The Seventh Day in Ancient Near Eastern literature


by koot van wyk   Seoul  South Korea 2008


A number of scholars in the past wrote on seven or the seventh day in Ancient Near Eastern perspectives. What is valuable from them, is that they supply us the data to consider this topic. What needs re-evaluation, is their conclusions at times about these data. We think of Cyrus Gordon's article on "The Seventh Day" Ugarit-Forschungen vol. 11 (1979): 299-301. There is the role of seven-day periods attested in the Gilgamesh Epic by the same author in Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (New York: W.W. Norton, 1965), 63, 70, 82, 88, 137 and  145. The prominence of seven is discussed by J. M. Sasson, "A Genealogical Convention in Biblical Chronography," Zeitschrift für altestestamentliche Wissenschaft 90 (1978): 171-185. Also U. Cassuto and B. Jacob wrote on this topic. A number of noteworthy articles by Gerhard Hasel on the Sabbath in the Pentateuch, Prophets and Historical Books, New Moon and Sabbath as well as the Origin of the Biblical Sabbath and the Historical-Critical Method: A Methodological Test Case appeared in K. A. Strand, The Sabbath in Scripture and History (Washington, DC: Review and Herald Publishing) as well as in the Journal of the Adventist Theological Society 4/1 (1993): 17-46. Hasel also paid attention to day and days in the Old Testament and the Creation description.


Criticism of Cyrus Gordon's approach


1. Gordon states that long before the Hebrews, reckoning time in seven-day periods is attested. He then listed the Gilgamesh as example. Some correctives are necessary for a proper methodology:


a. Gordon operates with a Wellhaussenian methodology that deny the Hebrews any earlier presence than the Babylonian Exile or shortly before. The earliest will be the days of Ahab. The book of Genesis is just as much a source for the Hebrews as is any other source. The book trace in the first 11 chapters genealogies back to the first two people, namely Adam and Eve. The first 11 chapters are scanty data not because they are fabrications but because the original history books were lost in the flood that occurred according to the MT chronology in 2523 BCE. Noah's memory and whoever wrote down what he said after the Flood is the scanty data what we have in these 11 chapters.


b. The Gilgamesh Epic listed as "before the Hebrews" by Gordon is a methodological error on his part: The Gilgamesh Epic comes to us in various forms and shapes, with the closest form the one from the palace of Sennacherib during the time of Ashurbanipal in 650 BCE. To say that it is a late copy of a much earlier account is problematic:


i) None of the earlier accounts (Sumerian, Old Babylonian, Artrahasis, Hittite, Assyrian) compare with the Gilgamesh Epic word for word. What was in and what was fabricated or plagiarized (from Mosaic accounts by Hebrew scribes in exile!) is hard to separate.


ii) The Hebrews were there long before 650 BCE.


iii) The antiquity of the form of the Gilgamesh is not easy to establish without proper data. Unfortunately, we have only the form of 650 BCE to go on. Exact earlier duplicates do not exist. Not yet.


iv) Is it not suspicious by itself, that only the Gilgamesh form of the Flood Account has detail remarkably close to the book of Genesis, ascribed by the ancients to Moses written in 1460 BCE (according to MT chronology his sojourn in Midian)? 


2. What Gordon is helpful is that he supplies data of early seven-day reckonings at Ugarit with the note "though not the earliest examples" (Gordon 1979: 299).


3. A third major point about Gordon is his theory or postulation that the word Sabbath should be connected to the planet Saturn (Sun = Sunday; Moon = Monday; Mars = Tuesday; Mercury = Wednesday; Jove/Ju+piter = Thursday; Venus = Friday and Saturn = Saturday).

a. First he attached the planet Saturn to the word Sabbath in the Old Testament and argue that even in modern Hebrew the word Shabbetai means Saturn. He asked the reader to consult any post-biblical Hebrew lexicon. Methodologically it is not a good idea to carry ideology or methods of interpretation from post-biblical times into the Old or New Testament. To use Arabic to unlock rare words or hapax legomena in the Pentateuch or Job or Isaiah is not a safe methodology. It is exemplified by modern archaeology using Arabic names to locate the ancient tels of the Old Testament. A cumbersome task.


b. On the basis of his planet Saturn = Sabbath theory, he looked at the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20 and found Sabbath there, thus Saturn climaxing but when he went to Genesis 1 he did not find Sabbath there. He thus concluded that the author of Genesis 1 intentionally avoided Saturn worship by omitting Sabbath from the account.


c. Even though the account in Genesis 2 indicate that God rested on the seventh-day, Gordon argued that the root is used there but, he said, it is in a verbal form and not in a noun as in the Decalogue or Ten Commandments.


d. Again he cited late extra-biblical examples to show how important Saturn was in the days of Tacitus and Roman and Byzantine zodiac mosaics. Methodologically, Gordon is outside the Old Testament and New Testament (chronologically) to be relevant for it. It is like saying that modern Paris will give us an idea how things were in the days of the French Revolution.


e. Gordon's humanistic interpretation (pure horizontal interpretation [thus eliminating verticalism or transcendentalism from his model]) can be seen in the last footnote where he refuse to accept that God buried Moses, resurrected him and took him to heaven, but instead argue "Accordingly, his [Moses] burial place was kept secret so that it could not be venerated". We are reminded by Wolfardt Pannenberg in his book Basic Questions of Theology Volume I (1970): 39-40 when he complained that the world view of the historical critical method focusses on anthropocentricity by excluding all transcendent reality as a matter of course, saying, "Were not the anti-Christian implications of this methodological anthropocentrism obvious by the time of Voltaire, at the latest? [1750]". We know now that Voltaire was aided for his hermeneutics of suspicion by Rousseau, Diderot, d'Alembert, Helvetius, d'Argent, de la Mettrie and others (see John Hurst, History of Rationalism [New York: Hunt and Eaton, 1865], 122). 


4. A methodology that wants to unlock the issues regarding seven-day reckonings in the Ancient Near East must use the Old Testament also as a major source, must sidestep the modern era German literature analysis methods, must work with the text as the text claim itself to be, must follow the chronology of the text as indicated by the text itself, must bring Umwelt data to the Old Testament and relate it to the dates of the writing of the texts.


5. In this perspective, much more is history than the "myth-syndrome" scholars are brushed aside as not important. 


Seven as unit and climatic seventh


When one investigate the appearance of seven in the sources: biblical and extra-biblical, two kinds, at least, are delineated: seven as a unit and the climatic seventh.


Seven as Unit


a. When you have numbers 1 through 7 in equal listing without indicating a preference of one above the other, you have to do with seven as a unit.


b. The days in seven days as a unit are basically all the same.


c. None of them are more important than others and they are in chronological order from one to seven.


d. Examples of seven as a unit can be seen in the Gilgamesh Epic (650 BCE) Tablet I column 1 line 19 "seven [wise men]"; Tablet III column iv line 137 "a sevenfold(?) terror"; Tablet III column iv line 172 "seven bolts"; Tablet IV column v line 45 "seven coats"; Tablet VI line 52 "seven pits"; Tablet VI line 55 "seven double hours"; Tablet VI lines 104 and 111 "seven years of (empty) st[raw]"; Tablet VII column iv line 10 "mother of seven"; Tablet XI line 157 "seven kettles"; Tablet XI line 305 "seven wise men"; Tablet XII line 115 "He who had seven sons";


e. Examples are also in the Atrahasis Fragment IV column iv line 23 "wise women(?) [seven a]nd seven wombs, seven created men, [seven] created women" (see Alexander Heidel, The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels [Chicago: University of Chicago, 1949).


Climatic seventh


a. When you have a chronological order of numbers but the last number is encased, or framed or elevated either by a linguistic formulation or by a surprise event connected to it, you have to do with a climatic seventh.


b. Cyrus Gordon correctly allocated the seventh day in the creation record as climatic "Indeed the Creation account makes of the Seventh Day, the holy climax of the Six Days of Creation" (Gordon 1979: 300).


c. At Ugarit [Kitchen op.cit A. Millard, "The Ugaritic and Canaanite Alphabets -Some Notes" Ugaritic-Forschungen vol. 11 1979: 613 footnote 2 dating it to 1360 BCE, but D. Pardee recently dated it to 1280 and later] some examples can be shown for the climatic seventh day:


i) Keret's march to Udum ends climatically on the seventh day (UT, Krt:114-119; 218-222 [= KTU I.14 III 10-15. V 3-7; see Cyrus Gordon 1979: 299).

ii) The gods answers Danel's prayers on the seventh day (2 Aqhttt:1:6-16 [=KTU 1:17 I 5-15; see Cyrus Gordon 1979: 299).


iii) The flame of Kothar and Khasis completes the work and departs on the seventh day (51:VI:24-32 [= KTU 1.4 VI 24-32] see Gordon 1979: 299).


d. We can list also examples from the Gilgamesh Epic (650 BCE) of the climatic seventh:


i) Gilgamesh Epic Tablet XI 127-129


127 "six days and [six] nights"

128 "The wind blew, the downpour ..."

129 "When the seventh day arrived, the tempest, the flood ...."


ii) Also in Gilgamesh Epic Tablet XI 144-145


144 "A fifth day, a sixth day Mount Niṣir held the ship fast and did not let (it) move"

145 "When the seventh day arrived ..."


iii) Gilgamesh Epic Tablet XI 218 and 228


218 and 228 "The seventh-suddenly he touched him, and the man awoke"


e. The Sumerian Flood account (1796 BCE) from Nippur also is an example of a climatic seventh (Heidel 1949: 102-104).


i) The form of the words seems to be the seven of unit but a closer inspection indicates that it is rather the climatic seventh.


ii) Sumerian Flood Account column v


"When for seven days (and) seven nights .....The sun-god came forth..."


In this case, it seems that seven is just part of a rainy unit but actually after the night part of the seventh, the sun break through which makes the seventh [night part] climatic as the end of one phase and the beginning of a new phase.


In a nutshell we can say the following:


1. Around 1796 BCE the climatic seventh is found on a Sumerian Flood account from Nippur.


2. In 1460 BCE the climatic seventh is found in the Book of Genesis by Moses in the Creation account and in Exodus 20 in the decalogue. Both are climatic since it shifts from creatures to Creator.

related. 


3. Around 1280 BCE and later, the climatic seventh is found in a number of texts from Ugarit (according to the books of Joshua and Judges, the Israelites were already in Canaan and the presence of Habiru or Hebrews at a cosmopolitan city like Ugarit is not to be excluded).


4. Around 650 BCE in the Gilgamesh Epic the climatic seventh is found at least at three events.


5. A seven of unit placed in a climatic phase inaugurating a new phase on the eighth day cannot replace the importance of the climatic seventh. They are both independently important without substitution.


6. Christ resurrected on the First day of the week or the eighth in sequence, inaugurating a new phase does not replace or remove the importance He Himself has placed on the climatic seventh.


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