Things Yorami know: Why are there seven days in a week?

Yuval asks "How can it be that all over the world time is measured in weeks and that all over the world the days are parallel (meaning there is no gap between Sunday in my culture and Sunday in France or Australia and so on)"

The week is indeed universal And similarly to the decimal counting method It was used by Rabbi Yehuda Halevi as further evidence of the descent of all mankind from the first Adam "Have you heard of a nation that disagrees about the week we all know, which begins on Sunday and ends on Shabbat? And how did the people of China and the people of the western islands admit this?... The reason for this is that all the people are sons of Adam or Noah and the determination of the week was given to them in a Kabbalah from their first father" (Khozari part 12 7-XNUMX). Yehuda Halevi, born in the XNUMXth century, was wrong: in China, Japan, the American continent and the Pacific Ocean there were cultures without the week in his day. And yet, even in his day, the universality of the week was impressive. From Ireland in the west to Thailand and Burma in the east, all over the Christian, Muslim and Hindu worlds, people determined the order of their day in units of exactly XNUMX days.

The week is the most useful unit of time in our lives, from the work meetings through the television broadcast schedules to the synagogue: the week is the metronome that dictates the rhythm of our lives and yet it is the most mysterious of all units of time. The day, the month, and the year are determined by the movement of the heavenly bodies, and the timing of time is the first role assigned to the lights in the act of creation. And they were for signs and times, and for days and years." This week, on the other hand, is a pure cultural creation and is based entirely on social consensus. When Robinson Crusoe tries to maintain his belonging to civilization on the deserted island, he does not look at the moon, but marks a notch in the tree every day and keeps track of the number of weeks. When "Fara" joins his island, he brings it into European culture by calling it the name of the day of the week he arrived: six.

One of the first questions prisoners held in solitary confinement ask upon their release is "What day is it?" A piece of information that means reconnecting with society and its rhythm. The clear sign of the expiration of the social order in the days of the Corona lockdown was the slight confusion that befell people who were asked "what day is today". It seems that ever since humans created communities that were too large to allow personal acquaintance between any two people, the need for a unit of time larger than a day and shorter than a month to gather for trade, worship, matchmaking or entertainment also arose. Indeed, ancient calendars in Egypt and Mesopotamia satisfied this need in different ways. The earliest calendar from the third millennium BC was based on the division of the year into 7 chapters of 50 days and was accordingly called the Pentacontad Calendar "fifty calendar". The fifty-day period was divided into seven seven-day units, at the end of which a special day called "Assembly" was celebrated. It is possible that a memory of those fiftieth cycles can be found in the counting of the Omer "And you counted for you, from the morrow of the Sabbath... seven Sabbaths, you shall be perfect until the morrow of the seventh Sabbath, you shall count five Yam Yom" (Leviticus 350). The year contained five such cycles, that is, 15 days and another XNUMX days of worship called, with a disturbing similarity to our Shabbat, shappatum.

The 50-day cycles disappeared from the religious and official calendars but showed an impressive ability to survive in popular culture. In 1913, an anthropological study was published on a calendar among Palestinian fellas in the south of the country (Der Kalender des palästinischen fellachen). It turns out that until the end of the Ottoman period, the year was divided into 50-day units ending in days with names of Christian origin: a remnant of a Byzantine version of the ancient fiftieth calendar. The number 50, as the Hebrew jubilee cycle, had a mystical significance both due to the completion of seven cycles of seven - an important number in the mythologies of the Fertile Crescent (seven fate-determining gods led the Sumerian pantheon already in the fourth millennium BC) and also due to being the sum of the squares of the smallest Pythagorean triple, i.e. The sum of the areas of the squares built on the right-angled triangle whose sides are 3,4, 5 and 3 (3x4+4x5+5x50=7). In Shumer's calendar, the 14th, 21th, 28st and XNUMXth days of each month were sacred and various crafts were prohibited. But these tables, despite the division into seven-day units, still do not constitute a true week system because they are related to the natural time cycles: the month and the year and therefore also include days outside the number of weeks.

The Egyptians moved a little closer to a weekly timeshare. The annual tide of the Nile required the Egyptian calendar to follow the summer year. Each Egyptian month consisted of 3 "weeks" of 10 days and only 5 days at the end of the year remained without a week to include in it. The Hebrew week takes the Babylonian unit of seven days but disconnects it (perhaps as a defiance against the sun and moon worshipers) from any connection with the heavenly bodies. A heretical hypothesis sees the week as the result of the contact of the Babylonian exiles after the destruction of the First Temple with Mesopotamian culture. The Sabbath is indeed the fourth commandment and is anchored in the story of creation, but embarrassingly in the stories of the First Temple: from the time of Joshua to the kings there is almost no mention of the Sabbath or the week as a unit of time. A passing mention of Shabbat together with the Rosh Hashem in XNUMX Kings chapter XNUMX and a few verses in Isaiah (chapters XNUMX and XNUMX) and Jeremiah (chapter XNUMX) are the few reminders of what occupies such a central place in religious life today, the other days of the week are not mentioned rule. On the other hand, Ezra's regulations after seventy years on the rivers of Babylon (tract Baba Kama) are steeped in the rhythm of the week: from reading the Torah on Mondays and Thursdays, through washing on Thursdays, to eating garlic on Fridays.

Sages noticed this lack of symmetry and pointed out that the Shabbat laws are "mountains hanging by their hair" meaning "little scripture and many laws". The week is indeed a Hebrew or at least a Middle Eastern creation, but the one who made the week universal was the first Christian Roman emperor: Constantine. The Romans had their own week, actually eight days, and market and assembly days were determined based on it. The great victory of the week and the decisive step for its globalization was on March 3, 321 when Constantine declared Sunday as the rest day of the empire and the week as the basic unit of time. It is tempting to see this as the victory of the seven cycle that originates in the Hebrew creation story or at least in the life story of our people from Nazareth, but it is not certain that Constantine's week is the monotheistic week. In Constantine's edict, Sunday is actually called "the day of the sun" dies solis and not the day of Jesus' resurrection. What is the connection between Sunday and the sun? The ancients recognized seven heavenly bodies that have holidays around the earth (according to Ptolemy's model): the sun, the moon, the planet Mercury (Mercury), Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn and assigned a day to each of them. Sunday was attributed to the sun, Monday to the moon, Tuesday to Mars, etc. The origin of this astrological week in the fifth century BC in the future contracts of Persia called by sages "Chaldeans" and received its final form in Alexandria in the second century BC. This star week migrated west to Europe and east to the Hindu culture that spread it in the Indian subcontinent and east of Asia to the border of China. And it was more familiar in Rome than the Judeo-Christian version. The names of the days in English reflect an adaptation of the astrological week to the Celtic pantheon: the day of Venus (Friday), for example, became the day of the goddess of love and marriage "Frigue" and evolved into Friday, while the day of the Persian sun god Mithras was in Rome the day of Sol Invictus (the invincible sun god ) and most days to the English Sunday.

The transition to a seven-day week was not smooth: it took more than a hundred years for the week to become the basic unit of time in Christian Rome. A calendar from the year 354 (33 years after Constantine's decree) indicates for each day, along with its place in the seven-day week, a letter from A to H to show its place in the old eight-day Roman week (Shamnoe?) and in addition to that it also indicates a 10-day week that divides the moon Muhammad was already operating in an environment that lived in the rhythm of the week. Moving the day of worship to Friday made the week holy for another significant part of humanity, thus completing this week's journey of globalization in most of the "Old World" until the voyages of Columbus.

More about our week and alternative weeks in next week's column (which will probably last exactly seven days).

Did an interesting, intriguing, strange, delusional or funny question occur to you? Send to ysorek@gmail.com

More of the topic in Hayadan:

• Summary of the history of time - Part I
• Brief History of Time - Part II
• "Religious tolerance" worded in the seventh century AD