Hebrew and Babylonian Traditions Author:Morris Jastrow Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE HEBREW AND THE BABYLONIAN SABBATH Among the problems directly created through the discovery of the cuneiform records of Babylon and Assyria... more », one of the most important, and at the same time one of the most intricate, is the question whether the Babylonians had an institution that may be compared to the Sabbath of the Hebrews, which up to within a short time ago was regarded as an absolutely unique contribution of the Hebrews to the religious thought and the religious institutions of mankind. The problem began with the discovery of an equation in a cuneiform text1 furnishing in parallel columns synonyms or explanations of certain terms as follows: urn nukh libbi= shabattum, which, literally translated, would be "Day of rest of the heart" = shabattum. At first sight, this would seem to indicate beyond any possibility of doubt that the Babylonians recognised a day of rest, and that they called this day by a term which certainly suggested the Hebrew Sabbath. There was, to be sure, an element of doubt as to the observance of a "day of rest" in Babylonia or Assyria, owing to the fact that the term shabattum, or Sabbath, had not been found in any literary or religious text, but only on a tablet of a purely lexicographical character, and that numerous business documents of all periods showed that at no time was the seventh day singled out as one on which the ordinary activities of life were interrupted. Yet the force of this objection was weakened by the consideration that the lexicographical tablet contained other terms, such as um bubbuli, a designation for the end of the month; urn nubatti, explained as "a day of distress" which had been found in religious and other texts, so that it was a fair inference to assume that the term shabattum belonged to the...« less