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To: idov
The seven-day week adopted by the Romans did not come from the Jews.

That's nonsense. It was instituted in the very first chapter of the very first book of God's Word, the Bible, in the Book of Genesis, at least 6000 years ago, way before anything called "Rome" was on the scene.

47 posted on 05/27/2014 1:08:30 PM PDT by PapaNew
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To: PapaNew

You are calling nonsense my sentence: The seven-day week adopted by the Romans did not come from the Jews.

Since when are facts nonsense?

The week was adopted by the Romans and in the Hellenic world, who paid no attention to what the Jews did and most people never heard of, long before the Christians came along. If they got it from the Jews they wouldn’t be calling the days by names of planets. The astrologers did that.

This is from F. H. Colson who wrote a history of the week in 1924.

“The planetary week rests on a ... principle, namely, the idea that the whole of time is under the control of divine beings, each of whom rules in turn. In this case the length of the week is clearly determined by the number of the divine beings concerned. In the case of the planetary week, these divine beings are the planets (including the sun and the moon), and therefore the number was fixed by nature. The number of planets visible to the ancients was seven.”
“The planetary week ... cannot be traced to a date much prior to our era.”

“By the beginning of the third century, the habit of measuring time in cycles of seven days, each of them dedicated to one of the seven planets, had become universal or at least general in private life throughout the Roman Empire, though it had not received official recognition.”

“How did the planetary week gain its ascendancy in the empire? I do not think that the difficulty of this has been properly appreciated. We talk glibly of one nation ‘getting it’ from another, but as a matter of fact a new time-cycle is not a thing which spreads automatically. The most natural method of propagation is by official authority. ... But as we have seen there is complete silence as to any official enforcement or even recognition of the planetary week.”

This is from Gilbert Murray, an expert on ancient Greece.

“Even the way of reckoning time changed (in Greece) under the influence of the planets. Instead of the old division of the month into three periods of nine days, we find gradually establishing itself the week of seven days with each day named after its planet, Sun, Moon, Ares, Hermes, Zeus, Aphrodite, Kronos. ... It was not the Jewish week. The Jews scorned such idolatrous and polytheistic proceedings. It was the old week of Babylon, the original home of astronomy and planet-worship.”

I got more if two scholars who know what they are talking about aren’t enough.


51 posted on 05/27/2014 1:47:12 PM PDT by idov
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