![]() Although there are a few passages where σάββατα does in fact mean ‘two or more Sabbaths’, in most cases both the singular and the plural forms are used to designate a single Sabbath. The seventh day is designated by the Hebrew or Aramaic loan word σάββατον (neuter singular) or σάββατα (neuter plural). But in Greek writings by Jews and Christians we do have such terms. The ancient Greeks did not have the concept of a week and thus there is no word for ‘week’ or for any of the days of the week in classical Greek. We need therefore to regard š‑b‑t and š‑b‑ʽ as two totally separate roots. There is of course the view that Semitic or Hamito-Semitic roots originally consisted of only two consonants, to which a third, semantically empty, consonant could be appended (very much like the ‘root’ and ‘extension’ posited for ancient Indo-European), but this, if true, would apply to proto-Semitic or pre-Semitic but would have no relevance for a concept like that of the week, which emerged in historic times. The words for ‘week’ and for ‘Sabbath’ share the same first two consonants, but the third consonant is different: /t/ in the case of ‘Sabbath’ and ‘rest’, and /ʽ/ in the case of ‘week’ and ‘seven’. The concept of the Sabbath is inevitably tied up with that of the week, in Hebrew šòḇūaʽ, which is manifestly derived from the number ‘seven’ šέḇaʽ. ṣeppar ‘small bird’), and not deverbal abstract nouns. On the other hand, the view that the noun šabbòṯ (*šabbat) derives from the verb š‑b‑t also has its difficulties, insofar as nouns of the patterns qattal, qittal, quttal are, as a rule, primary concrete nouns, often animal names (e.g. To explain this the ‘denominalist’ school has argued that Arabic sabata is either a loan from Hebrew, or that it has been influenced by Jewish usage, but this can hardly be the case with Ugaritic. But another difficulty is that this root has clear cognates in Semitic (Arabic sabata also Ugaritic and Punic š‑b‑t in derived stems, all in the sense ‘to rest’). To maintain the notion that the verb šòḇaṯ is denominal from the noun šabbòṯ one would have to argue that the idea of the Sabbath is so central to Jewish thinking that a verb which originally meant merely ‘to keep the Sabbath’ became so engrained in the language that it developed into the general word for ‘stop’ or ‘cease’. Both usages seem to be common in all compositional strands (J, E, P, D) of the Pentateuch, as well as in the other books of the Hebrew Bible. 8:22: ‘While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease (lo yišboṯu)’. But there are probably just as many passages where the same verb is used simply for ‘to rest’ or ‘to cease’ without any reference to the Sabbath, thus (a random example) Gen. 2:2: way-yišboṯ) from his creative labour. Right at the beginning of the Bible, in the creation story, we read that on the seventh day God ‘rested’ (Gen. It is true that in many of its occurrences in the Bible the verb š‑b‑t refers explicitly to rest on the Sabbath. One does, however, need to consider the possibility that the noun is not derived from the verb, but rather that the verb is derived from the noun. 1.1.1) who tells us that ‘in the dialect of the Hebrews’ the word σάββατα means ἀνάπαυσις. ![]() We will look at these two etymologies in turn.Ī connection between the verb šòḇaṯ ‘he rested’ and the noun šabbòṯ in the sense ‘day of rest’ is eminently plausible and the latter has explicitly been derived from the former at least since the time of Josephus (Ant. Concerning the origin of this word there have been basically two positions: One is that it is a purely Hebrew word derived from the verbal stem š‑b‑t ‘to rest’ the other is that it is a loan word from Akkadian. It is used both as a masculine and as a feminine noun. The Hebrew name for the seventh day of the week, the Jewish day of rest, is, in the pronunciation implied by the Tiberian pointing, šabbòṯ, in Ashkenazic pronunciation /šabos/, in Sephardic pronunciation /šabat/ in Old Hebrew it was presumably *šabbat. Šapattu (or šabattu) ‘15 th day of the month, full moon, fifteen days’ šambih Judaeo-Persian also šambidĪrḫu ‘moon, month, 1 st day of the lunar month’ The attested forms in Manichaean Parthian (Pa), Manichaean Middle Persian (MP), and in Early New Persian (NP): ![]() (as opposed to trēn b-šabbṯā in Luc.18:12)īut Mandaic has šʼptʼ ‘Saturday’, presumably /šappṯā/ The more usual word for ‘week’ is ἑβδομάς f. שָׁבַת šòḇaṯ ‘to rest, cease’, (like Arabic sabata also Ugaritic and Punic šbt in derived stems only) To download a pdf version please click here: SABBATH paper. The following is a lecture about the etymology of the ‘Sabbath’ given at the Workshop on ‘The Origins of the Seven-Day Week’ on 25 June 2015 at University College London.
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