The Seven-Day Week

The Seven-Day Week

Over at Brandywine Books [link corrected -- thanks, Lars!] they linked to an article about "the book you've always wanted to find," on a subject you're curious about. Someone in the comments section mentioned the seven-day week, about which I've always been curious myself. It's not obvious why it should be so common worldwide to think of days in sets of sevens. It's roughly a fourth of the lunar cycle, but not quite. It's not based on base 10, 12, or 60, the most usual numerical bunches.

How old is the Genesis story of the six days of creation, followed by the seventh day of rest? Wikipedia cites authorities that date it to the Babylonian Captivity in the 6th century B.C. The Babylonians celebrated holidays on every seventh day counting from the new moon, with an odd-lengthed week at the end of each month to straighten things out. The word "Sabbath" may stem from a Sumerian word referring to the second of these monthly seventh-day observances.

Although the seven-day week is widely observed all over the world today, that may be largely an effect of Judeo-Christian cultural dominance. The Romans had been accustomed to an Etruscan eight-day week, but began to switch to the seven-day week under Augustus in the first century A.D., a process that was completed by Constantine in 321 A.D. Non-Judeo-Christian cultures employed a wide variety of weeks. The ancient Basque language, not obviously related to any of the major Indo-European tongues, contains traces of a traditional three-day week. The Igbo of Nigeria use a four-day week, the Javanese a five-day week, the Chinese and Egyptians a ten-day week, and the Aztecs and Mayans both 13-day and 20-day weeks, though the latter is getting so big you might as well call it a month except for its failure to line up with any lunar cycle. My favorite is the ancient Balinese (possibly Hindu) system of a 210-day cycle divided into a wild variety of concurrent cycles of all lengths between one and ten days. The chart that attempts to describe all this has to be seen to be believed.

More recently, both France and the Soviet Union, after their revolutions, tried briefly to institute alternative weeks before relaxing back to the worldwide Western-derived standard.

The names of the days of the week in most Romance and many other European languages are associated with the Sun, the Moon, and the five easily visible planets: Mars, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn, although most Romance languages have substituted variations on "the Lord's Day" for Sunday. So Moon-day in Spanish or French is lunes or lundi, Mars-day is martes or mardi, Mercury-day is miércoles or mercredi, Jove-day is jueves or jeudi, Venus-day is viernes or vendredi, and Saturn-day is sábado or samedi. In German and English, some of the days correspond to Teutonic versions of dieties with similar associations: Tyr (Tuesday), Wodan (Wednesday), Thor (Thursday), and Freya (Friday).

I have just finished re-reading, with great pleasure, the third book in C.S. Lewis's planetary trilogy, "That Hideous Strength." Towards the end, the planetary angels associated with Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn descend to Earth and exert their various influences on a group of Englishmen:

Suddenly a greater spirit came—one whose influence tempered and almost transformed to his own quality the skill of leaping Mercury, the clearness of Mars, the subtler vibration of Venus, and even the numbing weight of Saturn.... Kingship and power and festal pomp and courtesy shot from him as sparks fly from an anvil. The pealing of bells, the blowing of trumpets, the spreading out of banners, are means used on earth to make a faint symbol of his quality. For this was great Glund-Oyarsa, King of Kings, through whom the joy of creation principally blows across these fields of Arbol, known to men in old times as Jove and under that name, by fatal but not inexplicable misprision, confused with his Maker -- so little did they dream by how many degrees the stair even of created being rises above him.