Abstract
MR. R. A. PROCTOR'S paper on “Saturn and the Sabbath of the Jews,” in the Contemporary Review of this month, reopens one of the oldest and most interesting questions in the history of astronomy. Unfortunately, the writer is very imperfectly acquainted with the literature of his subject, and in consequence has, I think, imported not a little confusion into the discussion. That the week of seven days is directly connected with the worship of the seven planets known to the ancients, is a theory which has always had many supporters. It is at once suggested by the familiar names of the seven days, and would be absolutely proved if we could show that these names are as old as the division of the lunar month into four weeks. Again, it is also a well-known, though less wide-spread doctrine, that the Jewish Sabbath passed into Mosaism from an earlier planetary religion. Of course, if it can be shown that the Sabbath was originally sacred to Saturn, we have a strong proof of the antiquity of the names of the week-days, and a probability that these names are as old as the seven day week itself. In this way a question in the history of Semitic religions comes to have an important bearing on a question in the history of astronomy. Mr. Proctor reverses the argument. He assumes that we have the clearest possible evidence that all nations that adopted the seven day week named the days after the planets, and did so in that peculiar order which is generally explained by assuming that a new planet presides over every successive hour of the week, and that each day takes the name of the planet of its first hour. It is then argued that Saturn, as the highest planet, was the supreme god of Assyria, and so also of the Egyptians who received their astrological lore from Chaldea. The Egyptians, we are told, certainly consecrated the seventh day of the week to Saturn, and since the Israelites left Egypt observing the Sabbath, while there is no evidence of a Sabbath in patriarchal times, “it is presumable that this day was a day of rest in Egypt.” Now, whatever may be the ultimate solution of the problem of the origin and diffusion of the seven-day week, this theory rests partly on uncertain assumptions, partly on undoubted blunders. It is notorious that several Semitic nations, not to speak of the Peruvians, had a seven-day week without planetary names; so that Mr. Proctor's fundamental assumption begs the whole question. Then, again, it is the opinion of so great an authority as Lepsius that the Egyptians had no seven-day week, but divided the month into three decades. The passage of Dion Cassius from which the contrary opinion is drawn is certainly not decisive for ancient Egyptian usage, and Mr. Proctor seems to quote his author at second hand; for he asserts, in flat contradiction to Dion, that when the latter wrote, neither Greeks nor Romans used the week. For the supposition that Saturn was the supreme god of the Egyptians, not a shadow of proof is offered, while what is said of the Assyrian Saturn is directly in the teeth of the most recent researches. If Mr. Proctor had read Schrader's essay on the Babylonian origin of the week, he would have known that Adar or Saturn is quite distinct from the supreme god Asur. Thus, apart from the late and doubtful testimony of Dion, Mr. Proctor has no other evidence for his Egyptian theory of the week than that which he derives from the presumed non-existence of the Sabbath among the Hebrews before they entered Egypt. But the seven-day week appears in the narrative of the flood, which is certainly not an Egyptian legend. I say nothing of numerous minor inaccuracies in Mr. Proctor's paper, but repeat that the point on which new light requires to be thrown is whether it can be made out that the names of the seven days are as old as the week itself. This again seems to depend partly on the question whether the division of the day into twenty-four hours is older than the week, and partly on what can be determined as to early Egyptian and Chaldean subdivisions of the month. The Egyptians had a day of twenty-four hours, but had they a week? The Chaldeans may have had the week, but they seem to have divided the day (including the night) into twelve hours. Perhaps, however, it ought to be borne in mind that Dion gives another way of accounting for the names of the day, depending not on the division of the day into hours, but on the analogy of musical harmony . The Jewish Sabbath can contribute little to the argument unless one is prepared with Lagarde to maintain that Shabbat is a name of Saturn.
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SMITH, W. The Origin of the Jewish Week. Nature 11, 363 (1875). https://doi.org/10.1038/011363b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/011363b0
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