In halakha, the 39 melachot of Mishnah Shabbat 7:2 functions as a comprehensive list of primary categories of forbidden labor. A closer look at the list in context, however, reveals that it was composed and added as a supplement, to clarify a detail in the previous mishnah.

Two responses—from an academic Bible scholar and from a rabbi.

Biblical prohibitions against preparing food on Shabbat are further developed in the Second Temple and rabbinic periods. At the same time, a new emphasis emerges: celebrating Shabbat with festive meals.

The parallels between the Tabernacle and ANE structures such as Rameses II’s military tent shed light on what the meaning and function of this ancient structure might have been.

Cracking the Rabbinic Code

The forms of of work forbidden on Shabbat and whether there is even a fixed number of them is disputed in the Tannaic period. Today, Judaism follows the opinion Rabbi Akiva and his students that the number is 39. But from where did Rabbi Akiva and students derive the number 39 as set in stone?^[1] 

The Torah never defines specifically what, melakha, labor, on Shabbat entails, but the Mishnah already has an exact list of 39 categories of labor prohibited on Shabbat.^[1] A comparison of the structure of the Yerushalmi and Bavli sugyot highlight the different ways the Amoraim conceptualized melakha in contrast to the Mishnah.^[2] 

The Sabbath laws offers an instructive model for how Jews in antiquity engaged in creative reinterpretation of biblical texts in order to expand their limited application and to ensure that their customary practice comported with their sacred texts. Using the prohibition against carrying as formulated in Second Temple period texts and rabbinic literature as an example, this analysis traces the history of this law as well as the strategies by which later authors exegetically engage and transform earlier textual material.^[1] 

The mishkan account as a polemical response to the Temple narrative