And Trypho said: Why is it that you select and quote from the prophetic words whatever you wish, but make no mention of those passages which expressly command the keeping of the Sabbath? For it is said through Isaiah thus: If you turn your foot away from the Sabbaths so as not to do your own pleasures on the holy day, and call the Sabbaths the delightful holy days of your God, and do not lift up your foot to work, nor speak a word out of your mouth, then you shall trust in the Lord, and He will bring you up upon the good things of the land, and will feed you with the inheritance of Jacob your father; for the mouth of the Lord has spoken these things.
And I replied: It is not because such prophecies oppose me, my friends, that I passed them over, but because you have understood and do understand that, even though God commands you through all the prophets to do the same things which He commanded through Moses, He does so on account of your hardness of heart and your perpetual ingratitude toward Him; He keeps crying out the same things, so that even thus you might at last repent and please Him, and neither sacrifice your children to the demons, nor be partners of thieves, nor lovers of bribes, nor pursuers of repayment, not judging for the orphans nor giving heed to the cause of the widows, nor having your hands full of blood.
For the daughters of Zion went with proud necks, and with winking eyes, sporting at the same time and trailing their tunics. And He cries: All have turned aside, all alike have become unprofitable; there is none who understands, there is not so much as one. With their tongues they have practised deceit; their throat is an open grave; the venom of asps is under their lips; ruin and misery are in their ways, and the way of peace they have not known.
So that, in the same way that He originally enjoined these things on account of your wickedness, likewise on account of your persistence in them—or rather your intensifying of them—He calls you through the same precepts to the remembrance of Him and to knowledge. But you are a stiff-necked, senseless, blind and lame people, sons in whom there is no faith, as He Himself says; you honour Him with your lips only, while your heart is far from Him, teaching your own doctrines and not the things that are His.
Since—tell me—did God wish the high priests to sin when they offered the sacrifices on the Sabbaths, or those who were circumcised and who circumcised on the Sabbath day, seeing that He commanded that those born be circumcised on the eighth day without exception, even if it should be a Sabbath day? Could He not have arranged for the newborn to be circumcised one day before or one day after the Sabbath, if He knew it to be an evil thing on the Sabbaths? Or those who lived before Moses and Abraham, who were named righteous and well-pleasing to Him, though they neither circumcised their foreskin nor kept the Sabbaths—why did He not teach them to do these things?