Seven Day Cycle and the Origin of the Sabbath in its Ancient Oriental Context (original) (raw)
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The Origins of the Seven-Day Week
OSU, 2021
How the seven days of the week got their planetary names is not a settled question. Evidence is presented in support of the hypothesis that the names arose in India. The Sūrya Siddhānta (SS) explains the names by a construction that divides the day into 12 parts. It is proposed that since the year was seen as the day of the devas and the division of the year into 12 parts goes to the naming of the Ādityas in the Ṛgveda as well as in RV 1.25.8 and RV 1.164.11, a corresponding division of the day into 12 parts served in addition to the better known division into 15 muhūrtas. Antecedents of the SS evidence in the Pañcaviṃśa-Brāhmaṇa are also reviewed.
The Anthropological Response - The Origin of the Seven-Day Week Within Ancient Judaism.
It has been proposed the origin of the seven-day week and subsequent adoption of a continuous seven-day cycle (Sabbath to Sabbath) by the ancient Hebrews was divinely mandated and instituted, rather than being adopted/integrated from regionally adjacent/dominant cultures.This position is untenable for two key reasons-namely a complete rejection of over a century of academic analysis as well as a highly selective and theologically suspect analysis of Isaiah 66:23. The latter requires a narrow interpretation of Sabbath to Sabbath as a fixed, uninterrupted seven-day cycle when such is unnecessary and likely unhistoric. 2 Additionally, it would mandate the acceptance of an unquestionable assertion of divine origin while overcoming the demonstrable and evidentiary-affirmed role cultural transmission plays in the formation, growth, and development of ancient societies, including the ancient Hebrews. A position which is neither new or novel. 3 Cultural Transmission (CT) Theory Within the modern field of anthropology there has been considerable, if not continuous, discourse regarding the concepts of acculturation, cultural diffusion and sociocultural change since Leo Frobenius first coined the term kulturkreise (culture circles) in 1898. In the simplest of terms, Frobenius demonstrated that cultures, through proximity and/or force, tend to influence each other over time (Dostal and Gingrinch 2010: 334-336). Cultural transmission (CT) theory is a refinement of earlier diffusionist models with nuanced attention to the manner, mode, and socio-historical context under which such transfers/integrations have occurred (Eerkens 2014: 1127-1138; Eerkens and Lipo 2007: 247-252). When they occur, these influences should be detectable within a variety of forms: material goods (in form and fabric), cultural norms and practices, and comparative linguistics. Given the broad nature of available evidence, be it literary or 3 See Morris 1979: 1ff. For contra see Gordon 1982: 12-16. 2 Isaiah 66:23 (KJV) "And it shall come to pass, that from one new moon to another, and from one sabbath to another, shall all flesh come to worship before me, saith the Lord"; (ESV) "From new moon to new moon, and from Sabbath to Sabbath, all flesh shall come to worship before me, declares the Lord."
Sabbath in the East, 2023
While Western Christianity’s early espousal of Sunday as the Christian day of rest and worship is broadly acknowledged, few studies have examined the development of the Sabbath/Sunday issue among Christian Churches in the East. The primary purpose of this study is to trace a New Testament continuance of Sabbath-keeping among Eastern Christians. This study examines mainstream Eastern Orthodoxy and the various “Semi-Orthodox” groups and denominations that historically have enjoyed greater freedom than their Western counterparts.
THE EIGHTH DAY ARGUMENT: A JEWISH RATIONALE FOR THE REJECTION OF THE SEVENTH DAY SABBATH
THE EIGHTH DAY ARGUMENT: A JEWISH RATIONALE FOR THE REJECTION OF THE SEVENTH DAY SABBATH, 2024
Building from the assumption of the Sabbath’s obsolescence much has been argued for the prominence of Sunday gatherings already in the New Testament corpus, or even that Jesus, though a Sabbath keeper, paved the way for the substitution of the seventh day Sabbath, which is by no means self-evident and therefore deserves further investigation. Ad interim, irrespective of the proper biblical interpretation of the continuity of the seventh day Sabbath, only voluntary blindness would deny the clear presence of the Sunday as a day to gather and worship within the Apostolic Fathers’ literature only a few decades after the last documents of the New Testament were written, at the pace that rejecting that which is Jewish was on vogue. Undoubtedly, the post apostolic treatment of the Sabbath is unprecedented given the Jewish origins of most New Testament writers, at the pace that the resurrection of Jesus became the main reason to account for the novelty of either worshiping on or keeping the Sunday. But how? What was the theological route that brought about such a phenomenon, i.e., that the Old Testament Sabbath became void on the basis of the resurrection of Jesus. Whereas Bacchiocchi, and many in his footsteps, find in the confluence of paganism, anti-Jewish sentiment and the prominence of the church in Rome as reasons that account for the suppression of the Sabbath in favour of the Sunday or Lord’s Day, there remains a need to explore the process through which such a belief came to be in the first place, hence the question: how did the resurrection of Jesus become the hermeneutical framework for the rejection of the
In Light of Genesis 1-2: What did the Seventh Day Represent for its swath of Biblical Practitioners?
Adventist Peace Fellowship Conference, 2022
With the Christian scriptures presenting a multiplicity of perspectives as to what the Sabbath is and how it is to be used, this paper works to formulate a hermeneutical lens through which a cohesive understanding of biblical Sabbaths can be seen. This is done by looking at several leading models in scripture, beginning with Genesis’ creation accounts and terminating with Jesus’ own Sabbath behavior, concluding that the Sabbath was not intended to be seen as a temporal space within time, but instead of an eternal fashion.
The stabilizing role of the Sabbath in premonarchic Israel:a mathematical model
The three monotheistic cultures have many common institutions and some of them germinated in pre-monarchic Israel. Reasonably, the essential institutions were in place at that starting point; this work explores the possibility that the Sabbath is one of these institutions. Our mathematical examination points to the potential cultural, civic, and social role of the weekly Sabbath, that is, the Sabbath institution, in controlling deviation from social norms. It begins with an analogy between spread of transgression (defined as lack of conformity with social norms) and of biological infection. Borrowing well-known mathematical methods, we derive solution sets of social equilibrium and study their social stability. The work shows how a weekly Sabbath could in theory enhance social resilience in comparison with a similar assembly with a more natural and longer period, say between New Moon and Full Moon. The examination reveals that an efficient Sabbath institution has the potential to ensure a stable organization and suppress occasional appearances of transgression from cultural norms and boundaries. The work suggests the existence of a sharp threshold governed by the“Basic Sabbath Numberש0”—a critical observance of the Sabbath, or large enough ש0, is required to ensure suppression of transgression. Subsequently, the model is used to explore an interesting question: how old is the Sabbath? The work is interdisciplinary, combining anthropological concepts with mathematical analysis and with archaeological parallels in regards to the findings.