Eruv and Sectarianism in Ancient Judaism: Biblical Background

Jacopo Tintoretto, The Jews in the Desert

Talmudic tradition assumes that the permissibility of constructing an eruv is derived from Exodus 16:29;

Each person shall sit in his (or her) place. Let no one go out from his (or her) place on the Sabbath day.

This interpretation seeks to understand the verb yetze as if it were equivalent to the causative yotzi’, “to take out.” The reality, however, is that this verse serves only to locate the origins of this law in the Torah, rather than in the Prophets, an effort consistently undertaken by the rabbis who, unlike the Dead Sea sectarians, wanted to derive all law from the Pentateuch, probably as a polemic against what they saw as the overemphasis on the Prophets by the early Christians. This is true despite the terminological influence that this passage had on M. Shabbat 1:1.  Explicit reference to the prohibition on carrying on the Sabbath is found in Jeremiah 17:21-22:

Thus says the Lord: “Take heed to yourselves, and bear no burden on the day of the Sabbath, nor bring it into the gates of Jerusalem. And do not bring out a burden from your houses on the day of the Sabbath, nor do any work. And sanctify the day of the Sabbath, as I have commanded your fathers.”

This is certainly an explicit reference to the prohibition. It is further paralleled by Nehemiah 13:15-21:

In those days I saw in Judah people… bringing in heaps of grain and loading them onto donkeys, and also wine, grapes, figs, and all kinds of burdens, which they brought into Jerusalem on the Sabbath day; and I warned them at that time against selling food.

While this passage clearly assumes that carrying is forbidden, we must recognize, especially when the full context is taken into consideration, that it emphasizes primarily the forbidden nature of commerce on the Sabbath. On the other hand, the passage makes clear that those who made purchases on the Sabbath were violating the prohibition against carrying from domain to domain if they brought them from the market that had been set up by the Greek traders outside of the city into the city itself and into their homes.

What these passages make clear is that early in the history of the Israelites, biblical authors considered it forbidden to carry from domain to domain on the Sabbath. At the same time, from Jeremiah’s prophecy and Nehemiah’s complaints we learn that many Israelites took this prohibition very lightly or, perhaps, were not even aware of it.