Poster with Shabbat times, Jerusalem. Djampa / Wikimedia
Shabbat HaYom, HaYom, HaYom: Stylistic Repetition or Polemical Assertion?
When Moses instructs the people to eat the manna on Shabbat, he emphasizes “today,” “today,” “today.” Is this repetition just Priestly literary style or is it meant to tell us that Shabbat begins in the morning, and not the evening like Pesach and Yom Kippur?
Published: January 28, 2015
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Last Updated: October 28, 2026
אמר רבי יוחנן: ושניהם מקרא אחד דרשו, ויאמר משה אכלהו היום כי שבת היום לה’ היום לא תמצאוהו בשדה. רבי חידקא סבר: הני תלתא היום – לבר מאורתא, ורבנן סברי: בהדי דאורתא.
“Rabbi Akiva … believed it impossible that there be in the Torah a single superfluous word or letter. …Even if the rules and conventions of language require that a certain word or letter complete the syntax, it is nevertheless fair game for exegesis. …Even particles and prepositions served as grist for his exegetical mill. …” (Heavenly Torah As Refracted through the Generations, by Abraham J. Heschel, edited and translated from the Hebrew with Commentary by Gordon Tucker with Leonard Levin, Continuum 2005, pp. 47-48). See also, Azzan Yadin-Yisrael, Scripture and Tradition: Rabbi Akiva and the Triumph of Midrash, Divinations: Rereading Ancient Religion (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), as well as his earlier article, “Resistance to Midrash? Midrash and Halakhah (Oral Tradition) in the Halakhic Midrashim,” in Current Trends in the Study of Midrash, ed. Carol Bakhos (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 35-58.
Rhetorical questions such as ‘lammah lei le-mikhtav…’ (why is it written…) or even ‘lo likhtov’ (it should not have written) dot the Talmud.
See, inter alia, Meir Paran דרכי הסגנון הכוהני בתורה: דגמים, שימושי לשון, מבנים [Forms of the Priestly Style in the Pentateuch; Patterns , Language , Usages , Syntactic Structures] (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1989); Sean E. McEvenue, The Narrative Style of the Priestly Writer, Analectica Biblica 50 (Biblical Institute Press, 1971).
For more on Rashbam’s suggestion and the controversy surrounding it, see part 2 of Zev Farber, “Can the Torah Contradict Halacha?” TheTorah (2013 [updated 2021]).
See e.g. Exod 12:10; Lev 7:15-18, 19:6-7, 22:30.
Most societies simultaneously have different definitions of the day. Our Jewish day starts with sunset/dusk, our civil day with midnight, our real day when we wake up in the early morning, and our workday between 8 and 9.
Exodus 12:17 - ושמרתם את המצות כי בעצם היום הזה הוצאתי את צבאותיכם מארץ מצרים ושמרתם את היום הזה לדרתיכם חקת עולם Leviticus 23:31 - כל מלאכה לא תעשו חקת עולם לדרתיכם בכל משבתיכם
See Jonathan Ben Dov, “The First Month of the Year,” TheTorah (2013).
