Is Sunday really the first day of the week? Really?

No . . . but do you call one of them a “bookbeginning.”

What would work just about as well would be to put a couple of little signs on them. For the one on the left:

BOOKS ===>

and on the right:

<=== BOOKS

Just for the thinking impaired. They might be compared with this sign.

The week is like a circle. It has no beginning or end. It does, however, have a radius and a circumference.

Yebbut, that’s just for historical reasons - specifically, the Universe beginning last Thursday.

Is anybody sure that Saturday is really the seventh day mentioned in Genesis? Did people perfectly keep up with what day it was all the way until Christians decided to go to church the day after?

I suppose that, considering that all religion is basically what someone in charge says or what enough people agree upon, if they say it’s Saturday it’s Saturday. Plus Genesis is most likely fictional, so it would have been hard to keep track of anyway.

Not to beat a dying horse, but in the case of a week, as opposed to a day or even a month, there’s very little besides a count of seven or seven scratches in the dirt to indicate that those seven days are about to repeat. Since Full Moon is very bright and rises at or near sunset, it’s visible. That much is an external signal. New Moon and the Quarters are less easy to see as specific days/nights. So beyond counting, or looking at the calendar, there’s not much in the natural world to signal that a new week (whenever it’s reckoned from and to) is underway.

I’m not too concerned about the religious aspect, but when I went to school for the first time (in Pennsylvania), this is how we were taught the days of the week:

Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday

And all of the calendars we ever hung up at home or in school, or that I have ever seen in offices have always had the weeks starting with Sunday. Same with calendars we’d get from insurance companies or the hardware store. So, at least there’s agreement among elementary schools and calendar printers, at least in the U.S.

It is odd that when the universe was created a few days ago, all the calenders indicated Sunday as the first day of the week. But it’s not the only odd thing about the universe either.

I’ve always been puzzled that Twosday isn’t the second day of the week. And Thirdsday is two days after Twosday.

In Egypt, Friday and Saturday are the “weekend”, inasmuch as they are the two non-work days each week. People work Sunday through Thursday.

In some other countries of the Middle East (sorry, can’t think which ones now … maybe Kuwait?) the two non-work days are Thursday and Friday, at least for the government.

All that really matters is convention - what day of the week do people expect to see on the far left side of their calendars, and when people ask “so, what are you going to do this weekend?”, which two days are they referring to? As long as a society is in general agreement regarding the answers to those questions, nothing else matters.

In Indonesia, Sunday is generally considered to be the first day of the week, but every now and then someone gets cute and decides that following European conventions and putting Monday as the first day of the calendar would give a certain je ne sais quoi to the material. It’s annoying as hell for me as an American, particularly when the days are not even written out but are abbreviated to “S, S, R, K, J, S, M” (Senin, Selasa, Rabu, Kamis, Jumat, Saptu, Minggu – Monday through Sunday in Indonesian).