The gemara makes a lovely little move on this amud, ensuring and enshrining the power of the rabbis to interpret scripture and to make the rules. Over the course of a fairly long discussion (taking up most of the amud) about work on chol ha-moed, the gemara goes back and forth, trying to work out what the nature of prohibitions might be. The end is great: Torah left it open for rabbis to decide. Some things are the purview of God and God's Torah, and some things are the purview of the Official Exegetes of God's Torah. Torah says so.
And while we're on the topic: we pretty much ignore the notion that work might be prohibited in any form on chol ha-moed. What's up with that?
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We ignore it, but the Shulchan Aruch doesn't. There is work, such as laundry, that is prohibited on Hol Hamoad -- it has a kind of quasi-hag status. I like to think that this is where some sanity came in -- It is hard enough to get people to refrain from work one day a week, or two or threes days a week with yom tov -- but for a whole week? Especially in our society, without a mass hetar on electricity, this is virtually impossible.
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