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1 Maccabees tells how Jewish people were killed for refusing to fight on the Sabbath, which led Mattathias to rule that fighting is allowed on that day. Rabbinic teaching in tractate Shabbat later debates the same issue and reaches the same conclusion.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
1 Maccabees 2:39
Deuterocanon
36 They didn’t answer them. They didn’t cast a stone at them, or block their secret places, 37 saying, “Let’s all die in our innocence. Heaven and earth testify for us, that you put us to death unjustly.” 38 So they attacked them on the Sabbath, and they died—they, their wives, their children, and their livestock—in number a thousand souls of men. 39 When Mattathias and his friends found out about it, they mourned over them exceedingly. 40 One said to another, “If we all do as our kindred have done, and don’t fight against the Gentiles for our lives and our ordinances, they will quickly destroy us from off the earth.” 41 So they decided that day, saying, “Whoever comes against us to battle on the Sabbath day, let’s fight against him, and we will in no way all die, as our kindred died in the secret places.”
Shabbat 19a
Babylonian Talmud
Rabbinic
The Sages taught in a Tosefta: One may not lay siege to cities of gentiles fewer than three days before Shabbat, to avoid the need to desecrate Shabbat in establishing the siege. And if they already began establishing the siege fewer than three days before Shabbat, they need not stop all war-related actions even on Shabbat. And so Shammai would say: From that which is written: “And you should build a siege against the city that is waging war with you until it falls” (Deuteronomy 20:20), it is derived that the siege should be sustained “until it falls.” Consequently, the siege must continue even on Shabbat.
Date: 450–550 CE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... The question whether it is permissible to wage war on Shabbat must be considered from three perspectives. First, from the perspective of legitimate milhamah (war) per se. Second, from the perspective of pikkuah nefesh (the saving of human life). Third, from the perspective of Rodef (the law that if one person pursues another to kill him, then the pursued party has the legal halakhic right to kill the aggressor in order to save his own life). There is an explicit heter (license) to wage war on Shabbat even if doing so is not indispensable to the saving of Jewish lives. This heter is mentioned in Deuteronomy 20:20 ..."
Soloveichik, Aaron
Waging War on Shabbat
(pp. 179-187) Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought Vol. 20, No. 3, 1982
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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