The Only Sign · Chapter 44 of 47
A Rendering Given Its Due
For many chapters now we have read the words of the resurrection morning as the original text sets them down: mia ton sabbaton σάββατον sab'-bat-on, “one of the Sabbatons.” Most readers of the English Bible have known that same morning by another name. Open almost any English translation at Luke 24:1 or John 20:1, and you will read “the first day of the week.”
It would be easy, after all that has been said, to treat that rendering as a mistake to be thrown out. This chapter says the opposite. Before anything more is said about the words, something has to be granted to the people who chose them.
Not Carelessness
Take Luke 24:1, which we read in Chapter 37. Those who rendered its mia ton sabbaton as “the first day of the week” were not careless readers of Greek, and they were not trying to hide anything. Their rendering came out of resurrection faith. They wanted to hold the day of the resurrection fast, as a day that comes back to the believer every seven days.
That desire deserves a moment’s thought. A people who had come to know a risen Lord did not want to be far from the morning on which He rose, and wanted it before their eyes week by week.
Every translation is made by people who must choose, verse by verse, how to carry an ancient word into a living language, and every choice keeps some things in view and lets others fall into the background. Those who rendered this phrase chose so that the reader would never lose sight of the resurrection. That must be said plainly: the translations we have were made with care, upon resurrection faith, and their fruit has reached us.
The Fruit It Bore
That desire bore fruit. The day of the resurrection was honored every seventh day as the Lord’s Day. And through that weekly keeping, Yeshua the Messiah, the Lord of the resurrection, was carried far into the world. Generation after generation, in land after land, believers gathered on that day to hear that He had risen, and the work of the gospel done in this way has come down to us.
Yeshua sent His disciples out with these words.
Matthew 28:19-20 Go therefore and make disciples of all the ethne(ethnic-groups, Gentiles), baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the hagio(holy) pneuma πνεῦμα pnyoo'-mah(spirit), teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and behold, I am with you all the days until the end of the age. Amen."
The disciples went out, and those who came after them, into nations whose people had never kept a Passover or seen a sheaf waved before the LORD. Many of those who heard them met the Messiah on the day they kept as the day of His rising.
Through that rendering, which set the resurrection before believers week by week, countless people came to Him. Those who read this book, and the one who wrote it, stand among that fruit. Nothing in these pages is written to take that away.
Adding, Not Pulling Down
What, then, is this study doing? It is not pulling down. It is adding.
Upon the same faith that keeps the resurrection every seven days, this study sets one more connection, which the original languages carried all along: the day He rose stood within the appointed feasts of the LORD. It was one of the sabbatons of Leviticus 23, the morrow after the Shabbat, the day of the first sheaf. The faith that has kept the resurrection every Lord’s Day stands as it is. We only set beside it this testimony of the original languages, that the resurrection fell in the midst of the LORD’s appointed feasts.
That has been the work of the earlier chapters of this part, and it was needed, because the connection is hard to see without looking up the languages. The Greek New Testament kept the Hebrew word by carrying its sound across: shabbat שַׁבָּת shab-bawth' and shabbaton שַׁבָּתוֹן shab-baw-thone' both became sabbaton, as we saw in Chapter 35. When that word is resolved into “week,” the link to the Hebrew Scriptures disappears from the page, though nothing of the faith is lost.
Side by Side
Three things may be set beside what most English Bibles have, and none of them requires taking anything away.
| As it stands | What may be added |
|---|---|
| The eleven Hebrew places where shabbaton appears are spread over four English phrasings | Render them all shabbaton, so that the one word shows |
| Sabbaton is resolved into “week” | Leave it as sabbaton, joined to the Hebrew |
| Mia ton sabbaton reads as “the first day of the week” | Set “one of the Sabbatons” beside it, and read it within the feasts |
All three are a matter not of changing but of setting side by side. The hope is simple: to bring back the unity of the word that the Greek New Testament kept, and so to hand on the whole testimony that both Testaments give together about the cross and the appointed times.
Read Together
When the two are read together, nothing is lost and something is gained. The believer who has kept the resurrection week by week has not been keeping a false day. He has been keeping faith with a risen Lord. What he may now add is the knowledge that the morning he celebrates was set in the Torah centuries before it came, on the morrow after the Shabbat, in the midst of the feasts God called His own.
John writes “one of the Sabbatons” (John 20:1), and Mariam Magdalene comes to the tomb while it is still dark. It is the same morning, the same empty tomb, and the same risen Lord. Only now we can also see where that morning stood among the appointed times.
Nor is this kind of addition new. In the first centuries after the apostles, there were churches that kept the memory of the cross by its date in the feasts and not by the day of the week. They stood close to the apostles in time, they said they had received their custom from them, and their story was written down by the historians of the early church. The next chapter tells it.