Did the rabbis imagine that the Sabbath was an angel? A spiritual person? Religious thought cannot afford to associate closely with the powers of fantasy. Yet the metaphoric concept of the Sabbath held no danger of deification of the seventh day, of conceiving it to be an angel or a spiritual person. Nothing stands between God and man, not even a day.
The idea of the Sabbath as a queen or a bride did not represent a mental image, something that could be imagined.
There was no picture in the mind that corresponded to the metaphor. Nor was it ever cristalized as a definitive concept, from which logical consequences could be drawn, or raised to a dogma, an object of belief. The same Rabbi Hanina who celebrated the Sabbath as a queen preferred or another occasion to compare the Sabbath with a king.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath, FSG Classics, 2005, p. 59.
