The spread of the weekly Sabbath

In the last Seleucid year, 2 Kanun, I was pondering the Seven Day Week. This exists in tension with the lunar month, which is not 28 days. A strict seven day week would force the Sabbaths out of sync with the month. Ganzel and Safford the prior September (I didn't know) had presented the evidences. Nice to have it for free.

The world of 1-4 Reigns may have been monthly. I haven't looked into it. Anyway after that: the Exile happened. So that's what we're discussing today.

Elephantine, it seems, had a seven day week reserving one day for rest, sbt. That doesn't mean "seven", sb'; although I imagine wordplay at work. "Elishavath" - "my God is rest" - seems a better word than "my God is seven (אֱלִישֶׁבַע)". The Babylonians preferred four days a month, usually seven day divisions but at least once eight. The Ganzel-Safford use that to introduce the paper's main argument, which is the Iraqi-Jewish name "Shabbataya". This is surely the origin of messiah Shabtai and could well be the true origin to our Ἐλισάβετ.

For the paper, Shabbataya came to the Jews under the Achaemenids. Not Cyrus; the paper goes with "mid-fifth century BCE". The name appears with Darius I and beyond, so the authors may mean sixth when people started taking that name. It's with Darius that the Elephantine settlement gets Persian protection, given how said settlement was surrounded by angry Egyptians. Nobody is called "Šapattāya" which, to Ganzel-Safford, means it wasn't a name for Babylonians. This is the Jewish Shabbat, not the Iraqi Šapatta.

It has long been argued that Genesis One appropriates Babylonian tropes, for a nonBabylonian mythos. Here we may have motive: to force the week, no matter what month it was. This seems a nod more to Egypt, once Egypt and Iraq were united in this empire.

As a side-note, all this should interest Yonatan Adler: as evidence for Genesis One's spread among international Jewry (if I may). It's not all the kosher codes, which as Adler notes was likely just for (Egypt-influenced) priests at the time. But the week was incumbent upon Creation. Ezra, Nehemiah, and all of them might be able to enforce their writ upon Jerusalem, but their influence abroad would have to be through persuasion. Genesis One's stentorious prose is nothing if not effective rhetoric.