342 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



From all this we infer that before coming in contact with, the 

 Babylonian Assyrians the Israelites had no weekly sabbath or 

 day of rest recurring every seventh day, but had a festival of the 

 new moon on the first day of the lunar month (I Samuel, xx, 27), 

 which, as we shall show, was observed by them as a day of rest, 

 as it is by other peoples at the present day. After they had 

 adopted the weekly sabbath from the Babylonians, they endeav- 

 ored, through national vanity, to show that they had always ob- 

 served it, and to account for it they inserted in their books two 

 traditions of its origin which are fatally at variance. Exodus, xx, 

 10, 11, says : " For in six days Jahveh made heaven and earth, the 

 sea, and all that therein is, and rested the seventh day ; wherefore 

 Jahveh blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it " ; while in Deu- 

 teronomy, V, 15, we read : " And remember thou wast a servant in 

 the land of Egypt, and that Jahveh, thy God, brought thee out 

 thence through a mighty hand and a stretched-out arm : therefore 

 Jahveh, thy God, commanded thee to keep the sabbath day." 



In the later books, written after contact with the Babylonians, 

 we find sabbaths frequently mentioned and strongly insisted 

 upon, but nearly always in connection with new moons. Thus, in 

 Nehemiah,x, 33, we read, " For the continual burnt offering, of the 

 sabbaths, of the new moons " ; in Isaiah, i, 13, " The new moons and 

 sabbaths"; in Isaiah, Ixvi, 23, "And it shall come to pass that 

 from one new moon to another, and from one sabbath to another, 

 shall all flesh come to worship before me, saith Jahveh " ; in 

 Ezekiel, xlv, 17, " In the feasts, and in the new moons and in the 

 sabbaths"; and in Hosea, ii, 11, "Her feasts, her new moons, and 

 her sabbaths." New moons and sabbaths are also mentioned to- 

 gether in I Maccabees, x, 2-4 ; I Esdras, v, 32, and in Judith, viii, 6. 

 In Ezekiel, xlvi, i, we read that the gate of the inner court of the 

 temple was to " be shut the six working days," and opened on the 

 sabbath and the day of the new moon, which shows that the latter 

 was a day of rest. The offering to be made on the day of the new 

 moon was superior to that to be made on the sabbath (v, 4, 5). In 

 Amos, viii, 5, we read : " When will the new moon be gone, that 

 we may sell corn, and the sabbath, that we may set forth wheat ? " 

 which again shows that the day of the new moon was a day of 

 rest.* 



In no one of these passages is the new-moon festival spoken of 

 as inferior in importance to the sabbath. On the contrary, since 

 the offering was superior, it is to be presumed that the festival 

 was also superior. Each was a day of rest. The explanation 

 doubtless is that, while adopting a seventh-day sabbath from the 



* New moons are mentioned alone that is, without sabbaths in Ezra, iii, 5. Ezra 

 does not anywhere mention the sabbath. 



