Tertullian — Against Marcion 2.21

So also in the rest you cast contradictions of precepts at him as if at one mobile and unstable—forbidding to work on the sabbath and commanding the ark to be carried around through eight days, that is even on the sabbath, in the assault on the city of Jericho. For you do not inspect the sabbath’s law, which forbids human works, not divine. Seeing that: Six days, it says, work and you shall do all your works; but on the seventh day sabbaths to the Lord your God; you shall not do in it any work. Which? Yours, of course. For it follows that it would take away on the sabbath those works which it had imposed above for six days—yours namely, that is human and daily. But to carry the ark around can seem neither a daily work nor a human one, but both rare and sacrosanct and from God’s own precept then of course divine. Which itself I would also unfold for what it signified, unless it were long to expand the figures of all the Creator’s arguments, which perhaps you do not even admit. But it is more if you are refuted from things absolute, by simplicity of truth, not curiosity. Just as even now there is a sure distinction of the sabbath forbidding human, not divine works. And therefore he who had then gathered wood on the sabbath was given to death. For he had done his own work, forbidden by the law. But those who had carried the ark around on the sabbath carried it with impunity. For they had administered not their own but God’s work, from his own precept of course.