23 [Moses] said to them, “This is what the Lord has commanded: ‘Tomorrow is a day of solemn rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord; bake what you will bake and boil what you will boil, and all that is left over lay aside to be kept till the morning.’” 24 So they laid it aside till the morning, as Moses commanded them, and it did not stink, and there were no worms in it. 25 Moses said, “Eat it today, for today is a Sabbath to the Lord; today you will not find it in the field. 26 Six days you shall gather it, but on the seventh day, which is a Sabbath, there will be none.”
"Sabbath as Resistance" is the title of Biblical scholar Walter Brueggeman's 2014 reflection on the meaning and practice of Sabbath. Sabbath, says Brueggeman, is a God-given form of resistance to the "culture of now" which is killing us all with its constant demands of availability, work, and production.
The Egyptian culture the Israelites escaped from was a "culture of now", with its exploitation of the Hebrews. The essential value of the mass labor force was measured by Pharaoh solely in units of economic productivity. "Homo sapiens" was reduced to "homo faber" and the value of the individual was reduced to his or her capacity to produce (bricks) with efficiency and in bulk. It did not matter if one was ground down at an early age because there was a constant supply of steady slave labor ready at hand. When one could no longer efficiently produce he or she was deemed worthless, discarded, and replaced.
Sabbath was resistance to Pharaoh's economy of exploitation. Sabbath was God's way of teaching the Israelites that the value of a human being is greater than his or her ability to contribute to the economic index. Sabbath was God's way of teaching the Israelites that they would not live by bread or being bakers of bread alone, but also find their substance in family, prayer, study, worship, and holy rest. And the society as a whole would find its value not only in what it produced but also in what it enjoyed. Sabbath was God's way of teaching the Israelites resistance against Pharaoh's culture of now.
Today we might call all this as quality of life. And with Pharaoh calling on the cell phone, needing you to come up to work for just a few hours (say 8 or 9) on the weekend, you really have to be a pretty radical group of people to try living it.
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