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The Hebrew seven-day week, ending with the Sabbath, presented so obvious a resem-
blance to the Babylonian septenary period, which closed with an "evil day," that scholars
have felt themselves compelled to seek its origin in Babylonia (ibid., pp. 252-252).

The Common Semitic Antiquity

The Hebrew seven-day week, ending with the Sabbath, did not, of course, originate in
Babylonia. The Sabbath day -- both Hebrew and Babylonian -- originated with the creation week
and was transmitted down through the flood to Babylonia where Abraham was born. "The celebra-
tion of new-moon and full-moon festivals," remarks Hutton Webster, "which BOTH BABYLONI-
ANS AND HEBREWS appear to have derived from a common Semitic antiquity, underwent, in
fact, a radically unlike evolution among the two kindred peoples." "To DISSEVER the week from
the lunar month," continues Webster, "to employ it as a recognized calendrical unit, and to fix upon
one day of that week for the exercises of religion were momentous innovations, which, until evi-
dence to the contrary is found, must be attributed to the Hebrew people alone" (Rest Days, p.254).

According to M. Jastrow, there is a passage in the Pentateuch (the first five books of the
Old Testament) which was in dispute several centuries before Christ concerning its meaning. In the
23rd chapter of Leviticus the word "Sabbath" appears to be used in a sense precisely THE SAME
as that of the Babylonian SHABATTUM, referring to the FIFTEENTH DAY OF THE MONTH. In
this passage it is directed that on "the morrow after the Sabbath" the sheaf of the first-fruits of the
harvest is to be brought to the priest, who shall wave it before God and then count fifty days from
"the morrow after the Sabbath" to the commencement of the Feast of Weeks or Pentecost.

Professor Jastrow clearly shows that the word "Sabbath" is used in Leviticus 23, not in its
later sense of a seventh day of rest, but as a survival of the old designation of the Sabbath as the
FULL-MOON DAY! Jastrow concludes by saying, "The two references in Leviticus stand out as
solitary signposts of an abandoned road" ("The Day After the Sabbath," American Journal of Se-
mitic Languages and Literature, 1914, xxx, 104).

The fact that the Babylonians kept Sabbath days that lined up with the phases of the moon is
noted by a number of different sources. According to the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics by
James Hastings --

The Babylonian...seven-day week...is the week with which we are so well acquainted...
this was the 7th, 14th, 21st, and 28th days of every [lunar] month. Of special interest in
connection with the seven-day week is the 19th of the month, which was a "week of
weeks" from the first day of the preceding month.

In the Ten Commandments by Joseph Lewis we find written:

In 1869 George Smith, well known as a pioneer student of Assyriology, discovered
among the cuneiform tablets in the British Museum "curious religious calendars of the
Assyrians, in which every month is divided into four weeks, and the seventh days, or
'Sabbaths,' are marked out as days on which no work should be undertaken." Authorities

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