This was the week as we know it, evolved perhaps somewhat more than a century before Christ, soon carried back into Alexandria, and there imparted to Greeks, Romans, and other nationalities. By the time Jesus was preaching, knowledge of the planetary week had reached Rome. Less than a century later, its days were being written in Pompeii. In another hundred years it was spoken of by contemporaries as internationally familiar.
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.
126. The Week in Christianity, Islam, and Eastern Asia
Christianity however felt and long resisted the essential paganism of the week. The Roman Catholic church in its calendar recognizes the Lord’s day, the second to sixth days, and the Sabbath, but none named after a heathen god. In Greece the influence of the Orthodox church has been strong enough to establish a similar numbering in civil life; and the Slavic nations, also mostly Orthodox, follow the same system except that our Monday is their “first” day and they close the week with Sunday.
Sunday, instead of Sabbath-Saturday, became the religious day of the week in Christianity because of the early tradition that it was on this day that Jesus rose from the dead. An unconscious motive of perhaps greater influence was the desire to differentiate the new religion from its Sabbath-observing mother religion, both in the minds of converts from Judaism and in the opinion of the pagans. The Romans for about a century confused Jews and Christians, no doubt to the irritation of both.
Meanwhile, the pagans themselves, perhaps under the influence of the popular sun-worshiping Mithraic religion of the second and third centuries, had come to look upon the Sun’s day instead of Saturn’s as the first of the week. At any rate, in 321 A.D. Constantine ordained “the venerable day of the Sun” as a legal holiday from governmental, civic, and industrial activity. Constantine perhaps issued this decree as high priest of the state religion of the Roman empire, but he was also the first Christian emperor, and his action must have been wholly acceptable to the church. Before long, church and state were in accord to discountenance work on Sunday; and thus Christianity had adopted the heathen planetary week in all respects but the names of its days. Protestantism finally withdrew even this barrier and accepted the planet-god names that had so long been popularly and civilly established.