And Trypho said: Why do you select for citation only such parts as you choose out of the sayings of the Prophets, and make no mention of those that expressly bid us keep sabbath? For thus it is said by Isaiah: If thou turnest away thy foot from the sabbath, not to do thy own will on the holy day, and callest the sabbath delightsome, holy to thy God, and settest not thy foot to work, nor speakest any word out of thy mouth, then shalt thou be trusting on the Lord, and He will mount thee on the good things of the earth, and He will feed thee with the inheritance of Jacob thy father. For the mouth of the Lord has spoken it.
And I replied: Not because such prophecies were against me, my Friends, did I leave them out, but because you have understood both in the past and in the present that, even though God commands you by all the Prophets to do the very things which He also commanded you by Moses, He ever cries out the same things, because of your hard-heartedness and unthankfulness towards Him; in order that even so you may some time repent and please Him, and may neither sacrifice your children to demons, nor be partakers with thieves, nor lovers of gifts, nor followers after reward, not giving judgment for orphans and not heeding the judgment of a widow, nor even having your hands full of blood.
For even the daughters of Sion went with neck on high, and coying with glances from their eyes and trailing their dresses.Isaiah 1:23 Isaiah 3:16 For even all men went astray. He cries aloud, all at once were unserviceable; there is none that understandeth, no, not one. With their tongues they deceived; an open tomb is their throat; the poison of asps is under their lips; ruin and misery are in their ways; and the way of peace they know not.
So that as at the first He gave you these commands because of your wickednesses, in the same way because of your persistence, or rather your intensity in them, by means of the same commands He calls you to remember and to know Him. But you are a people hard of heart, and without understanding, and blind, and lame, and sons in whom is no faith, as He Himself says, honouring Him only with the lips but in the heart far from Him, teaching your own teaching and not the things that are His.
Since, tell me, did God wish the high priests to sin, when they offered the offerings on the sabbath, or them that get circumcised, and also circumcise, on the sabbath-day, when He commanded that those that were born should be circumcised without fail on the eighth day in every case alike, even though it be the sabbath-day? Or could He not cause them that are born to be circumcised one day before or one day after the sabbath, if He knew it was wrong on the sabbaths? Or why did He not teach those also to do all this, who before the time of Moses and Aaron were called righteous, and were pleasing to Him, though they were not circumcised and had not kept the sabbaths?