Rest Days; A Sociological Study 119 



the Sabbath. The practice might have been kept up, however, by 

 the king and the priests as the special guardians of conservative 

 institutions.^' 



17. THE SABATTU 



The cuneiform records contain a term sabattn (m) or sapattu 

 (ill) which has been generally accepted as the phonetic equiva- 

 lent of the Hebrew sabbathon {infra). The Assyrian-Babylonian 

 expression does not occur in such a connected text as the hemer- 

 ology for the month Elul the second. Up to the present it has 

 been found only three or four times in the inscriptions.^^ One 

 of these cases is that of a cuneiform lexicographical tablet con- 

 taining" the equation: sa-bat-tit(iii) =^ fini nn-fih lib-bi."''' The 



^An interesting effort to discover whether there was any general 

 observance of the Babylonian evil days was made by the late astronomer, 

 G. SchiapareUi (Astronomy in the Old Testament, 132 n}, 175 sqq.). The 

 examination of 3148 documents of the period 604-449 B.C. led him to the 

 conclusion that there was no marked falling off of business on any of the 

 five days. It is, of course, true that these statistics deal with a late period 

 in Babylonian history and include the reigns of several Persian rulers. 

 By this time the general observance of the custom may have been in 

 decay. Moreover the criticism is valid that the figures do not distinguish 

 the sort of business done on those days. Many of the documents are 

 temple records relating to offerings, receipts of salaries by priests and so 

 on. Such business was possibly not regarded as a violation of the pro- 

 hibitions in question (Cf. C. H. W. Johns, " The Babylonian Sabbath," 

 Expository Times, 1906, xvii. 566-67). In his Assyrian Deeds and Docu- 

 ments, London, 1901, ii. 40 sqq., the same author has pointed out that in 

 Assyria during the period 720-606 B.C., the seventh, fourteenth, twenty- 

 first, and twenty-eighth days do not show any marked abstention from 

 secular business. But out of 365 dated documents only 2 were dated on 

 the nineteenth. Again in Babylonia out of 356 dated documents of the 

 Hammurabi period only 2 again are dated on the nineteenth and only 26 

 on the four other evil days. At this earlier epoch, if such evidence be 

 accepted, there would seem to have been a marked abstention in Babylonia 

 on the aforesaid days. 



** The evidence is cited by Jensen (Zeitschrift fiir deutsche Wortfor- 

 schung, 1901, i. 153). 



^'Rawlinson, op. cit., ii. pi. 32, 1. 16 a-b. The reading sapattu is also 

 possible (Zimmern, in Schrader, Keilinschriftcn^ 592 n.^). The discovery 

 of this important equation seems to have been first made by Boscawen. Cf. 

 Sayce, in Academy, 1875, viii. 555. 



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