Hi
Does the word “sabbath” or “shabbat” really derive from Babylonian Akkadian word Sapattum ? I look forward to your feedback.
davidmich
"Reconstruction of a broken tablet seems to define the rarely attested Babylonian Akkadian word Sapattum or Sabattum as the full moon: this word is cognate or merged with Hebrew Shabbat, but is monthly rather than weekly. It is regarded as a form of Sumerian sa-bat (“mid-rest”), attested in Akkadian as um nuh libbi (“day of mid-repose”). This conclusion is a contextual restoration of the damaged Enûma Eliš creation mythos, which is read as: “[Sa]pattu shalt thou then encounter, mid[month]ly.”
The pentecontad calendar, thought to be of Amorite origin, includes a period known to Babylonians as Shappatum. The year is broken down into seven periods of fifty days (made up of seven weeks of seven days, containing seven weekly Sabbaths, and an extra fiftieth day, known as the atzeret), plus an annual supplement of fifteen or sixteen days, called Shappatum, the period of harvest time at the end of each year. Identified and reconstructed by Hildegaard and Julius Lewy in the 1940s, the calendar’s use dates back to at least the 3rd millennium BC in Western Mesopotamia and surrounding areas; it was used by the Canaanite tribes, thought by some to have been used by the Israelites prior to King Solomon, and related to the liturgical calendar of the Essenes at Qumran. Used well into the modern age, forms of it have been found in Nestorianism and among the Palestinian fellaheen. Julius Morgenstern believed that the calendar of the Jubilees had ancient origins as a somewhat modified survival of the pentecontad calendar."
I’d like to help, but I’m not really sure what your question is. There are plenty of books and websites about word origins. Have you looked in any of them? Is there some specific reason you doubt what you quoted from Wikipedia?
Well, your cite from Wikipedia says that the Babylonian word is possibly cognate with the Hebrew word. Which means no, the Hebrew word is not derived from the Babylonian word, but both are derived from a common ancestor or root.
The Hebrew word is considered to be derived from a word which means “rest”. If so, then cognate words in other languages could be similarly derived, and could apply to rest days fixed on an entirely different basis to the seven-day cycle which fixes the Hebrew sabbath.
This is pulled out of my butt here, but “Shabbat” and shv ("sit” trilitteral) are not related? Shabbat “means” and meant considerably more than “rest,” but sit–>rest doesn’t seem too much of a stretch.
Of course shv is also “seven” root, seven days. And then there’s that upbeat song “Shavta shavta mayim…” and I don’t know where that comes from.
Puns are great when all you’ve gone are trilitterals, as commentators from Genesis God to Jesus and certainly exilic Jewish interpretation (and post 1948, if you want to get sniffy about it) know.
Eta: if this is in Wik my apologies. Dr