The noun σχολη (schole) means (a) hang-out. It literally describes leisure, rest or ease in the sense of being free from having to work for a living, and thus a having time to hang out, and thus having the time to hang out with someone clever who then teaches you things, particularly things that are not directly practical or intended to sustain your daily life or improve your service of your masters. It ultimately stems from the Proto-Indo-European root "segh-", meaning to hold, which quickly assumed an emphasis on collectivity and began to describe things done by groups of people who had no obligations elsewhere. Our English word "scholastic" is often juxtaposed with "monastic" (from "mono"), which implies that scholars study in a way that is the opposite of doing it on one's own.

From our Greek noun σχολη (schole) comes our English word "school", which is rather unfortunate because our modern schools are not based on the Greek σχολη (schole) but rather on the Roman legion. A Greek σχολη (schole) is all about conversation, dialogue, self-discovery and (equally important) other-discovery. A Roman legion is all about standing in a grid and doing as you are told by the commander up front, who's been put there not because he knows better but because he's proven to be loyal to the higher-uppers. Most of our modern schools, theaters, churches, even our television sets, are al based on the Roman ideal of super-slavery, whereas our Greek word σχολη (schole) is all about super-liberty. And that's not a subtle difference.

In the Hebrew Bible we find the principle of σχολη (schole) most significantly paralleled by the principle of Sabbath: that one day per week upon which one is entirely free from obligations and duties, and can enjoy the freedom to pursue whatever desire God has put in one's heart. The execution of any ideas will have to wait until the first day of the following week, but that's precisely what makes the Sabbath so very fruitful.

In order to get a Sabbath, one first has to "count the number of one's days" (Psalm 90:12), and agree with everybody to whom one is in any way linked that all work is performed on any of the other six days. In a society of people who have never heard of a day off, such endeavors at once reek of laziness and uppityness. People who are in control of society have enough money and power to know the taste of freedom, but the rest of us are entirely unaware of what freedom is like, unless we forcibly "tzimtzum" our subjugated reality and forge an artificial island of freedom, temporal for now but a prelude to a stable and permanent state of freedom. This requires planning and that requires law and that requires covenant (a formal agreement between parties that shape society in ways other than through biological and physical forces).

The rule is simple: no covenant, no law, no freedom. And the freedom that results is a governed freedom, a freedom that is an acquired skill, which requires practice, agreement and social harmony. Such freedom is like learning a language, which means that one submits oneself to the rules that govern that language. Without submission to those rules, one has no freedom-of-speech, but with it, one has. That's the kind of freedom the Sabbath is there to train for: what the Greeks called ελευθερια (eleutheria), freedom-by-law.

Our noun is used a mere one time in the New Testament (Acts 19:9 only) and from it comes: