3 ms·

> Then Sunday=1, Wednesday=4, etc. That's a helpful encoding because it matches up with numbering that's routinely used in Portuguese, Hebrew, Greek, and by Qu

by schoen 2y ago

> Then Sunday=1, Wednesday=4, etc. That's a helpful encoding because it matches up with numbering that's routinely used in Portuguese, Hebrew, Greek, and by Quakers, among many others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_days_of_the_week#Days_numbered_from_Sunday https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_days_of_the_week#... These are mostly ultimately because of the Hebrew Bible account in which Sunday is the first day of creation (e.g. Genesis 1:5, 1:8, 1:13, ...).

sudosysgen 2y ago
The numbering itself has little or nothing to do with the Bible. The practice of numbering days of the week is, as the page you linked suggests earlier, widespread and much older than the Bible. Sunday is the day of creation in the Bible because it was the first day in the calendar being used where Genesis was written and translated, so "Day 1" became "Sunday" because to the translator "Sunday" was the first day. That calendar itself was not mathematical - the Hebrew calendar was an empirical lunisolar calendar with arbitrary intercalarion for thousands of years until it was fixed in 2CE in Judea, and it took another thousand years for this practice to become consensus, so Sunday being the day of creation is purely incidental and not a necessary intersection. Ascribing the Bible into it is gratuitous and useless. While it might be a reason why a small proportion Christians use it, it only explains a tiny minority of its usage, not most of it. It's just explained by it being an obvious way to name days.
- dotancohen 2y ago
  He didn't ascribe the Biblical narrative to the convention, he mentioned that they match. They could match due to coincidence, due to having a common ancestor, or due to the Biblical narrative itself following the extent (as you claim) standard.
  - schoen 2y ago
    I wrote "mostly ultimately because of", so I did mean to say that I thought the Biblical narrative was the historical reason that most cultures and languages that use this numbering did so. I'm pretty curious about this question, which I've previously asked in the form of "for how long has there been a worldwide consensus about which day of the week it is?". One answer that I heard is sort of akin to sudosysgen's account, in that some people suggested that the question might not be meaningful: there may have been different cultures with a seven-day week and, when they made sustained contact, instead of debating with each other about "which day of the week it is", they may have understood themselves to be translating their existing names for the weekdays -- some of which were based on numbers. To the extent that that's a good way of talking about it, I also don't have a good understanding of when those translations would have happened, or who would have made them.
    - sudosysgen 2y ago
      It most likely comes from Greek, as the first time the Bible would be translated in a language where days had names. Some Greek calendars used the seven day week which seems to originate from the Sumerians, and naturally the day of the Sun would be the choice for the first day in the Greek pantheon.
      - schoen 2y ago
        I just looked in the Septuagint and (I guess unsurprisingly) it uses ἡμέρα μία, ἡμέρα δευτέρα, ἡμέρα τρίτη. So it wasn't literally directly in the translation process. One could also say that the Genesis text is counting days rather than naming them, as Genesis 1:5 for says יוֹם אֶחָד ('one day') whereas the "name" of the day in Hebrew is יוֹם רִאשׁוֹן ('first day'). This author argues that the "the Jewish, biblical week and the planetary week of astrological origin" were combined in Rome rather than Greece, while agreeing that there are earlier antecedents for the use of the seven-day week. https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/zodiacblog/2022/05/02/the-origins-of-the-planetary-week/ https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/zodiacblog/2022/05/02/the-origins... Wikipedia on "nundinae" seems to roughly agree with this interpretation: > The 7-day week first came into use in Italy during the early imperial period. For a time, both systems were used together, but the nundinae are seldom mentioned in extant sources after the Julio-Claudian period. The nundinal cycle had probably fallen out of use by the time Constantine adopted the Hebrew weeks for official use in AD 321, altering the day of rest by declaring the Lord's day the Day of the Sun (dies Solis) a legal holiday. Different scholars have placed the end of 8-day markets at various dates from the late 1st to early 5th centuries.

by schoen 2y ago

sudosysgen 2y ago

The numbering itself has little or nothing to do with the Bible. The practice of numbering days of the week is, as the page you linked suggests earlier, widespread and much older than the Bible. Sunday is the day of creation in the Bible because it was the first day in the calendar being used where Genesis was written and translated, so "Day 1" became "Sunday" because to the translator "Sunday" was the first day. That calendar itself was not mathematical - the Hebrew calendar was an empirical lunisolar calendar with arbitrary intercalarion for thousands of years until it was fixed in 2CE in Judea, and it took another thousand years for this practice to become consensus, so Sunday being the day of creation is purely incidental and not a necessary intersection. Ascribing the Bible into it is gratuitous and useless. While it might be a reason why a small proportion Christians use it, it only explains a tiny minority of its usage, not most of it. It's just explained by it being an obvious way to name days.

dotancohen 2y ago
He didn't ascribe the Biblical narrative to the convention, he mentioned that they match. They could match due to coincidence, due to having a common ancestor, or due to the Biblical narrative itself following the extent (as you claim) standard.
- schoen 2y ago
  I wrote "mostly ultimately because of", so I did mean to say that I thought the Biblical narrative was the historical reason that most cultures and languages that use this numbering did so. I'm pretty curious about this question, which I've previously asked in the form of "for how long has there been a worldwide consensus about which day of the week it is?". One answer that I heard is sort of akin to sudosysgen's account, in that some people suggested that the question might not be meaningful: there may have been different cultures with a seven-day week and, when they made sustained contact, instead of debating with each other about "which day of the week it is", they may have understood themselves to be translating their existing names for the weekdays -- some of which were based on numbers. To the extent that that's a good way of talking about it, I also don't have a good understanding of when those translations would have happened, or who would have made them.
  - sudosysgen 2y ago
    It most likely comes from Greek, as the first time the Bible would be translated in a language where days had names. Some Greek calendars used the seven day week which seems to originate from the Sumerians, and naturally the day of the Sun would be the choice for the first day in the Greek pantheon.
    - schoen 2y ago
      I just looked in the Septuagint and (I guess unsurprisingly) it uses ἡμέρα μία, ἡμέρα δευτέρα, ἡμέρα τρίτη. So it wasn't literally directly in the translation process. One could also say that the Genesis text is counting days rather than naming them, as Genesis 1:5 for says יוֹם אֶחָד ('one day') whereas the "name" of the day in Hebrew is יוֹם רִאשׁוֹן ('first day'). This author argues that the "the Jewish, biblical week and the planetary week of astrological origin" were combined in Rome rather than Greece, while agreeing that there are earlier antecedents for the use of the seven-day week. https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/zodiacblog/2022/05/02/the-origins-of-the-planetary-week/ https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/zodiacblog/2022/05/02/the-origins... Wikipedia on "nundinae" seems to roughly agree with this interpretation: > The 7-day week first came into use in Italy during the early imperial period. For a time, both systems were used together, but the nundinae are seldom mentioned in extant sources after the Julio-Claudian period. The nundinal cycle had probably fallen out of use by the time Constantine adopted the Hebrew weeks for official use in AD 321, altering the day of rest by declaring the Lord's day the Day of the Sun (dies Solis) a legal holiday. Different scholars have placed the end of 8-day markets at various dates from the late 1st to early 5th centuries.