Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
So too in other matters you reproach him with contradictory commands, as though fickle and unsteady — forbidding work on the Sabbath, and then ordering the Ark to be carried around for eight days running, that is, including a Sabbath, during the siege of Jericho. But you fail to look closely at the law of the Sabbath, which forbids human works, not divine ones. For it says: 'Six days shall you labor and do all your work, but on the seventh day is the Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall do no work on it.' What kind of work? Yours, obviously. For it follows that what was being removed on the Sabbath was precisely the work he had enjoined for the six days before — that is, your work, human and everyday work. But carrying the Ark around can hardly be counted as everyday work, nor as human work at all — it was rare, sacrosanct, and, coming as it did from God's own command at that moment, plainly divine. What it signified I would explain, were it not too long a task to unfold the figures underlying all the Creator's arrangements — figures which perhaps you would not even accept anyway. But it is more telling if you are refuted out of plain, settled facts, by the simplicity of truth rather than by fine-spun inquiry — as here too there is a clear distinction: the Sabbath forbids human work, not divine. That is why the man who went out to gather sticks on the Sabbath was put to death: he had done his own work, forbidden by the law. But those who carried the Ark around on the Sabbath did so with impunity: for they were performing not their own work but God's, acting, of course, on his own express command.
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