Sabbath
day set aside for rest and worship
In Abrahamic religions, the Sabbath () or Shabbat (Biblical Hebrew: שַׁבָּת [ʃa'bat]) is a day set aside for rest and worship. According to the Book of Exodus, the Sabbath is a day of rest on the seventh day commanded by God to be kept as a holy day of rest as God rested in the Genesis creation narrative. Sabbath observance is commanded in the Ten Commandments: "Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy" in the Masoretic text contrasting with the Samaritan Pentateuch which says "Keep the Sabbath day to keep it holy."
A day of rest is observed in Islam (Friday), Judaism (Saturday), and Christianity (Sunday). Observances similar to or descended from the Sabbath also exist in other religions. The term may be used more generally to describe similar weekly observances in other religions.
The Sabbath might have been influenced by Babylonian mid-month rest days and lunar cycles, though its origins remain debated.
Origins
Some scholars propose a cognate Akkadian word šapattu or šabattu, which refers to the day of the full moon. A lexicographic list found in the library of Ashurbanipal glosses šabattu as "[the gods'] day of the heart's rest" (ūm nûḫ libbi), although this probably refers to the appeasement of the gods' anger. Other scholars doubt that there is a connection between the biblical Sabbath and the Akkadian šapattu/šabattu, as the two words may not have a common etymology and šapattu refers almost exclusively to the fifteenth day of the month or the phenomenon of lunar alignment, not to the seventh day of a week. However, different studies found evidence that the biblical sabbath indeed sometimes had a monthly, rather than weekly, meaning.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Sabbath” is day set aside for rest and worship. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Sabbath, aside and rest, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3322950. The Library of Congress control number is sh85116177. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sabbath” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.