I’m told, http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=33015, that orthodox Jews believe that the weekly cycle has never changed, i.e. any multiple of seven days before this Saturday has always been Saturday. I never really thought about it before, but this surprised me, given the various calendar changes in history. Is there any archaeological evidence for or against this idea? How would we know that days of the week vis-a-vis our current calendar correspond to days of the week in the ancient systems?
I’d say that the time structure has always been based on the sun and moon. A day ends when the sun sets, and a month takes untill the next full moon. And as the moon cycle has four stages, it makes sense to divide a month into 4 equal parts. Of course, the Gregorian calender (and others, no doubt) completely screwed up that idea. But the basis is still there.
There was a time, I think in the 1800’s where we realized how off our present calendar was. So we changed the day from like August 12 to October 18 or something crazy like that. They just made an announcment that the next day would be a couple months later and then they adjusted the calendar to be more accurate. I think this is when we started using Leap Years.
This event alone would mean that the 7 days theory is wrong. Because they could have gone from a monday in august to a saturday in october. Unless they made sure to keep the days going correctly. SO that the next day would be a Tuesday in October. Hmmmm.
This happend, man, I swear!
Bear_Nenno, You’re not quite correct. What you are refering to is the replacement of the Julian calendar (Old Style) by the Gregorian calendar (New Style). This took place throughout Catholic Europe in 1582 on the orders of Pope Gregory XIII. Under this arrangement, 4 Oct. 1582 was followed by 15 Oct. 1582. Britain did not bring its calendar into line with these new arrangements until 1752.
In both cases the days of the week did not change. Thus 4 Oct. 1582 Old Style was a Thursday and 15 Oct. 1582 New Style was a Friday. It was the need to preserve the cycle of the Sabbaths which was the specific reason why they were not changed.
I would have thought that the cycle of the Sabbaths, whether for Christians or Jews, was so central to their liturgical practices that this consideration would always override all others. The OP seems plausible.
What about other parts of the world before they were invaded such as the Pacific Islands and Asia? Did they have a 7 day week or just fall in to line?
Well, APB9999, I’ll be the first to admit (and for the record, I was the person who asserted in the other thread what the OP stated) that there is probably no way to prove that Saturday today is a multiple of 7 days away from a Saturday 2500 years ago. We base it simply on tradition.
Zev Steinhardt
APB999:
This probably isn’t conclusive proof, but far-flung Jewish communities, even in the days prior to reliable telecommunications, have not had a known discrepancy over when Shabbos was. In Medieval times, Jews in France, Spain, Egypt, Yemen and other places celebrated Shabbos on the same day (to the best of our knowledge), despite the differences in the societies amongst which they lived.
It’s hard to imagine such consistency continually existing in the absence of a common source, and that would have to go pretty far back…probably at least prior to the destruction of the First Temple, I’d think.
Keep in mind, too, that the weekly cycle isn’t something that can gradually change. In order for it to change, you’d need, somewhere along the line, a day which was followed by the wrong day-- Say, a Thursday followed by a Saturday, or two Mondays in a row (horrors!). From the point of view of a person living through the event, this would be a big deal, and would almost certainly have been recorded, had it ever been done, and we have no records of such an event. Further, why would it ever be done in the first place?
Some good points, thanks.
I can see that an important religious cycle like the week would be maintained down through history by the culture that invents it, but my reasoning was that our calendar is an outgrowth of the Roman system, and I seriously doubt they felt compelled to fall into line with the Jewish calendar (the Gregorian coming from the Julian, established by Julius Caesar his own self, IIRC). The first WAG about the lunar cycle doesn’t work, either, since the lunar cycle is 27.3 days and the phase of the moon cannot consistently define weekdays always seven apart. The week cycle would have to be passed down from antiquity.
Follow up Questions:
I can also see why the Gregorian calendar would use the Jewish system, since it uses it for other things, like calculating the date of Easter. So am I correct in assuming that the west as a whole adopted the Jewish system of weekdays only after the spread of Christianity? Did the ancient Romans, who used a solar calendar, not a lunar, have a week of seven days? If so, where did they get it? What were the names of the weekdays? (Saturday, Sunday, and Monday might have been the same, but those Nordic God names for the other days are surely a later introduction).
I believe the Romans used several different calendars at various times, but the week seems to have been 8 days (the eighth “divider” day being a market day). The day names are as follows: solis, lunae, martis, mercurii, jovis, veneris, saturni. I’m not sure when or if the Romans eliminated the 8th day.
The 7 day week is not unusually common throughout history, although it seems to have been prevalent in the Near East (e.g. Babylon, Judah & Israel of course). In some parts of Asia (China I think), there was a 5 day week, Egyptians and Greeks used a 10 day week.
A lot of great historical calendar information and references (I refreshed my memory with a few of them) may be found at http://www.norbyhus.dk/calendar.html and http://www.norbyhus.dk/calrefs.html
/Kate
Interestingly, the Norse also used a 7-day week, and some of the English day names (Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and I think maybe Tuesday) come from the Norse gods (Oden, Thor, and Fria). So far as I know, this is just coincidence, and does not necessarily imply any contact between the ancient Norse and Hebrews.
The Anglo-Saxon week was an adoption of the Roman week (who in turn got it from the Egyptians). It’s uncertain who came up with the 7 day week, but it probably wasn’t the Hebrews. It was used informally for a couple centuries in the Roman Empire before Constantine made it official.
The Anglo-Saxon names of the days came from equating Norse gods with those of the Romans, who had already named the days of the week after their gods (=planets). The equivalences aren’t perfect. Wodin, king of the Germanic gods, was equated to Mercury (they’re both gods of knowledge) while Thor was equated to Jupiter (both gods of thunder).
Here’s a site with much more about it. This site also answers the OP with a “no”.
since the lunar cycle is 27.3 days and the phase of the moon cannot consistently define weekdays always seven apart. The week cycle would have to be passed down from antiquity.
Not to nitpick, but the lunar cycle is a bit longer than 28 days, not a bit shorter, IIRC.
Depends whether you mean the sidereal or synodic cycle… The sidereal cycle, measured with respect to the stars, is about 27 and a half days. The synodic cycle, measured relative to the Sun, is about 29 and a half, and is usually more relevant to folks here on Earth-- That’s the period of the phases, for instance.
Thanks, all. WRT the lunar cycle, I was just going by what it says in the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. It was the sidereal period.
dtlique:
The Hebrews had been using it long before Constantine. In order to not seem Biblically biased, I’ll refrain from saying it was the Hebrews, but it pretty likely originated in the Middle East.
The equivalencies, in my understanding are based on the planets rather than the dieties. The ancient world very much believed in astrology, with seven “movable stars” in the sky: the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn. According to astrology, these stars had a cycle in which each one had “power” for one day, hence the naming of the weekdays. When Germanic tribes adopted the Roman calendar, they used their own names for the planets in question.
Chaim Mattis Keller
cmkeller: The Hebrews had been using [the seven-day week] long before Constantine. In order to not seem Biblically biased, I’ll refrain from saying it was the Hebrews, but it pretty likely originated in the Middle East.
dtilque: The Anglo-Saxon names of the days came from equating Norse gods with those of the Romans, who had already named the days of the week after their gods (=planets). The equivalences aren’t perfect. Wodin, king of the Germanic gods, was equated to Mercury (they’re both gods of knowledge) while Thor was equated to Jupiter (both gods of thunder).
cmk again: *The equivalencies, in my understanding are based on the planets rather than the dieties. The ancient world very much believed in astrology, with seven “movable stars” in the sky: the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn. According to astrology, these stars had a cycle in which each one had “power” for one day, hence the naming of the weekdays. When Germanic tribes adopted the Roman calendar, they used their own names for the planets in question. *
Chaim and dtilque are both pretty much right. The ancient Babylonians used the 29- or 30-day synodic lunar month, but the seven-day week appears to have originated with the Hebrews. When the Greeks invented predictive astrology on the basis of Babylonian astral prediction in the late first millennium BCE, they appear to have borrowed this notion of a seven-day cycle to associate with their seven movable stars or planets. (Those stars, by the way, were indeed named after the Greek divinities Ares, Hermes, Zeus, Aphrodite, Kronos, and Helios and Selene for the sun and moon, corresponding to the Latin Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Sol, and Luna, and the Germanic Tyr, Wotan, Thor, Freya, (nobody really took Saturn’s spot), Sun, and Moon.) Greek astronomical texts uniformly refer to the planets as “the star of Ares”, “the star of Aphrodite”, and so forth.
Each of the 24 hours (originally a Babylonian/Egyptian standard) of each of the seven days had one of those seven planets as its own astrological “lord” or chief influence. The “lord” of the first hour of the day was the “lord” of the day as a whole.
Quiz question: The early Greeks considered the planets’ distances from the earth (in the center of the universe, natch) to be inversely proportional to their apparent angular speeds (which is actually more or less equivalent, qualitatively, to Kepler’s Third Law—good guess, guys). So proceeding outwards, the order of the planets was Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. For an imaginary $64,000 and a really cool piece of trivia, can you tell me why our weekdays are named in the order that they are? (No fair looking it up: you have all the information needed to deduce the necessary algorithm right here in this post.)
I didn’t say anything about where the Hebrews got the 7-day week. I said Constantine made it official for the Empire. This had zero effect on Jewish religious observances.
The Romans seem to have borrowed the week from the Egyptians well before Christianity became prevalent in the Empire. Constantine just made it an official part of the Roman calendar.
From this site that I gave a link to earlier:
Possibly, but I suspect that the equivalences between gods was established first.
Illiterate peoples generally do not know about planets. It takes lots of record keeping to establish the patterns of their movements. So when the illiterate Germanic peoples came into contact with the literate Mediterranean peoples, they would not have had names for the planets. But they would have had gods, and it seems to be natural to create equivalences between the main gods in two different pantheons. The Greeks did it with the Babylonian and Egyptian gods, the Romans with those of the Greeks. So the Germans probably did it with the Romans.
The Germans also learned about planets and astrology and lots of other things from the Romans. And since the Romans had named the planets after their gods (or considered the planets to be gods), it’s only natural that the Germans do the same.
Wednesday, September 2nd, 1752. The next day was Thursday, September 14th. If you’re on a Unix or Unix-like OS, type in “cal 9 1752” at the command line to see that month.
IIRC, there were riots by renters, infuriated that they would have to pay a whole month’s rent on 19 days of wages.
As it happens, I do have access to a Unix OS computer…so I ran the “cal 9 1752” command…pretty cool. Naturally, I started playing around with the “cal” command…and made this shocking discovery:
>cal 12 9999
…December 9999
…S…M…Tu…W…Th…F…S
…1…2…3…4
…5…6…7…8…9…10…11
12…13…14…15…16…17…18
19…20…21…22…23…24…25
26…27…28…29…30…31
>cal 1 10000
cal: bad year!!!
Egads! Its…the Y10K bug!
Quick…everyone start stockpiling supplies…
MEBuckner (who’s in an excessively silly mood this evening.)