125. The Names of the Days and the Sabbath
As yet, however, the week was more of a plaything of the superstitious than a civil or religious institution; and it was pagan, not Christian. The names of the days were those of the gods which the Babylonians had assigned to the planets a thousand or more years earlier, or, in the Western world, “translations” of the Babylonian god names. The Greeks had long before, in naming the stars which we know as Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, substituted their Hermes, Zeus, Aphrodite for the Babylonian Nabu, Marduk, Ishtar, on the basis of some resemblance of attributes. Thus, Nabu had to do with learning or cunning like Hermes; Marduk, like Zeus, wielded thunder; Ishtar and Aphrodite were both goddesses of love. The Romans, in turn, “translated” the Greek names into those of their divinities Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, which survive for instance in French Mercre-di, Jeu-di, Vendre-di.
In the passing on of the week to the Germanic barbarians, still another “translation” was made, to Woden, Thor, Frija, whence English Wedn-es-day, Thur-s-day, Fri-day. It is true that these northern gods were not equivalents of the Roman ones, but that mattered little. The reckoning of the week was growing in frequency, and some sort of familiar and pronounceable names for its days had to be found for the new peoples to whom it spread. So a minimum of resemblance between two deities answered for an identification. Moreover, the ancients, because they believed in the reality of their gods but not in the infinity of their number, were in the habit of assuming that the deities of foreign nations must be at bottom the same as their own. Therefore a considerable discrepancy of attribute or worship troubled them no more than the difference in name.
For the days of the week, then, which the public came more and more to deal with, these translations were made. Astronomy, however, was in the hands of the learned, who knew Latin; and hence scientists still denote the planets as Mercury, Venus, and so on, instead of Woden and Frija.
Jesus observed the Sabbath, not Sunday, which he was either ignorant of or would have denounced as polytheistic. The Sabbath was an old Hebrew institution, a day of abstention and cessation from labor, evidently connected with and perhaps derived from the Babylonian Shabattum. These shabattum were the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first, twenty-eighth, and also nineteenth days of the month, the first four probably having reference to the phases of the moon, and all five being “days of rest of the heart,” inauspicious for undertakings, and therefore unfavorable for work. They were thus tabooed, supramundane days, and while their recurrence chiefly at seven day intervals, like that of the Jewish Sabbath, provided a sort of frame for a week, this week was never filled in. The influence of the Babylonian-Hebrew Sabbath on the development of the week was chiefly this: it provided the early Christians with a ready-made habit of religiously observing one day in seven. This period coinciding with the seven day scheme of the week that was coming into use among pagans, ultimately reinforced the week with the authority of the church.