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The knowledge of the Sabbath was brought through the flood by Noah and his family, and
when Noah's children and their descendants spread out into the area that later became known as
Babylonia, the knowledge of the Sabbath went with them. As a result, we find a "Sabbatum" in the
ancient records of Assyria and Babylonia where certain activities were prohibited on the 7th, 14th,
19th, 21st and 28th days of the lunar month.

The Babylonian Connection

In the year 1869 the late George Smith, a well-known pioneer student of Assyriology, dis-
covered among the cuneiform tablets in the archives of the British Museum in London "a curious
religious calendar of the Assyrians, in which every month is divided into four weeks, and the sev-
enth days or 'Sabbaths,' are marked out as days on which no work should be undertaken." Some six
years later Sir Henry Rawlinson published this calendar in the fourth volume of his standard col-
lection of cuneiform inscriptions.

Records Hutton Webster --

It appears to be a transcript of a much more ancient Babylonian original, possibly belong-
ing to the age of Hammurabi, which had been made by order of Asshurbanipal and placed
in his royal library at Nineveh. The calendar, which is complete for the thirteenth or inter-
calary month, called Elul II, and for Markheshwan, the eighth month of the Babylonian
year, takes up the thirty days in succession and indicates the deity to which each day is sa-
cred and what sacrifices or precautionary measures are necessary for each day (Rest
Days: A Study in Early Law and Morality. New York: The MacMillan Company. 1916.
P. 223).

Webster continues by saying --

All the days are styled "favourable," an expression which must indicate a pious hope, not
a fact, since the words ud-khul-gal or umu limnu ("the evil day") are particularly applied
to the SEVENTH, FOURTEENTH, nineteenth, TWENTY-FIRST, and TWENTY-
EIGHTH days...With regard to the reasons which dictate the choice of the seventh,
fourteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-eighth days, two views have been entertained. It has
been held, in the first place, that the "evil days" were selected as CORRESPONDING TO
THE MOON'S SUCCESSIVE CHANGES; hence that the seventh day marks the close of
the earliest form of the seven-day week, A WEEK BOUND UP WITH THE LUNAR
PHASES (ibid., p.224).

S. Langdon, in his book Babylonian Menologies and the Semitic Calendars, mentions the
Asurbanipal calendar --

Asurbanipal in the seventh century promulgated a calendar with a definite scheme of a
seven-day week, a regulation of the month by which all men were to rest on days 7, 14,
19, 21, 28. The old menology of Nisan made the TWO DAYS OF THE DARK OF THE
MOON, 29, 30, rest-days, so that each lunar month had 9 rest-days, on which neither the

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