Matthew records controversies between Jesus and the Pharisees that reflect serious differences over how to observe the Sabbath. Although few today believe that Matthew opposed the Jewish Sabbath, polemics and confessional biases have prevented a fair reassessment of the Pharisees’ own Sabbath praxis.

The late Uruguayan theologian Juan Luis Segundo fared better than many of his contemporaries, discerning in Matthew a clash between Jesus and the Pharisees over an ethical dilemma: What to do on the Sabbath when the obligation to love God conflicted with the command to love the neighbor?⁴¹ Segundo was right to emphasize that, like Matthew, rabbinic (used by Segundo interchangeably with “Pharisaic”) teaching places the love of God and the neighbor above “holocausts and sacrifices.”

He was mistaken though to suppose that this rabbinic prioritization could emerge from the Prophets (e.g., 1 Sam 15:22) but not the Mosaic Torah. As we saw, rabbinic exegesis turned to the Torah of Moses (e.g., Lev 18:5) to justify placing human life above the Sabbath (and most commandments).

The problem is that none of Jesus’ interventions on the Sabbath as reported in Matthew (or in any other Gospel) deal with life‐threatening matters. Matthew specifies that Jesus’ followers plucked grain on the Sabbath because they were hungry. But were they starving? Jesus healed a man with a withered hand. Yet Matthew provides no indication that this condition posed an imminent threat to the man’s life.

Feeding the hungry and healing the sick do admittedly represent acts of mercy, doing “good” (Matt 12:7, 12), which is consonant with the Sabbath’s raison d’être, a day that God “blessed” (Gen 2:3).

Nevertheless, we have speculated from a Jewish Latin‐American perspective that the Pharisees would have deemed that any effort requiring “work,” however good, trespassed the divine imperative to honor the passive, peaceful mode of Sabbatical cessation, which was instituted at creation (Gen 2:3) and designed to liberate humanity from perpetual procurement and self‐reliance.

On the Sabbath, Israel (and those who join Israel in the Sabbatical rest) is already free as it were from all worldly preoccupations, harms, and strife. This perspective certainly resonates with Latin American theologies of liberation, which, naturally so, have focused on how Jesus embodies the spirit of the Sabbath through his ministry on behalf of the poor, the sick, and the oppressed. My Jewish Latin‐American reconstruction, however, seeks to balance this evaluation by also considering the Pharisees’ point of view.

Presumably, the Pharisees did not remain aloof from the harsh realities of the imperfected world they inhabited. They knew that the sick and suffering were counted among Israel’s children and humanity at large. They too were struck with hardship and disease.

However, the test, indeed, the commandment, in the eyes of the Pharisees (and other first‐century Jews) was to remain at ease on this day despite the unfavorable circumstances, to faithfully trust in divine providence. By abiding in the Sabbath rest, they hoped to transcend human worries. The Pharisees would have agreed with the rabbinic dictum: “It is the Sabbath [when one refrains] from crying out, and healing is soon to come.”⁴²