I04 Hiitton Webster 



form literature in the British ]\Iuseum found a tablet which 

 referred to certain days of abstinence observed in ancient Meso- 

 potamia. He writes: "In the year 1869, I discovered among 

 other things a curious religious calendar of the Assyrians, in 

 which every month is divided into four weeks, and the seventh 

 days or ' Sabbaths,' are marked out as days on which no work 

 should be undertaken."^ 



Shortly after this striking announcement Sir Henry Rawlinson 

 published a portion of a calendar, the transcript of a much more 

 ancient Babylonian original, 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 intercalary 

 month called Elul H, and for Marcheswan, the eighth month of 

 the Babylonian year, takes up the thirty days in succession and 

 indicates the deity to which each day is sacred and what sacri- 

 fices or precautionary measures are necessary for each day. All 

 the days are styled " favorable," an expression which must indi- 

 cate a pious hope, not a fact, since the words u-hulgala or mnn 

 limnu ("the evil day") are particularly applied to the seventh, 

 fourteenth, nineteenth, twenty-first and twenty-eighth days. Such 

 days would seem therefore to have possessed an indeterminate 

 character : though naturally evil or unlucky, they could be made 

 favorable or at least innocuous, provided the rules for their ob- 

 servance were faithfully followed. The second Elul, being an 

 intercalated month, might be thought to have enjoyed a special 

 significance, as intercalary months have had elsewhere (supra) ; 

 but such an hypothesis will not explain the inclusion of the 

 month Marcheswan in the calendar. Hence it is highly probable 



^Assyrian Discoveries,'' London, 1883, p. 12. 



"Rawlinson, Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia, London, 1875, 

 vol. iv, pis. 32-;^;^. A complete translation was given by Sayce, Records of 

 the Past, London, 1876, ist ser., vii. 157-68. Cf. also Zimmern, in E. 

 Schrader, Die Keilinschriftcn und das Alte Testament^' Berlin, 1903. pp. 

 593 SQQ- The complete series consisted of fifteen tablets. Of these, nos. 2 

 (II Nisan). 4 (Sivan), 8 (II Elul), 10 (Marcheswan), 12 (Tebeth), 13 

 (Shebat), and 15 (II Adar), have survived, in full or in part, but only 

 tablets 8 and 10 have so far been published. 



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