LABORIOUS WORK — the work-category this chapter bans on ordinary festival days (23:7-8 and elsewhere), narrower than the Sabbath's own blanket 'work at all' (kol melachah, 23:3, and again for the Day of Atonement, 23:28). The chapter never explains the difference in so many words, but later practice built an entire legal category on it: food may be prepared on a festival day in a way it may not be on the Sabbath or Yom Kippur. The distinction the rabbis would later call yom tov versus Shabbat starts here, in this chapter's own choice of which of two Hebrew phrases to use for which day. → first discussed at Lev 23:7