1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
Wouldn’t have a day at all without having the sun, it seems.
Nice, except that assumes God was speaking English.
The French word for “Sunday” is “Dimanche,” which doesn’t have any connection with “sun”; it is derived from “The day of the Lord.” Other Romance languages use cognates of this. Since the Church grew out of Rome and the Romance languages, it’s clear there is no connection between “sun” and their version of “Sunday.”
“The day of the Lord” is often taken to mean the day God rested, which is why Christians went to church on Sunday instead of going to work. In France, this meant that Sunday was the last day of the week.
But the Old Testament couldn’t possibly have used the term “Sunday,” which comes from the Germanic, and IIRC, the Old Testament was not originally written in any ancestor of German.
The first time we moved to Canada and went to francophone school, all the calendars started with Monday as the first day of the week. English calendars started Sunday like what we were used to.
Actually – and I may be wrong here – my understanding is that the Sunday-first calendar began in Europe (or more accurately, was adopted there with Christianity from the Jewish calendar). Like the metric system, Europe moved to the Monday-first calendar “recently” (i.e., within the last 200 years), while America preserved the more traditional usage. I do not, of course, have evidence byond the Christian calendar to support that.
The tangential question of “Why is there a seven-day week in the first place?” is related to the question of months – a month being originally the time between new moons. It will be noted that typically if a new moon occurs on Tuesday, first quarter, full moon, and last quarter will also fall on Tuesday, or very early on Wednesday for one or both of the last two. Each week of a month would be Week of the Waxing Crescent, Week of the Waxing Gibbous Moon, Week of the Waning Gibbous, and Week of the Waning Crescent, with the quarters marking the breaks between them. With the advent of solar calendars, this ceased to be accurate, but the custom of a seven day week was already established.
14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
The Sun was not created until the fourth day, well after the creation of light.
In fact for many calendars, March 31st used to be the year end. It is only recently that it is generally agreed that Dec.31st is year end. I recall a gravestone on a church floor in England where the child was born in later the year (16xx?) and died in early in the year. The guide seemed to thnk it was a typo (???) but the real explanation was that many people considered March 31st the end of the year. now only accountants do.
The decision to shift from the Sabbath to Sunday was made, IIRC, at the Council of Laodicea (so Wiki tells me). the practice of celebrating Sabbath was adopted from the Jews; the Sunday worship (day after Sabbath) was sometimes celebrated instead as God’s day because that is the day of resurrection. Because the practice varied, the council decided to fix it as Sunday; probably the more perferred and logical day.
If you recall, Jesus was killed by a fatal wound so he wouldn’t have to hang on the cross for the Sabbath and offend local religious sensibilities. I suppose by the time his followers went to see the body after the sabbath restrictions were over, it was Sunday, he was risen. hence, Sunday, holy day versus Sabbath, holy day; decisions, decisions…
The pre-Christian Latin name for Sunday was dies Solis, the day of the Sun. The association and re-naming of that day as “the day of the Lord” would have come later, after widespread adoption of Christianity. The order of the days of the week, and their association with the ancient “planets” and thus with the gods associated with those planets–the day of the Sun, the day of the Moon, the day of Mars, the day of Mercury, the day of Jupiter, the day of Venus, and the day of Saturn–probably goes back to the ancient Babylonians. From the Middle East it spread to the Mediterranean and the Greeks and Romans. Later, the week was adopted by the Germanic peoples of Northern Europe, with appropriate “translations” of the names of the gods; with in some cases some irregularities in which god was identified as which: Wotan or Odin doesn’t really correspond all that well to Hermes or Mercury, and although Jupiter or Zeus and Thor were all thunder gods, Jupiter and Zeus were also the kings of their respective pantheons, while in the Norse and Germanic areas Wotan or Odin filled that role rather than Thor.
The Jews picked up the basic Mesopotamian seven-day week–IIRC, the subsequent importance of the Sabbath-day and hence the seven day week notwithstanding, that may not actually have been original to Jewish culture but was possibly actually something picked up during the Babylonian captivity (and then read back into Genesis as allegedly primordial). In Hebrew the pagan and idolatrous associations of naming the days after planets/gods is avoided by just naming them “first day” (yom rishon, i.e. what in English is called Sunday) through “sixth day” (yom shishi, i.e., Friday), followed by yom Shabbat, “the day of rest”, which we heathenish Anglo-Saxons still refer as “the day of Saturn”.
No, it was a Pit thread against such calendars. And the ones in Thailand ARE all Sunday to Saturday EXCEPT the ones promoted to tourists. Every year, we send Thai-themed calendars to elderly relatives in California. The ones the Thais all use are Sunday-Saturday but boring and nothing special. The really nice designs that feature the beauty of the country and carry tourist-oriented prices have all moved to Mon-Sun, the bastards. But Thais themselves feel Mon-Sun calendars are weird, and they pretty much all use Sun-Sat ones.
Ale pointed out he had seen some nice Thai-themed Sun-Sat calendars in a certain local bookstore chain, but when we looked they were all desk calendars and not wall calendars. We always send wall calendars.
Years back I bought a beautiful wildlife calendar in Australia. When I started using it, I discovered to my dismay that it was Monday-Sunday.
From this I assume that Oz uses the Monday-Sunday convention. Perhaps that is why Thai tourist calendars do also, the Aussies being the closest English-speakers in the region and probably the dominant English-speaking tourists as well.
Along with France and Hungary already mentioned, Germany also has Monday-Sunday calendars. We don’t want to break up our weekend of two free days, no matter what the church says.
My handheld calender, as well as MS Outlook calendar and similar applications, allow me to choose whether the first day of the week shall be Monday or Sunday.
This is because for a farming people, April marks the start of the new year: Spring, and the planting season.
In the early 1950s, in Germany, the school year still went from March to March, and was later switched to September-September. (although that has the disadvantage of sending 6-year-olds off to school in the dark. The advantage is that the long summer holidays come at the end instead of the middle of the year, and new apprenticeships and university start in September.)
What’s odd is that every single person I know- quite seriously without exception- considers Monday to be the start of the week, not Sunday. Yet most wall calendars here start on Sunday for some inexplicable reason…
