The Sabbath and the appointed times

This page is meant to be practical rather than argumentative. It assumes you have already read the case elsewhere on the site and are now asking the ordinary question: what do I actually do this week?

When the Sabbath begins and ends

The seventh day. Friday sunset to Saturday sunset. The day runs evening to evening.

It shall be a Sabbath of solemn rest for you, and you shall deny yourselves. In the ninth day of the month at evening, from evening to evening, you shall keep your Sabbath.

Leviticus 23:32

Elohim called the light “day”, and the darkness he called “night”. There was evening and there was morning, the first day.

Genesis 1:5

Evening first, then morning. That is the oldest count in the Book, and it is not a Babylonian import. Dawn-to-dawn reckoning is rejected here. See what we believe for why.

Practically this means you need your own local sunset time, and it moves through the year. Look it up for your location rather than using someone else’s.

Preparing beforehand

Most of the difficulty in keeping Sabbath is removed the day before, not solved on the day itself. Work that has to happen anyway is easier to move than to argue about. Cooking, water, fuel, feed set out, and anything that would otherwise fall due on the seventh day.

Keeping it with livestock and a garden

A garden can wait a day. A dairy animal cannot, and neither can water in August. Both Sabbath texts name the livestock explicitly, so the rest is for the animals too, not only a restriction on the household.

This is the question homesteading households ask first, and it has its own page: Sabbath with livestock and a garden.

The appointed times

The feasts of Leviticus 23, kept in place of the pagan holidays:

• Passover
• Unleavened Bread
• Firstfruits
• Shavuot
• Yom Teruah
• Yom Kippur, kept as a day of affliction
• Sukkot

They are agricultural feasts as much as anything else, which is part of why they fit a household working the land better than they fit a calendar built around an office.