  THE BABYLONIAN SABBATH Feast of Marduk and Zarpanit. A Day Called Shabatum. A Day in Some Tablets at Yale. 1. Feast of Marduk and Zarpanit. The seventh day is the feast of Marduk and Zarpanit. It is an evil day. The shepherd of the great people shall not eat flesh cooked on the coals which is smoked. The garment of his body he shall not change; a clean one he shall not put on. A sacrifice he shall not offer. The king in a chariot shall not ride. In triumph he shall not speak. In the secret place a seer shall not give an oracle. The physician shall not lay his hand on the sick. It is not fitting to utter a malediction. At night before Marduk and Ishtar the king shall bring his offering; a libation he shall pour out. The lifting up of his hands shall then be pleasing to the gods.[365] This passage occurs in a tablet which describes the nature of all the days of a month. The same prohibitions are recorded for the fourteenth, nineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-eighth days. The tablet has often been brought into comparison with the Hebrew sabbath, partly because the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-eighth days are involved, partly because the prohibitions remind the reader of Exodus 20:8-11 and Deut. 5:12-15. Exod. 20:8-11. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work: but the seventh day is a sabbath unto the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it. Deut. 5:12-15. Observe the sabbath day, to keep it holy, as the Lord thy God commanded thee. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work: but the seventh day is a sabbath unto the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thine ox, nor thine ass, nor any of thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates; that thy manservant and thy maidservant may rest as well as thou. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, In reality the Babylonian prohibitions apply to certain classes of people only, and not to the whole population. A study of the contract literature shows that there was no cessation of business upon these days of the month, so that resemblance to the Hebrew sabbath is really quite slight. 2. A Day Called Shabatum. These days were not, so far as we know, called shabatum, but another tablet[366] tells us that the fifteenth day of each month was so called. Shabatum is etymologically the same as the Hebrew sabbath. As the Babylonian months were lunar, the fifteenth was the time of the full moon, so that in Babylonian the day denoted the completion of the moon’s growth. In the Old Testament “sabbath” is sometimes coupled with “new moon,” as though it may also have designated a similar day. (See 2 Kings 4:23; Amos 8:5; Hosea 2:11; Isa. 1:13; 66:23, and Ezek. 46:3.) This Babylonian shabatum can, in any event, have no direct relationship to the Hebrew sabbath as a day of rest once a week. 3. A Day in Some Tablets at Yale. A series of tablets in the Yale Babylonian Collection, a portion of which has been published by Prof. Clay,[367] shows that special sacrifices were offered on the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-eighth of each month. These sacrifices show that these days were thought to have some peculiar significance, but, whatever that significance may have been, the evidence cited shows that it was not the same as that of the Hebrew sabbath. |
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