117 “Day and Night” and the Sabbath Controversy of John 9 transition, within traditional Jewish understandings of the Sabbath, that allows one to resume working. In other words, Jesus connected the arrival and departure of sunlight with the ability (or justification) to work at a given moment, and he did so in a way that purposely reversed the Jewish authorities’ connection of these two factors. When Jesus states that “we must work ... while it is day,” and that “night is coming when no one can work,” he was reversing the custom of the Jews, in which one may not do anything that might be considered work on the Sabbath, but rather must wait until nightfall. One can almost hear the Pharisees stating the opposite of Jesus’ formulation: “Night is coming—then you can resume working”. In support of this view, we might consider Jesus’ instructions to the blind man: “Go wash in the pool of Siloam” (9,7). To understand the signi- ficance of these instructions, I would point out that the incident recorded in John 9 almost certainly occurred during one of two Jewish festivals: Sukkoth or Hanukkah10. In other words, Jesus instructed the man to draw water from the pool of Siloam on the one day of an eight-day celebration on which the priests, in deference to the law of the Sabbath, suspended the ritual of drawing water from the pool11. This gives a polemical edge to Jesus’ instructions to the blind man, as the halakhic ruling that he flouted was probably a cardinal symbol of Sabbath sanctity within the authorities’ minds, especially at this time of year. (It is often said that the precise ins- tance of Jesus’ violation of the Sabbath was his making clay, but that is an insignificant breach compared to the man’s washing in the pool of Siloam on a Sabbath during Sukkoth or Hanukkah.) In other words, the fact that Jesus’ instructions to the man violated Sabbath regulations is scarcely a piece of uncalculated fallout from an otherwise arbitrary and mysterious thaumaturgical recipe. Rather, Jesus purposely healed the blind man in a way that made his violation of the Sabbath as conspicuous as possible12. Virtually all commentators assume Sukkoth to be the setting of John 9, but as there is 10 no temporal transition preceding the notice in Jn 10,22 that it was the “feast of dedication” (= Hanukkah), it seems to me that scholars should take that possibility more seriously. The reason they have not done so, I believe, is that they have not been aware that a water-drawing ritual at the pool of Siloam (as is assumed to lend significance to Jn 9,7) was probably also associated with Hanukkah. See M. D. Herr, “H.anukkah”, EJ 7, cols. 1280-88, esp. 1284. It was not just the carrying of water to the temple that threatened the sanctity of the 11 Sabbath. Drawing water was also prohibited if the pool in question was public (and not partitioned into separate Sabbath domains). See m. Erub. 8.6-7. I thus disagree with Bacchiocchi’s attempts to exonerate Jesus of any real charge 12 of breaking the Sabbath in the Fourth Gospel. Bacchiocchi thinks that in Jn 9,4, “Christ repudiates the charge of Sabbath-breaking, arguing that His works of salvation are not precluded but rather contemplated by the Sabbath commandment,” a view that he arrives at apparently by (somehow) considering 9,4 to be “striking[ly] similar[]” to the thought of 5,17 (From Sabbath to Sunday, 29-31).