Sleeping

We spend about a third of our lives sleeping but usually focus on sleep only when deprived of it. Since more and more people are suffering from sleep deprivation, at present it is the subject of much attention. There are various reasons for people’s sleeping less than they should. Some are attempting to do too much (see Drivenness) and cut back on sleep to increase the time at their disposal. Others are too uptight and preoccupied at the end of the day (see Stress) to rest properly and therefore lose quality or quantity of sleep. Many carry their worries, plans and desires to bed with them and cannot relax enough to sleep well. Some live and work to an irregular rhythm and find their sleeping pattern sometimes disturbed (see Shiftwork).

One consequence of sleep deprivation is that insomnia has now become the major medical problem in newer Western societies. This lies at the root of the huge pharmacological industry in sleeping tablets and drugs for reducing stress. When people do not get their proper sleep, they suffer more than a loss of physical energy. They have less psychological stamina, make poorer decisions and find it difficult to concentrate and think effectively. They also lose out on the equilibrium and, at times, insight that come from regular dreaming.

Sleep in the Bible

While sleep is not a major topic in Scripture, the contexts in which it appears and the treatment Scripture gives it are instructive, both for sleep in itself and for the other activities that come with our bodies (eating, staying warm or cool, etc.).

Job, in the midst of his arguments with his friends, provides a vivid description of his world—and ours:

Why are not times of judgment kept by the Almighty,
and why do those who know him never see his days?
Men remove landmarks;
they seize flocks and pasture them.
They drive away the ass of the fatherless;
they take the widow’s ox for a pledge.
They thrust the poor off the road;
the poor of the earth all hide themselves . . .
They lie all night naked, without clothing,
and have no covering in the cold. (Job 24:1-4, 7 RSV)

It is a conflictive and dangerous world, a world in which those on the losing end can find themselves without the most basic of necessities. In our world at least one-sixth of the world’s population lives in absolute poverty. These poor, for whom even sleep can be problematic, form the constant background of this study.

For the world’s actively literate the Preacher’s observations may provide a more familiar starting point:

What has a man from all the toil and strain with which he toils beneath the sun? For all his days are full of pain, and his work is a vexation; even in the night his mind does not rest. This also is vanity. (Eccles. 2:22-23 RSV)

Life is hard, and this cuts into our sleep. Jacob, with Laban as his boss, would have agreed (Genesis 31). Other texts witness to sleeplessness in different contexts (Job 7; Isaiah 38).

Further, we are vulnerable during sleep, as the fates of Sisera (Judges 4), Samson (Judges 16) and Ishbosheth (2 Samuel 4), the experience of Saul (1 Samuel 26) and Job’s portrait of the world (Job 24:1-8) remind us. In summary, life itself is problematic and dangerous, and sleep increases our vulnerability on both counts. Things can go wrong while we sleep; people can do us wrong while we sleep.

Sleep as an Act of Faith

Given these threats, giving oneself over to sleep can be a basic expression of confidence, as, for instance, in Psalm 3:5-6:

I lie down and sleep;
I wake again, for the Lord sustains me.
I am not afraid of ten thousands of people
who have set themselves against me round about. (RSV)

Because “he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep” (Psalm 121:4 RSV), we can sleep. Psalm 127 reflects on this confidence, focusing on both God’s protection and his gracious provision:

Unless the Lord builds the house,
those who build it labor in vain.
Unless the Lord watches over the city,
the watchman stays awake in vain.
It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest,
eating the bread of anxious toil;
for he gives to his beloved sleep. (Psalm 127:1-2 RSV)

Jesus’ sleep in the boat during the storm may be seen as an example of this confidence (Matthew 8:24), a confidence that both natural processes and kingdom growth are accomplished by God even while we sleep. This possibility of sleep is shown in one of Jesus’ parables:

The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed upon the ground, and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he knows not how. The earth produces of itself. (Mark 4:26-29 RSV)

Because God provides, we can sleep. Sleep witnesses to a fundamental truth in the same way that keeping the sabbath or the Lord’s Day does: by God’s grace we do not need to burn the candle at both ends to achieve prosperity or security. This witness has long found expression in vespers services and family prayers at night.

While sleep may be a gut-level expression of confidence, excessive sleep is simply an expression of folly:

How long will you lie there, O sluggard?
When will you arise from your sleep?
A little sleep, a little slumber,
a little folding of the hands to rest,
and poverty will come upon you like a vagabond,
and want like an armed man. (Proverbs 6:9-11 RSV)

Both Jesus’ sleep in the boat and Jonah’s sleep in the boat (Jonah 1:5-6) reveal character, but not the same character: one the sleep of faith, the other the sleep of a slothful escape from duty.

Forgoing Sleep

While trustful sleep may be the appropriate response in some situations, in others the appropriate response is to deprive oneself of sleep to pray or work. God’s watchfulness allows us to sleep securely, but we are also invited to participate in this watchfulness, forgoing sleep. Both biblical and extrabiblical evidence suggests that sleep was regularly broken for nighttime prayers, as witnessed in the Psalms: “When I think of thee upon my bed, and meditate on thee in the watches of the night” (Psalm 63:6 RSV).

In more “acute” situations we find references to both prayer (2 Samuel 12:16; Joel 1:13; Matthew 26:36-46) and work through the night (2 Cor. 11:27):

I will not give sleep to my eyes
or slumber to my eyelids,
until I find a place for the Lord,
a dwelling place for the Mighty One of Jacob. (Psalm 132:4-5 RSV)

These texts find a variety of contemporary liturgical expressions, in vigils before major feasts in the Christian year or periods of extended prayer in crisis situations. Jesus as he speaks of the urgency of the end times views sleeplessness as a metaphor for readiness: “Blessed are those servants whom the master finds awake when he comes” (Luke 12:37 RSV).

Because sleep needs to be broken off to participate in God’s watchfulness, we need to find and follow an appropriate rhythm that expresses both our confidence in God’s protection and our participation in God’s watchfulness.

Sleep and Justice

Sleeping becomes an ethical issue largely when our conduct affects the sleep of others. Thus a proverb warns—only partly tongue in cheek—“He who blesses his neighbor with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, will be counted as cursing” (Proverbs 27:14 RSV).

More substantively, the Israelites were instructed not to take advantage of their neighbors’ indebtedness to rob them of sleep:

If ever you take your neighbor’s garment in pledge, you shall restore it to him before the sun goes down; for that is his only covering, it is his mantle for his body; in what else shall he sleep? And if he cries to me, I will hear, for I am compassionate. (Exodus 22:26-27 RSV)

This theme also reappears in Job’s declaration of innocence (Job 31:32).

Justice is good news for the sleepless poor. It is striking that these texts do not start with sleep but offer a broad vision of justice in terms of loan guarantees or innocence. In that context the neighbor’s sleep comes into the conversation. Our challenge, in a very different social setting, is to let our vision for justice be shaped by that vision so that our actions become good news for the poor in practical matters like sleep.

God’s Sleep

What does God’s watchfulness mean for the poor? Does God never slumber or sleep? The psalms—reflecting a liturgical tradition evidenced elsewhere in the ancient Near East—use sleep as a way of expressing God’s absence:

Rouse thyself! Why sleepest thou, O Lord?
Awake! Do not cast us off for ever!
Why dost thou hide thy face?
Why dost thou forget our affliction and oppression? (Psalm 44:23-24 RSV)

To have God asleep and the poor sleepless is an intolerable situation, theologically and existentially. Following the lead of the biblical witness, we should on the one hand learn from people like Job what our justice should look like and, on the other, cry out with the psalmist, with the poor, with Israel and with the church until God does “wake up” and his kingdom come.

So faith not only gives us personal confidence to sleep but also compels us to cry out to God until we all can sleep securely. It is no surprise that secure sleep appears among the Old Testament’s end-times promises, in Ezekiel 34:22-25 and Hosea 2:18:

And I will make for you a covenant on that day with the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the creeping things of the ground; and I will abolish the bow, the sword, and war from the land; and I will make you lie down in safety. (RSV)

Aids to Sleep

Sleeping properly, then, should be a regular part of our lives. It is honoring to God, beneficial to ourselves and advantageous for others. Apart from reliance on chemical aids to sleep, some nonmedical ways of dealing with insomnia to follow:

• Wind down—don’t go jogging just before sleep or watch television until late in the evening.

• Avoid caffeine and heavy meals just before going to bed, resorting if needed to warm milk or a light sandwich.

• As much as possible, take only short naps during the day, so that you will sleep well at night.

• Save the bedroom for sleeping and sex, not for other things like intense conversation, working and squabbling.

• Develop consistent sleep patterns, rather than ones that vary between cheating on sleep and desperately trying to make up.

• Cast any burden you may have on God, and ask him to relax you and grant you the gift of sleep.

Sleeping pills may occasionally have their place, for example, in a time of great pressure or crisis when you are severely agitated, or when going on a long plane flight into a different time zone and it is important to be refreshed on arrival. Even then, however, adjusting your sleeping patterns two or three days ahead so that you begin to move into the time of the place to which you are going is a very effective nonmedicinal way of obtaining the sleep you need.

» See also: Anxiety

» See also: Dreaming

» See also: Rest

» See also: Sabbath

References and Resources

J. A. Hobson, Sleep (New York: Scientific American Library, 1995); T. Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976); P. Laxie, The Enchanted World of Sleep (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996); T. McAlpine, Sleep, Divine and Human, in the Old Testament, JSOTS 38 (Sheffield, U.K.: JSOT, 1987).

—Thomas H. McAlpine