November
14
/ 2022
To the Hebrew prophets Isaiah, Amos and Hosea, the Psalms and the Book of Kings, the Sabbath signified the Full Moon, whereas for Jews in the days of ancient Rome it came to mean one day out of a seven-day week. How did that transition come to be? Josephus describes how Judaism spread around the Mediterranean – there were some 7-8 million Jews in the Roman Empire – taking the seven-day week with it. Everyone liked the idea of the Sabbath, he explained, as a day of rest every seven days. It was one of the more attractive features of the religion. Roman writers were then commenting upon how the ‘week’ was a relatively new idea. The historian Dio Cassius
