Torah says that a fire is not to be kindled on the Sabbath day, but this law has a deeper foundation, meaning, and application than most think.
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This is Living Hebrew, Selah, where we present a brief Scriptural topic for you to ponder on.
In this episode, we consider:
“KINDLING FIRE ON THE SABBATH”
Chapter 35 of the book of Exodus opens after the covenant is renewed between Yah and Israel. Moses had hewn two new tables of stone on which the covenant law was rewritten, and the first few verses tell us:
1Moses assembled all the congregation of the people of Israel and said to them, “These are the things that Yah has commanded you to do. 2Six days work shall be done, but on the seventh day you shall have a Sabbath of solemn rest, set apart to Yah. Whoever does any work on it shall be put to death. 3You shall kindle no fire in all your dwelling places on the Sabbath day.”
—Exodus 35:1 – 3
Yah, through Moses, clearly proclaims that any work done on the Sabbath incurred the penalty of death. That is followed by a seemingly separate prohibition: kindling fire in one’s dwelling place. But while it may seem separate, and students of Scripture tend to isolate it, the kindling-fire clause belongs within the Sabbath commandment. It must be understood, however, that kindling fire in the time of Moses was in fact work, no less than chopping wood and building an old-fashioned fire during a camping trip in our modern day. This is not equivalent to striking a match, lighting a candle, or flipping on a light switch, as some argue.
In fact, the reason fire is mentioned here is related to one important function of fire: transformation. We have to take into consideration what was happening when this law was given. The Israelites were in the process of erecting the tent of meeting and all its furniture and fittings. That required a lot of preparation, craftsmanship, and metalwork, which employed the process of metal casting, according to verses like Exodus 25:12; 26:37, and many others. A General Kinematics blog post explains the process:
What is Metal Casting?
Metal casting is a modern process with ancient roots. In the metal casting process, metal shapes are formed by pouring molten metal into a mold cavity, where it is cooled and later extracted from the mold. Metal casting is arguably the earliest and most influential industrial process in history.
https://www.generalkinematics.com/blog/metal-casting-process-explained/
Exodus 38:24 – 30 informs us that over 2,000 pounds of gold, 7,500 pounds of silver, and 5,300 pounds of bronze were used throughout the tent of meeting. In other words, a great deal of fire was kindled in order to melt and refashion this amount of metal. That work was never to be done on the sabbath.
But more than that, fire was never to be used to change the state of not only metal, but anything else on the sabbath day, including food. We see the consequence of this action in passages like the one found in the book of Numbers:
32While the people of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man gathering sticks on the Sabbath day. 35And Yah said to Moses, “The man shall be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him with stones outside the camp.”
—Numbers 15:32, 35
A similar passage of Scripture correlates the gathering of sticks with cooking, namely the one in 1 Kings that sees Elijah the prophet instructing the widow of Zarephath to bring him a drink of water and a morsel of bread when he spots her picking up sticks:
12And she said, “As Yah your Elohim lives, I have nothing baked, only a handful of flour in a jar and a little oil in a jug. And now I am gathering a couple of sticks that I may go in and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it and die.”
—1 Kings 17:12
Note that the widow was going to pick up sticks in an effort to turn flour into bread with the use of fire—a clear transformation. So, the same action of picking up sticks (presumably to cook) cost a man his life simply because he was doing so on the Sabbath. Exodus 16 expressly forbids using fire, or heat, to transform food items from raw to cooked on that day.
23He said to them, “This is what Yah has commanded: ‘Tomorrow is a day of solemn rest, a set apart Sabbath to Yah; bake what you will bake and boil what you will boil, and all that is left over lay aside to be kept till the morning.’”
—Exodus 16:23
The Israelites were to use the day of preparation for baking and cooking (turning raw food into cooked food using fire). This was not the case with days of pure convocation, such as Passover, and Unleavened Bread, which had no preparation days. In fact, Israelites were commanded to both kill and prepare their lambs at twilight, when Passover was already underway, per Exodus 12:6. And two verses later, we read:
8They shall eat the flesh that night, roasted on the fire.
—Exodus 12:8
Not only could the Israelites kill the lamb on Passover, which was perceived as a kind of Sabbath, but they could also roast the lamb on a fire, and we know what that entailed. When you look at all the feasts of Yah, each and every one of them were to include something called a food offering (i.e., an offering made by fire), per Leviticus 23. The only day on which a food offering is not commanded, is the seventh-day Sabbath, because food was never to be cooked on that day. (And yes, food offerings are commanded for the Day of Atonement as well, which meant that the priests did not fast on that day. To learn more about food offerings—or offerings made by fire—see Leviticus 6:14 – 18 and 7:28 – 36.)
Now, kindling a fire on the seventh-day Sabbath was forbidden, in the sense of cooking in one’s dwelling. Even gathering sticks outdoors with the intent to cook indoors was prohibited and meant certain death. But, we don’t have to gather sticks today and bear the exertion of building a fire. One can simply turn a dial on an electric stove for instance, or press a button on a microwave. This is true, but remember that the prohibition is related to transformation, turning something from a raw state to a cooked state, per Exodus 16:23. From my studies, I have found that, once food is already prepared and cooked (which should have been done on preparation day) warming it up is not prohibited in Scripture, because cooking is not being done.
The spiritual analogy behind this is drawn from an event that will mark the end of this age. In the final chapter of Revelation, Yeshua declares:
12“Behold, I am coming soon, bringing my recompense with me, to repay each one for what he has done.”
—Revelation 22:12
We get a glimpse of that recompense being handed out in vivid detail in the fourteenth chapter of Zechariah. Essentially, when the window of opportunity is closed to people living in this age, transformation will be impossible. We are in the preparation day of existence, at the highest spiritual level, since this is the end of the sixth-thousandth year. The millennium will be a Sabbath of rest, where the fire that is HaShatan will be removed and no one will be transformed from wicked to righteous. The time for that is now, in the day of preparation. This is why the heavenly messenger tells John:
10 … “Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is near. 11Let the evildoer still do evil, and the filthy still be filthy, and the righteous still do right, and the set apart still be set apart.”
—Revelation 22:10 – 11
Selah.
Keywords: cooking on sabbath, lighting a fire on sabbath, metal casting, tent of meeting, warming food on the sabbath, gathering sticks, selah, living Hebrew, kingdom preppers, kp
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