Why 7 days for Creation?

@Setanta,

Good info. Thanks.

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@Setanta,

Quote:

The only plausible explanation for a lunar connection in using seven days would be that shamans, and later priests used four "weeks" of seven days as a rule of thumb, while knowing full well that it was inexact. Astronomy was the first systematically studied science precisely because of the need for accuracy in plotting the seasons.

Agreed. By the time there was a need for exact counting the number of days in the week had already been long established.

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@TomTomBinks,

I suspect that was case as well. That's why I think superstition is the origin of the seven day week.

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As Krumple and others already stated it was the Mesopotamians of the fourth millennium BC who studied the rhythms of the heavenly bodies, the planets and stars, and constructed their societies in accordance with that knowledge. I think the rhythm of seven days between phases of the moon probably has probably affected most strongly our concept of the number. We have to remember that the Christian religion is a latecomer and that its concepts are handed down from ancient, forgotten traditions.

The concept of the seven chakras, or levels of consciousness, in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism has analogues in the various native groups of the western world. The question is how much the knowledge of moon's rhythms affected the personal study of the human levels of consciousness. I suspect greatly.

Some of Joseph Campbell's speeches were compiled in a book called, "The Inner Reaches of Outer Space." The "Inner" refers to our minds in accordance with the universe.

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Ok, now I'm starting to lean away from the lunar hypothesis and more towards the original "planetary bodies" explanation.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

That's why I think superstition is the origin of the seven day week.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "superstition is the origin".

Are you saying that you think someone simply made up the 7-day theme without any type of physical-world connection and it became some type of trope which made it into mythology and then flowed into other mythologies ending with where we are today?

Or are you saying that it had some sort of observed source, but then gained momentum through mythology?

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I continue to see this as a product of superstitions. In numerology, seven is the seeker after truth. I doubt that the Sumerians, for example, started out right away with a coherent and relatively complete observational understanding of heavenly bodies. Remember that people did not understand what planets were, although they are strikingly visible against the field of stars. The word planet derives from the Greek word for wanderer. Rather than seeing the number seven deriving its cultural significance from astronomical observations, I see it as being imposed on the observational regime. The phases of the moon are not divisible by seven into numbers of whole days, and without observational instruments, there are not seven planets--seven celestial wanderers--visible in the night sky.

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@rosborne979,

Essentially, I'm saying yes to the questions in your second paragraph. See my post above. Even naked-eye observation of celestial bodies would not particularly favor the number seven. I can't say why seven became significant, and I don't believe anyone else can answer that, either.

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@Setanta,

Here's one opinion about "7."
http://www.humanreligions.info/seven.html

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I think we're underemphasizing the importance of the Moon and it's phases to the ancients. And we must remember that religion evolves and maintains part of the previous myth altered into the new form.

To the ancients, at some point, the Moon in its total cycle (zoey) was thought of as the eviternal Goddess, and the Moon in its phases, her living and dying son, (bios)--the son who after centuries or even millennia evolved into the monotheistic God. Thus the seven days of each phase were very important and embedded in their consciousness.

Also, by the time Monotheism rolled around, I think in Hinduism and Buddhism, at least, the concept, or discovery, of the seven levels of consciousness were established. I don't know how much influence this chakra concept had on western thought, though.

But if there were mystics in the west who realized the importance of the seventh level of consciousness as the definition of the divine, then that is creation in the mystical sense. And they may have had influence on the creation of the myths.

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There's also the six degrees of separation. Which has more truism?

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The creation account is found in Genesis 1–2. The language of the Genesis account makes it clear that all of creation was formed from nothing in six literal 24-hour periods with no time periods occurring between the days. This is evident because the context requires a literal 24-hour period. The description specifically describes the event in a manner that a normal, common-sense reading understands as a literal day: “And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day” (Genesis 1:5). Further, each sentence in the original language begins with the word “and.” This is good Hebrew grammar and indicates each sentence is built upon the preceding statement, clearly indicating that the days were consecutive and not separated by any period of time. The Genesis account reveals that the Word of God is authoritative and powerful. Most of God’s creative work is done by speaking, another indication of the power and authority of His Word. Let us look at each day of God’s creative work

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@myrobostation,

You are putting the biblical account (which is a written record of a ancient oral account) into context as if it was being written by an author living today. The original language that oral version was originally created in could have used different words to describe the length of time intervals. When it was written it might have even been common knowledge it wasn’t 24 hour days, we don’t know so why assume it. We do know that the history of the earth is millions or billions of years and the evolution of life took millions of years. The rocks don’t lie. If one believes the Bible and the fossil record are both a historical record of the universe, they can’t be interpretated in ways that disagree with each other.

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@brianjakub,

In Pre-1085 AD Christian Europe the Credo was " knowledge comes from belief." That is, if you wanted to study anything you would look for it in the Bible as an authority. In 1085 the Muslim city-state of Cordova in what is now Spain was overrun by the Christians. In it was the library containing the Lost knowledge and science of ancient Greek and Rome. Christian scientists and Scholars flocked to Cordova to study these newly discovered volumes. Gradually over time the credo changed from "knowledge comes from belief" to "belief comes from knowledge". This led 300 years later to the Renaissance. So anybody who still uses the Bible as an authority is stuck to a thousand-year-old credo.

I'm not saying the Bible is without value but that the value is of a metaphorical nature.

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@coluber2001,

The bible is not book of science. The bible is a book with ancient information about the creation, and the creator that (I believe) can help us interpret scientific data. I think it can be shown that the sequence of events in the creation stories and flood stories (Noah's ark and the tower of Babel) are important and accurate. To date these stories to use them to interpret the creation of matter, biology, and the laws of physics as we observe them we must defer to current methods of ancient dating. The periods of days in the bible must correlate with those methods. And the hebrew word for day or "yom" in the bible allows us to do just that.

wiki

Quote:

Biblical Hebrew has a limited vocabulary, with fewer words compared to other languages, like the English that has the largest vocabulary.[2] So words often have more than one meaning and context would determine the meaning.[3] Strong's Lexicon yom is Hebrew #3117 יוֹם [4] The word Yom's root meaning is to be hot as the warm hours of a day.

Thus "yom", in its context, is sometimes translated as: "time" (Gen 4:3, Is. 30:8); "year" (I Kings 1:1, 2 Chronicles 21:19, Amos 4:4); "age" (Gen 18:11, 24:1 and 47:28; Joshua 23:1 and 23:2); "always" (Deuteronomy 5:29, 6:24 and 14:23, and in 2 Chronicles 18:7); "season" (Genesis 40:4, Joshua 24:7, 2 Chronicles 15:3); epoch or 24-hour day (Genesis 1:5,8,13,19,23,31) – see "Creationism", below.

Yom relates to the concept of time. Yom is not just for day, days, but for time in general. How yom is translated depends on the context of its use with other words in the sentence around it, using hermeneutics.[5]

The word day is used somewhat the same way in the English language, examples: "In my grandfather's day, cars did not go very fast" or "In the day of the dinosaurs there were not many mammals."

The word Yom is used in the name of various Jewish feast days; as, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement; Yom teruah (lit., day of shouting) the Feast of Trumpets.[6]

Yom is also used in each of the days of the week in the Hebrew calendar.

For instance 40 days in hebrew can also be translated upteen years or as long as it takes to complete. Which means the flood event could have taken thousands or millions of years as we observe years today.

So since I believe evolution is a algorithm created to run in the universe and the universes time table is set in stone. I believe we must interpret words like yom (day) and abroim (40) to fit what science is confident about when interpreting the data on the age of the earth, and even more confident in the age of biological events.

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None of this religious bullsh*t here addresses the question of why the number seven, in particular, would be used. As it does not conform to any astronomically observable events, I am convinced that the origin was superstition, in the broadest sense, and without regard to anyone's favorite theology.

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@Setanta,

Quote:

None of this religious bullsh*t here addresses the question of why the number seven, in particular, would be used. As it does not conform to any astronomically observable events, I am convinced that the origin was superstition, in the broadest sense, and without regard to anyone's favorite theology.

There is a little (and sometimes a lot) of truth and ancient history behind superstition. Do you think there is any truth in the Mayan calendar and their superstitions? There was some tremendous science involved.

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The Maya were obsessive mathematicians, which would make them proto-scientists at best. They didn't do to well on the end of the world. They developed no engineering and no technology from their math.

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@brianjakub,

brianjakub wrote:

There is a little (and sometimes a lot) of truth and ancient history behind superstition.

At this point, I would observe that even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

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@coluber2001,

The Bible has positive and negative value. It has too many errors, omissions and contradictions to have any real value.

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Why 7 days for Creation?

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