Seven Days of the Week and the Seventh Day—Chp.3

The Day of Rest
Biblical Teaching About Time
—An online book about rest and worship—
By Dr. Al Franzmeier

Chapter 3 

The Seventh Day Is Holy

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We move now to the study of the Biblical concept of time and rest, an understanding largely lost to our post-modern world.

Perhaps you have asked, as I have, why we have a week of seven days rather than, say, eight or five or twelve.  Why is a seven-day week recognized around the world?  There is no mathematical or scientific reason for it.  Seven does not divide equally into 365.25 days to give us twelve months with an equal number of days.  In fact, the whole business of developing a calendar is very complex.

In ancient days, when most pagans believed that the earth was the center of the universe, many believed that each day was ruled by one of the seven known planets (sun, moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter). The word planet is derived from the Greek  planês, and the Latin planeta, meaning wanderer. The ancients reasoned that since these seven heavenly bodies wandered or revolved about the sky, each must have significance. And since they were heavenly bodies they further concluded that planets represented certain gods and were so named. As a result, each day was named for one of the seven planets and the gods behind them. Currently, the names for our days are a combination of Greek gods (e.g. Saturn-day) and Norse gods (e.g. Sunna's-day, Mani’s-day, Tiu’s-day, Woden’s-day, Thor’s-day, Freya’s-day. Saturday was simply called wash or bath day among the early Norse).

We are not concerned here with a history of these pagans and their worship practices. Our focus is upon our spiritual ancestors, the Israelites. Why did they decide to observe a seven-day week and why did they observe every seventh day as a Sabbath day of rest?

Some scholars have tried to find the roots of the Biblical Sabbath in the myths of the ancient Babylonians living along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.  That was the region from which Abraham came and Abraham is the father of the Hebrews. So, they suggest we can discover the roots of the seventh day Sabbath among those people. Of course, they do not have any way to tell us how the Babylonians came to their conclusions.

The Babylonians, these scholars tell us, divided each week into seven days and each day into six parts of two hours duration.  In turn, they divided the year into twelve lunar months of twenty-eight days. That meant that an extra month had to be added from time to time to catch up.

These people had a day of rest called “Shappatu,” a word mentioned in some ritual texts and sounding very much like the Hebrew word “Shabbath.”  Some have speculated that the Biblical Sabbath finds its roots in Shappatu.  That is a natural conclusion, because the Babylonian language is related to Hebrew.  Shappatu was celebrated on the seventh, fourteenth, nineteenth and twenty-first days of each month.  On those days the king was forbidden to eat certain foods, ride in his chariot and make sacrifices.  However, Babylonian tablets indicate that on Shappatu work was not interrupted for the general populace.

Whatever Shappatu meant, the contrast between that day and the Biblical Sabbath is obvious.  Most probably, the presence of cyclical days of rest in ancient Middle Eastern societies were what had survived of the original Sabbath keeping as commanded by God to Noah and his sons.  Their descendents may have kept the Sabbath for generations until transformations in meaning and approach took place with the introduction of superstition and the worship of false gods. 

By the Seventh Day God had finished His work.

The seventh day Sabbath preserved among the Hebrews was always a day of celebrating the Creator’s blessings, a day to cease from work in order to remember God’s creative work and to give thanks.

We learn from the Scriptures that God created the week and decreed that His people should rest on the seventh day.  God created the universe and all that is in it in six days and rested on the seventh: “By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing” (Genesis 2:2).

Some Rabbis asked if God did anything before he rested on the seventh day.  Yes, they replied, he had one more thing to do before he rested.  Before he could step back to exult and delight in his work, he created peace, joy and happiness, for he wanted his children to celebrate with him the perfect balance and marvelous wonder of all he has created.  He wanted to bless them with an entire day in which to rejoice and be happy as they celebrated his wisdom and goodness. 

God blessed the seventh day.

To understand the meaning of this blessing we must turn to the original Hebrew.  In Hebrew there are two verbs translated to bless: Ashar and Barak.  Ashar is never used to speak of what God does.  It always refers to what man does or desires.  Ashar speaks of man’s congratulations.  Barak speaks of God’s benediction.  Barak is used in Genesis 2 to speak of God blessing the Sabbath.  Therefore, when a man speaks a blessing, he is really praising God for all that God has done and praying that God will pour his blessings upon the one to be blessed.  To bless is to remember that all true blessings come from God.  Consider some Biblical examples.

•“The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; The Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.  So they (Aaron and sons) will put my name on the Israelites, and I will bless them” (see ESV - Numbers 6:23-27).

This Aaronic blessing spoken by God’s chosen priests put God’s ‘name’ upon the Israelites.  To put his ‘name’ upon them meant that the Lord claimed these people as his children; they carried his name.  Therefore he would protect and bring them prosperity and peace.  The full meaning of this blessing is now coming to pass in the Lord Jesus Christ, who came to bless all people. For this reason the Aaronic blessing is still spoken when God’s chosen people gather to worship in the ‘name’ of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

•Samuel bestows God’s blessing upon Saul, making him king: “the Spirit of God came upon him in power, and he joined in their (prophets) prophesying”  (see ESV - 1 Samuel  9:13-10:ll).

In order to lead God’s people Saul needed the blessing of God’s Spirit, enabling him to proclaim God’s Word to Israel and to fulfill his duties as Israel’s king.  When Saul rejected that blessing it was passed on to David and his descendants, ultimately it rested upon Jesus, the Son of David.  All who are baptized into Christ have the blessing of the same Spirit, enabling them to believe in him and empowering them as members of his Body to proclaim the Gospel.

•God controls all blessings and curses.  Balaam could not curse Israel.  He could only bless her (see ESV -Numbers 22-24, especially 23:8,20).

The king of Moab was frightened.  Convinced that Israel would come like an ox to lick up every blade of grass, he sought out the pagan prophet Balaam to curse these invaders.  In this strange story God appeared to Balaam to say, “You must not put a curse on this people, because they are blessed.” Try as he would, Balaam was unable to speak a curse from God upon Israel.  “How can I curse those whom God has not cursed?” he asked.  “There is no sorcery against Jacob, no divination against Israel,” he continued. Balaam even foresaw the coming of the Messianic King from these people.  “A star will come out of Jacob; a scepter will rise out of Israel,” he prophesied. Thus, we see that no man can remove a blessing given by the Lord.  This is especially evident in this next blessing.

•God blessed Abram, promising to make of this childless man a great nation, with offspring as numerous as the stars (see ESV - Genesis 12:2-3; Genesis 15).

Notice the seven-fold structure of God’s blessing.  Seven is the number for the week, the number of completion.  This blessing brings God’s full blessings to his people who trust in him, as did Abram.  Here is God’s seven-fold promise:

1.  I will make you into a great nation
2. I will bless you
3. I will make your name great
4. You will be a blessing
5. I will bless those who bless you
6. Whoever curses you I will curse
7. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you.

God’s original blessing upon all mankind, a blessing to be remembered on the Sabbath, was now to be restored and fulfilled through Abram and his descendants.  These promises were reaffirmed in various ways to Abram, his sons and those descended from him. After healing a man crippled from birth before Solomon’s Colonnade, the Apostle Peter quoted the seventh promise in his sermon (Acts 3). His sermon led to the conversion of thousands.  For this he was dragged before the Jewish High Council, the Sanhedrin.  Filled with the Holy Spirit, he claimed the power of Jesus’ name and declared that “salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.”  As the church continues to proclaim this Gospel, God still blesses all who hear the Word and believe it.

•To turn away from the Lord is to invite His curse (see ESV - Deuteronomy 29:16-21).

The Lord brought Israel out of slavery in Egypt, led and fed them in the wilderness for forty years.  Now as they stood before the Promised Land, the Lord called upon them to follow carefully the terms of his covenant.  If anyone fails to do this, said the Lord, “All the curses written in this book will fall upon him, and the Lord will blot out his name from under heaven.”

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Next time Chapter Three continues with a discussion of God declaring the seventh day holy and the implications of that command.