Zia nie si prvy.
THE ORIGIN OF THE HEBREW SABBATH.
By Rev. J. T. NICHOLS,
Furthermore, upon the Babylonian monuments recently
discovered mention is made of a week of seven days ending
with a seventh day on which no work was to be done or
sacrifice offered. This seventh day was a day of rest and
abstinence from the usual employments. This is shown bythe register tablet of the intercalary month of Elul. We read
there that the seventh, fourteenth, nineteenth, twenty-first
and twenty-eighth days were Sabbaths. Directions are given
in this tablet for the observance of the day by the " ruler of
the great nations." He must not eat certain kinds of food,
nor change his garments, nor offer sacrifices. So, too, the
riding on a chariot and issuing of royal decrees was forbid-
den. It was not proper then for one to curse or an augur to
mutter his divinations. This tablet shows us only the nature
of these Sabbaths as kept by the king and priests, but it is
probable that a similar, though, perhaps, not so strict a Sab-
bath, was observed by the citizens.
We cannot but notice how much this Sabbath of the Baby-
lonians resembles the Hebrew Sabbath of the Levitical law.*
We notice also that the word for Sabbath in the form Sab-
batfi was known to the Assyrians, and is explained as mean-
ing "a day of rest for the heart." The Babylonian day of
rest differs from the Hebrew in not being always on the
seventh day, for their month followed the moon,+ and as the
full lunar month has from twenty-rnine to thirty days, the
last week must be eight or nine days long. Moreover, there
is the unaccountable observance of the nineteenth day as a
Sabbath in the same way as the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-
first and twenty-eighth. Notwithstanding these differences,
this calendar shows that a Sabbath similar to that of the
Hebrews was known to the Assyrians and Babylonians.
