Exodus 20:8-10

Exodus twenty, verses eight through ten, states the Sabbath commandment in its fullest early form: six days are given for labor, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord, on which no work is to be done by the person commanded, their son, daughter, servant, animal or the resident stranger within their gates. Placed fourth among the Ten Commandments, the instruction is distinguished from the surrounding commands by its length and by the reasoning attached to it, since the verses that follow ground the seventh day rest in the pattern of creation itself, six days of work followed by rest on the seventh. The command's reach across household, servant, animal and resident foreigner marks it as a communal rather than a purely personal obligation, extending rest to everyone within a household's authority rather than only to the head of the household making the commitment. Within the Ten Commandments the Sabbath instruction sits between commands governing Israel's relationship to God directly and commands governing relationships between people, a position later readers have taken as reflecting the day's double character, a sign of covenant with God kept through a concretely social practice touching every member of the household in turn.

Deuteronomy's version of the Ten Commandments repeats the Sabbath instruction in nearly identical terms but changes its stated reason, grounding the seventh day rest in the memory of slavery in Egypt and the exodus from it rather than in the pattern of creation that Exodus gives. Scholars who study the book of Exodus have taken the difference seriously rather than treating it as incidental, since it means the tradition preserved two distinct and complementary justifications for the same practice, one cosmic and one historical, without ever choosing between them or harmonizing them into one account. Both versions agree on the practice itself, and later Jewish observance draws on both reasons together, treating Sabbath rest as simultaneously an imitation of the world's own creation and a lived reminder of liberation from servitude. The instruction's insistence on rest for servants and animals as well as for the household head became a recurring point of ethical reflection in later Jewish commentary, read as building a limit on labor's demands into the structure of the week itself rather than leaving that limit to individual conscience or to the discretion of whoever held authority over a given household.