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sick could be cured nor a man in difficulty consult a prophet; none might travel and fast-
ing was enforced (London: Oxford University Press, 1935. Pp. 86-87).

"A similar association with the moon's course," explains Hutton Webster, "is set forth in
the case of a seven-day period in a text which specifically indicates the seventh, fourteenth,
twenty-first, and twenty-eighth days as those of Sin, the moon god." "Another text," continues
Webster, "connects several days of the month with the moon's course in the following order: first
day, new moon; seventh day, moon as 'kidney' (half moon); fifteenth day, full moon."

"Finally," writes Webster, "in the fifth tablet of the Babylonian 'Epic of Creation,' a work
which in its original form is traced to the close of the third millennium B.C., it is told how the god
Marduk, having created and set in order the heavenly bodies, then placed the moon in the sky to
make known the days and DIVIDE THE MONTH WITH HER PHASES." "Although this inter-
esting production, in its present mutilated state," elicits Webster, "mentions only the seventh and
fourteenth days, we are entitled to believe that the original text also referred to the twenty-first
and twenty-eighth days of the month" (Rest Days: A Study in Early Law and Morality, pp.
228-229).

The Babylonian "Shabattum"

These cuneiform records of ancient Babylonia contain a term shabattum, which has been
generally accepted as the phonetic equivalent of the Hebrew shabbathon, more than likely an in-
tensive form of shabbath or Sabbath -- referring to a Sabbath of particular solemnity. Writes Hut-
ton Webster --

Shabattum, a word which has been found as yet only five or six times in Assyro-Baby-
lonian documents, occurs in a lexicographical tablet containing the equation shabbattu(m)
= um nukh libbi. The accepted translation of the latter expression is "day of rest of (or
for) the heart" (s.c., "of the angered gods"). Various scholars in England and Germany...
have therefore explained shabattum and its equivalent phrase by the five "evil days"
found in the calendar already noticed. This identification was based on the observation
that these seemed also to be penitential days, when by special observations the gods must
be appeased and their anger averted. (Rest Days, pp. 235-236).

As is wont with all humankind, the original meaning and intent of the Sabbath day, as re-
vealed by God to Adam and his descendants, became perverted after the flood and associated with
pagan gods. However, the timing of these Sabbath or rest days was kept intact. Continues Hutton
Webster --

A lexicographical tablet from the library of the Assyrian king Asshurbanipan gives the
names attached to several days of the Babylonian month; and among these is the designa-
tion shabattum, applied to the FIFTEENTH day [of the lunar month]. Still more recently
a similar use of shabattum has been found in a text which contains an account of the
moon's course during the month. Reference is here made to the first appearance of the
new moon, its ash-grey light until about the seventh day thereafter, its opposition with the
sun on the fourteenth day, its aspects on the twenty-first, twenty-eighth, and twenty-ninth

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