In Contra Apionem I:209 Josephus quotes Agatharchides who writes the following: “The people known as Jews, who inhabit the most strongly fortified of cities, called by the natives Jerusalem, have a custom of abstaining from work every seventh day; on these occasions they neither bear arms nor take any agricultural operations in hand nor engage in any other form of public service, but pray with outstretched hands in the temples until the evening.”
In verse Contra Apionem I:212 Josephus confirms Agatharchides’s statement, speaking of his Jewish compatriots as ‘men who consistently care more for the observance of their laws and for their religion than for their own lives and their country’s fate’.
I believe there is a story in the Synoptic gospels that – in its clearest form in Mark – discusses this subject at the beginning of the rebellion against the Romans in 66 CE. It is the story of the man with the withered hand, Mark 3:1-6, Matthew 12:9-14, Luke 6:6-11.
Mark 3:1-6 goes as follows:
(1) Again he went into the synagogue, and a man was there who had a dry hand. [(2) And they watched him, to see whether he would heal him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse him.] (3) And he said to the man with the dry hand, “Come into the middle.” (4) And he said to them, “Is it permitted on the Sabbath to do good or to injure, to save life or to kill?” But they kept silent. (5) And he looked around at them with anger, grieved at the inflexibility of their heart, and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. (6) The Pharisees went out, and immediately held counsel with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.
This translation is based on Nestle-Aland, with some slight changes, for example ‘dry’ instead of ‘withered’. I will discuss below why I have put verse two between square brackets.
At first sight this is a miraculous healing study, but at closer view the central element of the story is the fundamental Sabbath question raised in verse 4: Is it permitted on the Sabbath to do good things or to injure, to save life or to kill? We can reformulate the question as follows: Are we allowed to wound and kill on the Sabbath? Or: Are we allowed to take part in military activity on the Sabbath? These questions necessarily belong to an era with military activity, which in this age is inevitably the war against the Romans (66-70 CE). In contrast to the Maccabean story, this time the issue was raised and settled timely, not after a major bloodshed.
In these circumstances it is not difficult to recognize the man with the withered hand. This man doesn’t have a physical problem, but his hand remains dry because it doesn’t want to spill blood with the sword it holds – at least not during the Sabbath. This makes Jesus, one of the most prominent rebellion leaders in Galilee, angry because this opinion jeopardizes the military ambitions of the revolutionaries. The ‘hardness of heart’ of verse 5 in this context is probably better translated as ‘inflexibility of heart’, because the persons concerned can’t give up their Sabbath principles in a war situation of life or death. If the hand was restored to its ‘humid’ condition after stretching it out, this is simply because the person involved was given a sword again. That the ‘hand’ problem disappeared at once means that the person involved accepted the sword, that way solving the ‘war on Sabbath’ problem amongst the Galilean revolutionaries at the beginning of the war against the Romans. This dryness problem was not the problem of a single man but of one of the revolutionary factions, as the plurals (αὐτοῖς/οἱ/αὐτοὺς/αὐτῶν) in verse 3 to 5 indicate. Maybe this story describes the confrontation of Jesus, the most prominent leader of the Galilean rebels, with a strict revolutionary faction that had a negative view on Sabbath warfare. It is their leader whom Jesus urges to come forward to the center of the synagogue (verse 3).
Verse 6 supports this thesis. Would the Pharisees and the Herodians look for a way to destroy Jesus if he had wrought a healing miracle to one pitiable disabled person? I don’t think so. The reaction of both groups is political. The Herodian party surely was opposed to the rebellion, and here the Pharisees are mentioned as anti-war in the same breath. The ‘7/7-war’ decision of the revolutionaries was bad news for the anti-war parties and an element of further political polarization. This is why the other parties wanted to eliminate Jesus.
Without verse 2 this pericope is a consistent rebellion story. Verse 2 tries to distract attention away from the original war content of this passage. It changes the political ‘warfare on the Sabbath and subsequent deadly opposition’ focus to a ‘Jesus healing on the Sabbath and his subsequent accusation’ focus, putting aside the political/military subject of the story. The accusation theme is introduced prematurely in verse 2, while in my military interpretation (without verse 2) the murderous intentions of the opposing parties naturally appear at the end. The flow of the text is also more natural without verse 2.