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Rowland Ward wrote an interesting article entitled : "The Lord's Day and the Westminster Confession" and it's published in a book entitled "The Faith Once Delivered: Essays in Honor of Dr. Wayne Spear" (my systematics prof. in seminary :-) )
In the article, Ward has this to say about the prohibitions of the Sabbath: "... As for specific prohibitions, work during the plowing and harvest times was prohibited on teh Sabbath (Ex. 34:21), presumably because people claimed that the limited period available to complete these tasks justified ignoring the Sabbath. Nehemiah (13:15-22) and Jeremiah (17:21-27) prohibited the bearing of burdens on the Sabbath, but the context indicates that commercial activity was involved. There are two other prohibitions. Fire in dwellings is banned in Exodus 35:3, but occurs in the context of instructions about the building of the tabernacle, no doubt to offset any tendency to justify working on the materials for the tabernacle on the Sabbath. In other words, building a place of worship was not a proper activity for God's day. The other reference (Num. 15:32-36) sets the death penalty for gathering wood, but the context is that of defiant transgressors. The case in question is surely that of a fuel merchant who plies his trade on God's day. One other text (Ex. 16:23) has been taken as excluding any preparation of food gathered the previous day, but this is to draw too much from the passage. This approach to the cited passages is essentially that found in writers such as Thomas Shepard (1604-49) in his work on the Sabbath published in the year of his death, and reminds us that Puritans were not necessarily the rigorists often alleged." (pgs. 198-199) Emphasis added by me...
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