the reader or speaker. For instance, the following is the word adam, meaning man.

Hebrew is read from right to left so the first letter in adam is on the right in Hebrew. It is the Aleph with an a sound, then the Dalet with a d sound and then the Mem with an m sound. That accounts for three of the letters in the English. The second vowel a is not written, but yet is pronounced. Now look at the word for Sabbath. In its fundamental form there are no written vowel sounds. It has three Hebrew letters. I have to remind you that we are reading right to left. The first letter, which looks like w is the same letter that starts shalom and gives that sh sound. You can look it up in the Jewish virtual library . It is the Shin. the Shin has dots over it to distinguish the s sound from the sh sound. The middle letter is the Bet which gives the b or v sound. The Bet looks very much like the Kaf but the difference between Bet and Kaf is the bottom right corner. For Bet, the corner is square and for Kaf it is round. The last one is the He corresponding to h. That's it. Any other sounds come from nikkudot.

The point that I am trying to make is that in discussing the Hebrew for Sabbath we are talking of the world 3,000 years ago, not today, and conditions with the Aramaic/Hebrew were different than what exists today. To make an analogy suppose we had a word bg in Aramaic that was used to refer to both bugs and bags. You could not argue today that it was pronounced differently then depending on what the user was referring to. You could not know the pronunciation. All that you could say is that it came to be differentiated with the use of vowels but you could not claim that it was always so. For a real world example consider the word Joshua . Currently it is differentiated from the Hebrew word translated Jesus by the use of vowels but that is not what was happening 3,000 years ago. The actual Aramaic letters did not make a written distinction between some words that are written as separate words today. From what I have seen the word for seat and the word for sabbath were identical when written but there came to be a distinction with the use of vowels. That distinction did not exist 3,000 years ago and I have seen nobody produce evidence to the contrary.

I gave a challenge to identify the root of Sabbath in Genesis earlier. The sequence of consonants is found several places and are not translated as Sabbath in English. The link between all of them has to do with dwelling or staying:

Moses wrote the whole Torah at the same time. The first five books of the Bible therefore share a common original language. Understand the background to why I am proposing that shbth is the same word in Genesis. It is because at that time there were no vowels in Aramaic. Since the nikkudot were only invented 1,000 years ago what could have been translated as to rest or to stay in the extracts above as to dwell in other places. If we use a language tool to look for where the actual word for Sabbath is used in the KJV/AV we notice that several times it is preceded by a word ending ium or some translations use yom . These words ending ium are translated as day i.e. day of Sabbath or Sabbath day. The point is that when God wants to identify the Sabbath day he knows how to do it. What I noticed is that when ium is omitted then the information may be applied to both the Sabbath day and something else e.g. God may be saying I have given you the rest day or He may be saying I have given you the rest (time to relax). Exodus 31:15 is another scripture that brings out the ambiguities in the word;Six days may work be done; but in the seventh [is] the Sabbath [shbth] of rest [shbthun], holy to the LORD: whosoever doeth [any] work in the sabbath [e shbth] day [ium], he shall surely be put to death . Actually the phrase the seventh is the Sabbath is translated from Hebrew that says in the seventh day is the sabbath. Can the one meaning that you have defined for the word be used here and elsewhere without being ridiculous?

I have done a search and found over 50 places where shbth is found in the Old Testament and the meaning is not anywhere nearly always Saturday. The most extreme cases are I Kings 10:19 and 2 Chronicles 9:18.

The tool that I used for the search was Interlinear Scripture Analyzer by Scripture4All. In the second case it is impossible to highlight where shbth is the KJV because it is left out in the interpretation. Apparently the original Hebrew says that two seated shbth lions are positioned next to the throne but the KJV says that two lions are standing by the throne.

We have seen that there is no truth to the claim that the word represented by shbth only refers to the Sabbath day since as the context varies the word is translated seat or week or rest, but still some insist that it cannot refer to anything but a Sabbath day even when an annual Sabbath is strongly implied by the context. Let's go a little further in the same book of Leviticus. Chapter 23 is used for the claim that it only means Saturday but we skip down to Chapter 25.

Their argument defines the word to predispose a predetermined outcome. In other words I can define dog to be anything with paws and can run and then claim that there are no cats, but if I honestly look at the animals in context I will have to discard that. We cannot decide on the outcome and decide to personally define words to make it appear plausible. We need to let the context of the Bible reveal what God is saying unless God Himself has defined the word elsewhere.

Does it refer only to Saturday?

When God wants Sabbath day, shbth is preceded by ium in some form. If we make up our minds in advance that in all cases God means Sabbath day when He does not say so, then it is we who have defined it so not the Bible. The only time that you are certain that God means Sabbath day is when He says so, otherwise He can use the word to mean toilet seat if He wants.

If you establish a hypothesis that all As are Bs then I only have to cite one A that is not a B to prove you wrong. This is the same as saying that all incidences of sabbath in the Bible are referring to Saturday. Look at Leviticus 23:3 which is used to introduce the subject of the Feasts.

Now replace Sabbath with Saturday and we get Six days shall work be done: but the seventh day is the Saturday of rest, an holy convocation; ye shall do no work therein: it is the Saturday of the LORD in all your dwellings . That makes no sense.

Leviticus 23:3 shows that the key verse used to support this dogma - Leviticus 23:11 - cannot be used as a proof but before we get to that there is more. Leviticus 23:11(KJV) And he shall wave the sheaf before the LORD, to be accepted for you: on the morrow after the sabbath [shabbt] the priest shall wave it. Here it is claimed that the word translated Sabbath can only mean Saturday i.e. seventh day of the week. This contradicts the usage in Exodus 20:10-11. Please try it. i.e. translate shabbt or shbth as Seventh day or Saturday in Exodus 20:10-11 and see what happens. It creates a redundancy. The implication is that it is a not a name but a description of a type of day that can be applied to other days or can even be applied to things that are not even days. Let us take a look at a definite exception where it unequivocally refers to something other than Saturday.

And this shall be a statute for ever unto you: that in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month, ye shall afflict your souls, and do no work at all, whether it be one of your own country, or a stranger that sojourneth among you: ³⁰ For on that day shall the priest make an atonement for you, to cleanse you, that ye may be clean from all your sins before the Lord. ³¹ It shall be a Sabbath [shabbath] of rest unto you, and ye shall afflict your souls, by a statute for ever , Leviticus 16:29-31 [KJV] . Again referring to Atonement mentioned in v28 we have Leviticus 23:32 [KJV] It shall be unto you a sabbath [shabbath] of rest, and ye shall afflict your souls: in the ninth day of the month at even, from even unto even, shall ye celebrate your sabbath [shbth·km] .

My argument then becomes that if we can definitely use Shabbat / shbth for one non-Saturday day (Atonement) and that day has a common distinguishing background with others (they are Holy Days), then there is nothing preventing me from using it for the others as well, like for example, in Leviticus 23.

Let me use another example. I can say without fear of contradiction the prophet John, brother of James. John is not called a prophet in the Bible; he is referred to as a disciple or an apostle because the context makes that imagery more appropriate, nevertheless I can see that he fits in with other people who are identified as prophets i.e. he wrote the Book of Revelation. Applying the same treatment to the Sabbath means that I can observe the context and if the treatment fits then I can have no argument against the interpretation without evidence to the contrary. When the context of the reading points to the word shbth as referring to a holy day then I have no argument against that interpretation. This means that its use is ambiguous.

The Jubilee was another Sabbath but this time it was a whole year (Leviticus 25:2-4 [KJV])

Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye come into the land which I give you, then shall the land keep a Sabbath [shabbath] unto the LORD. 3 Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof; 4 But in the seventh year shall be a sabbath [shabbath] of rest unto the land, a sabbath for the LORD: thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard. Furthermore here God adds of rest unto the land to show what was resting during this rest period.

Can it be Constrained to Mean Either Rest or Sabbath but not Both?

An easy verse to use in establishing the answer is Leviticus 26:35 (KJV); As long as it lieth desolate it shall rest [thshbth] ; because it did not rest [shsbthe] in your Sabbaths [bshbththi] , when ye dwelt [bshbth] upon it .

Here it seems to be all over the place and the place where it appears to be most likely to be translated Sabbath it is translated dwelt as it usually is in Genesis. The actual phrase is b shbth km where km means of you (plural) and b means in so it is translated in to dwell of you or when you dwelt. So what does it mean rest, dwell, Sabbath? You tell me.

Is it God's special word that can be used only for special things?

This argument only makes sense if you understand that the Hebrew writing has changed over the centuries and at first it did not have vowels. Let us again use Leviticus 23:11(KJV),And he shall wave the sheaf before the LORD, to be accepted for you: on the morrow after the sabbath [e shbbth] the priest shall wave it. Now look up 1 Kings 10:19 in the same lexicon that you used to translate Leviticus 23:11. You should see something like 1 Kings 10:19 (KJV) , The throne had six steps, and the top of the throne was round behind: and there were stays on either side on the place of the seat [e shbbth] , and two lions stood beside the stays. The only difference between Leviticus 23:11 and 1 Kings 10:19 may be the vowels. In one case it may be a sounding and in the other e sounding but there were no vowels in the language at that time.

I have already demonstrated a similar situation in 2 Chronicles 9:18. It is a bit more challenging to see because of how the sentence is translated into English but the same problem occurs there with the lions that are translated as standing but actually appear to be seated in Hebrew.

We see that the word is used to mean seat in 1 Kings 10:19 and 2 Chronicles 9:18, a place to rest, proving that the word had alternative usage and therefore could have been used to specify Sabbath related concepts (rest implied by a seat or seven because of the number of steps) other than the Sabbath day.

The word sabbath, (in Hebrew: Shabbath, Shbth, Shabbat or Shavat), can mean rest and occurred every seventh day as decreed at creation, and not Saturday. The Jews had a Sabbatical Year (Exod. 23:10-11; Levit. 25). It followed six normal years, again the when, and it was a rest year.

Notice also how God identified the day. It was the seventh day. Jews in Old Testament times did not have names for days of the week. Today we call the seventh year the Sabbatical Year. It had no name back then either and God identified it, not by name but by an ordinal number, seventh. None of them had names. They were all referred to by number. Sabbath was not the name of the day it is the description of the day as it can be of a year. Notice it can also be a day with more complex reckoning but always includes a seven and rest as with the Day of Atonement.

My argument then becomes that the word is not a special word but is very common. It has simultaneous connotations of rest and seven in its use but there does not seem to be any clear meaning or equivalent English word. The commentators appear to be putting us in the same situation as they did with between the evenings where they tried to constrict the meaning of something that had a much more loose meaning in ancient Hebrew. The word can mean Saturday, week and seat (which had six steps leading to it 1kings 10:19) so it may have more to do with seven that rest. I don't know but nobody else has a convincing meaning either.

The meaning is complex

In the next extract we find that the word Shabbath is obviously referring to many kinds of Holy Days. We can easily interchange the word here with rest but also with sevenths.

And also in other places (Leviticus 23:1-44; Leviticus 25:1-55). So does the word always and in every case mean rest?

Now a look at (Leviticus 23:3) from strongs

or from [ISA BASIC]

Now get some definitions from Strongs:

Hebrew has separate words for sabbath (Strong's H7676), seven or week (Strong's H7620) and rest or Sabbath (Strongs H7677) but shbth/shabbath seems to double for them all. Some references claim that this treatment is erroneous and the word means solely rest day . One proof that it does not always mean rest is Leviticus 23:3 above. If shabbath is translated rest day or rest then the sentence becomes redundant and silly. Please try it now. Similarly if shabbathown is translated as Sabbath day then it is also ridiculous.

Is a Sabbath not the same as a Holy convocation?

Here we see that the Sabbath is a Holy convocation nevertheless they do not mean the same. One means rest (sometimes) the other means assembly or gathering. What about feast?

So it seems clear that feasts are holy convocations and Sabbaths are holy convocations but are Feasts also Sabbaths? We will automatically think of Passover but beyond that

The Feast of Tabernacles is seven days long but the Eighth Day is also a Feast. There will always be at least two Sabbaths in this period. The first and the eighth are rest days and they are actually translated from shabbathown (v39). There are several words translated to English as feast. The word here (v39) actually means feast. Sometimes the word is translated from a Hebrew word meaning appointment but the context shows that we are referring to the same days. In any case, like Trumpets and Atonement, the feast of Tabernacles also falls in the seventh month but only its first day and the Eighth day are highlighted as Sabbaths. Is it possible that He also meant weekly shabbath to be used for identifying the beginning of the count in the Passover season? I do not have that evidence from Leviticus 23.

This shabbath is one that begins the counting. It is defined as the day before the wave sheaf day. Whichever way you determine Pentecost this day is always a rest and is always a seventh counting backwards from Pentecost. The problem is that you can't define the day as a Saturday because we see that Atonement is a shabbath along with several others in the same month, and we also know that the word used for Sabbath can be translated as a seat (a place to rest your butt) therefore you cannot say that God defined the First of Omer as the day following a Saturday during Passover. The problem is that we cannot emphatically state the opposite either. What we are relying on is compounded evidence. Trying to define Pentecost solely by the meaning of words in Leviticus 23 is a fool's errand. It is like the Energizer Bunny.

Does the Sabbath and the Sabbath day mean exactly the same thing?

This question is just as difficult to tie down as the others. I will leave it to you to establish your own answer. From what we have already read there appears to be evidence on both sides of each argument depending on the context. I have strong opinions but they do not derive solely from dissecting Hebrew language. What I have tried to do is to look for all evidence, find out what is conclusive and then see if the other evidence can be interpreted to conform.

There are easily many places in the Bible where sabbaths (plural) refer to other than Saturday alone, but in the case of Leviticus 23 we want to tie it down specifically to the sabbath (singular). I have extracted some of the places in the Authorised Version (AV) where the sabbath is found without day attached. The challenge is to be convinced without any doubt that the sabbath is only used when the intention is to convey the Sabbath day (meaning Saturday) as the sense. Another way of looking at it is that we need to construct an objective hypothesis of the form all xs (e.g. places where the word is used by an Israelite) are ys (e.g. places where the word means dog), then we must defend it.

Can you find a hypothesis and defend it conclusively?

Is shbth the description of the day?

The caption is another trick question. First to show that it was a description we go back to Leviticus.

The Jubilee was another Sabbath but this time it was a whole year

Furthermore here God adds of rest unto the land which is different from unto the LORD in verse 2, to explain what was rested during this rest period. The above is intended to show that shbth was a description of a period.

I submit that shbth was the description of a type of ANYTHING. It is a rest type of ANYTHING. It is not necessarily twenty-four hours. I have already shown that it was used in Genesis in several places but you would never know by reading the English translation, and without the knowledge that there were no vowels available to Moses. We even observe that it can refer to a seat, a place of rest for your buttocks. What it applies to in the Bible is determined from the context.

Are all Sabbaths holy?

Exodus 16:23 (KJV) says: And he said unto them, This is that which the LORD hath said, To morrow is the rest of the holy sabbath [shbth]unto the LORD: bake that which ye will bake to day, and seethe that ye will seethe; and that which remaineth over lay up for you to be kept until the morning .

Notice that here God describes this Sabbath as holy; something that would have been totally unnecessary if all Sabbaths were the same. Some people claim that He is saying this purely for emphasis and it is redundant; I do believe that it is said for emphasis, not that God is being redundant. We have already seen that Solomon's throne had a shbth but was it holy? It is only when a Sabbath is unto the Lord that it is holy e.g. when it is the seventh day, but apparently you can have a sabbath room (restroom) and would that be holy?

What does the instruction say?

We are now going to look for evidence in the original instruction.

It is actually not unreasonable to come to the conclusion that the Sabbath here means Saturday. First there are two annual Sabbaths and the definite article the indicates that there is only one Sabbath available, next the counting talks about after the seventh Sabbath suggesting that you are counting Saturdays (clarified in Deuteronomy 16:9) rather than periods of seven. The problem here is one of semantics, however an alternative reading is far more reasonable if we follow the normal way that people interpret the meaning of words in context.

If I said that I am now going to talk about people being ambidextrous and then referred to the right most people would look to the topic to understand that I meant right handed or right hand as opposed to left hand and not as opposed to wrong. If I said that I had been talking to a genius and drunkard and then went on to refer to the dope nobody would think that I meant drugs; they would look at the context and see that I meant the drunkard, so what do we do in Leviticus? We insist that the writer strayed from the subject and started talking about something that he never introduced.

The first argument that I have seen in support of the Sunday Pentecost theory is that the word translated Sabbath can never mean anything but the Sabbath day or Saturday. In other words whenever you see that word sabbath then day is supposed to be understood.

This is the first place that we see Sabbath in the Bible. Does is look like it can always be replaced by Saturday? What does for to day is a sabbath unto the LORD mean to you? Was it supposed to mean something to them? If so what? When Moses told them that it was a Sabbath unto the Lord were they supposed to know what a Sabbath was? Had the word ever been seen or heard before? I submit that it meant rest to them and hence Moses proceeds under that assumption.

An understanding of what I have said about 1 Kings 10:19 and 2 Chronicles 9:18 shows that same word used here for Sabbath is used to refer to the seat on Solomon's throne. In that context it was a seat! I have also presented other arguments above to show that it cannot be equivalent to Saturday.

In Leviticus 23 the verse specifying how to determine the day is v15. It says to count from the Sabbath not Sabbath day. The definite article the requires that there should be only one Sabbath in the context. The fact is that there is only one if we follow the context; it is just that we have been conditioned to do something different for so long that it no longer seems natural. God assumes that we know which one in v11, although there are two annual Sabbaths mentioned before, the first Day of Unleavened Bread (v6) and the last day (v8). Why would He make such an assumption? He is actually clarifying His topic as it was introduced in (v6) where he begins In the fourteenth day of the first month at even is the Lord's Passover. ⁶ And on the fifteenth day of the same month is the feast of unleavened bread unto the Lord: seven days ye must eat unleavened bread . To understand this let us back up to the beginning of the chapter. God first explains that He is about to talk about His feasts. The first one is identified as the Sabbath day in v3. He completes the Sabbath day and moves on the annual feasts in v4 i.e. the ones that come once a year in in their seasons. He starts of course with the Passover season which includes the Days of Unleavened Bread. Notice that God begins the whole thing by pointing to an ordinary day and a Sabbath; the remaining information is an exposition of what that subject is about. When He later refers to His subject in v8, 11, and 15 He identifies which one by the distinguishing characteristic of being a rest day or shbth. This is the Sabbath which is the same as the Fifteenth because it is to be distinguished from the other element in the subject which is Passover.

Anything else just leads to confusion. We can deduce that since no definite annual or other Sabbath is provided then we may chose whatever weekly Sabbath falls in the vicinity of the days of Unleavened Bread. Some include the weekly Sabbath just before Passover, or the weekly Sabbath after the Days of Unleavened Bread when complications occur with the Saturday or Sunday Passover or a Friday or Saturday Last day of Unleavened Bread. Remember that a sheaf is not a stalk it is a bundle. The sheaf is translated from the word omer which is actually about half a gallon. This is presumably how much barley could be obtained from the sheaf. It took time to cut and would be bulky. It then had to be ground into fine meal before it could be baked as cakes for the offering because they could not offer unrefined grain, (Leviticus 2:1). The Jews considered it too much work for Christ and the disciples to pluck enough corn to eat as they walked (Mark 2:23-28) also Matthew 12:1-2 (KJV), At that time Jesus went on the sabbath day through the corn; and his disciples were an hungred, and began to pluck the ears of corn, and to eat. ²But when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto him, Behold, thy disciples do that which is not lawful to do upon the sabbath day . They would not cut barley on the Sabbath either and they would certainly not grind it into fine flour. We pointed out before that if Christ had capitulated to keeping Pentecost on the wrong day to please the Jews then He would have sinned. Furthermore, some argue that Sabbath can refer to a whole week in Hebrew so based on the wording of (v15) the Sabbath could be the whole week of Unleavened Bread. We have to use the context.

I submit that this the Sabbath referred to the First Day of Unleavened Bread which starts the narrative. In addition the celebration is clearly separated from the First day of Unleavened Bread and in the context not recommended for a Sabbath because of the element of work.