…SundayMondayTuesdayWednesdayThursdayFridaySaturday… Then the cycle repeats itself ad infinitum. My question is, where did this cycle originate? It seems to be going on for at least hundreds of years. The ancient Hebrews may have started it. But where did they get it from and importantly when did they start it?
I know some Creationist believe it originated c. 6000 yrs. ago with God’s creation of earth. But although I do believe it God, I do not hold this view. And neither do most people on these boards, I assume.
It seems to have arisen independently in the middle east, India and China (although the Romans had an 8 day week, that only went to 7 days in the christian era). Like most time periods the answer is probably astronomical: the Sun, Moon, and five visible planets (that is, the visible objects that were not stars) lent their names neatly to a seven-day week (in English some have since been renamed from Norse origins).
I think that, as Cecil suggests, there were several factors, but a key one has to be the lunar phases. There are roughly seven days between new moon and first quarter, between first quarter and full moon, etc. In a littoral environment like the Mediterranean, keeping track of this had a very mundane value – it flagged spring and neap tides, which had real-life implications – how deep is the water above the reef? how high will the tide rise as against the stuff piled on land near water level?
Couple this with a need for cyclical events – e.g., people 20 miles ouit need to know when Market Day will be to bring their produce to town to sell it, and if market day always falls on the lunar quarters… and you get a set of concepts m,ilitating toward a seven-day repeating cycle.
The naming of the days and their identification with the “seven planets” (Sun, Moon, and five naked-eye planets in the modern sense) came after the creation of the weekly cycle.
Certainly the spread of Judaism and Christianity, with its own independent seven-day cycle, reinforced what was already more or less in place. As noted, some cultures had other cycles, from four to ten days long, but there seems to have been a relatively early consensus to settle on the seven-day one.
Would the Judeo-Christian “God created the world in 7 days” origin really be all that independent? We could easily argue that the story used a 7 day basis because the 7-day moon quarters and pre-existing observances around that number of days. If the moon had had a 40 day cycle, thus lending itself to 10 days/quarter, then I think the Judeo-Christian story would be that “God created the world in 10 days” instead.