134 Hiitton Webster 



as many other peoples have done ; they may have borrowed them 

 from the Babylonians as various authorities have supposed ;*" they 

 may have taken them from the Canaanites whose agricultural 

 festivals appear to have been transferred to the Hebrew calen- 

 dar with little essential change. Archaeological research points 

 more and more to the great influence of Canaanitish culture 

 on the early Hebrew^s. 



With our present knowledge we cannot hope to fix with any 

 exactness the precise period when the momentous change from 

 lunar weeks to periodic weeks took place in Israel. That the 

 periodic week was borrowed from Babylonia is an hypothesis 

 that finds little support in any cuneiform evidence at present 

 available.'*^ It is highly questionable whether the Babylonians 

 ever possessed the institution of a periodic seven-day week. 

 That it was borrowed from the Canaanites is a gratuitous as- 

 sumption. Until evidence to the contrary is found we may with 

 good reason attribute the periodic week to the Hebrews them- 

 selves — an institution as characteristically their own as formed 

 the nundinal period to the Romans, both being weeks which ran 

 from month to month and from year to year. 



In his able treatise Meinhold has gone so far as to argue that 

 until the age of Ezekiel the Israelites employed no weeks at all.*- 

 He then supposes that continuous seven-day weeks were intro- 

 duced largely through Ezekiel's reforming influence, hence that 

 the Sabbath as the last day of the periodic week was a post- 

 Exilic institution. Critics have pointed out that it is almost im- 

 possible for so far-reaching a change to have occurred unre- 

 corded ; moreover that the acceptance of such an hypothesis makes 

 it necessary to argue that all places in the Old Testament where 

 the Sabbath is mentioned as the seventh day of the week are 

 either of Ezekiel's time or later.*' To my mind, the problem is 



*" Marti, " Week," in Encyclopaedia Biblica, iv. col. 5290. 

 "C/. Zimmern, in E. Schrader, Keilinschriftenf 594. See also A. H. 

 McNeile, Book of Exodus, London, 1908, p. 122. 

 ^Sabbat uiid Wochc, 10 sqq., 21 sqq. 

 *^Cf. Hehn, " Siebenzahl und Sabbat," 115 sqq. 



