“In general, units of time can be divided into two categories. One category contains the units that measure something objective and observable, typically the movements of astrological objects. A day, for example, is the length of time it takes our planet to complete one rotation with respect to the sun.
“The second category is much more fun: totally random, basically meaningless divisions of time that were created out of a combination of superstition, incorrect science, and the need for greater precision in timing.
“The seven-day week is in the latter category. There’s no good reason for it, and yet, it’s constant to almost every single culture.”
(Dan Nosowitz. “Why Can’t We Get Rid of the 7-Day Week?” Atlas Obscura. September 17, 2015.)
The week makes no sense? Wow, this seems unbelievable because so much seems to depend upon our observance of a seven-day week these days. Yet, authorities tell us that a week is a questionable division of time. However, days, months, and years all make sense as units of time – they match up, at least roughly, with the revolutions of Earth, the moon, and the sun. But, the week is a “random” division.
So, why do we even bother with the time-honored division of a seven-day week?
Exploring the issue, we discover seven-day weeks very rarely divide evenly into any month or lunar division. They don’t fit into the overarching, flexible sexagesimal system for measuring time, angles, and geographic coordinates. (Ancient Sumerians began using the sexagesimal numerals not only because the number 60 has many divisors or it is countable on the fingers of both hands but because 60 is the least common multiple of the number of fingers of both hands and the number of months in a year.)
In fact, seven-day weeks don’t divide evenly into any conception of a year. Even our hours, minutes and seconds make more sense than the week. The sexagesimal system, meaning a numeral system with 60 at its base, happens to be fantastically flexible and information-dense
Throughout history, thinkers have tried to oust the seven-day week for various philosophical, mathematical, and political reasons.
Yet, for some reason, weeks remain.
The week has been deeply significant to Jews, Christians, and Muslims for centuries; however, people in many parts of the world happily made do without it, or any other cycles of a similar length, until roughly 150 years ago.
The week as we know it – a repeating cycle that has seven distinct days and divides work from rest – has been around for about 2,000 years, since ancient Roman times. The Roman week itself blended two separate precedents: One was the Jewish (and later, Christian) Sabbath, which occurred every seven days. The other was a rotation of seven days tracked by timekeepers in the Mediterranean; each day was associated with one of seven celestial bodies (the sun, the moon, and five planets).
(Joe Pinsker. “We Live By a Unit of Time That Doesn’t Make Sense.” The Atlantic. November 16, 2021.)
So where did the idea of the seven-day week originate? We don't really know. But the best be is the ancient Babylonians living in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq). They held the number seven as a holy number, that being the number of objects in our Solar System they could observe at the time: the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn – the “Seven Wanderers.” The result of the astrological week was largely a result of the fact that the ancient Babylonian astronomers happened to identify seven planets.
The Babylonians already had months, just like anyone else. (If you want to split up a period of around 29 days into a smaller period, why not divide it basically into four parts, especially when that number is damnably close to your holy number of seven?) So, the Babylonians used a seven-day week, with the seventh day having certain religious responsibilities (relaxation, cessation of work, worship, that kind of thing).
Sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel in his book, The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week (1989) blames the moon’s for being so unreliable. “Only by establishing a weekly cycle of an unvarying, standard length could society guarantee that the continuity of its life would never be interrupted by natural phenomena such as the lunar cycle,” he writes.
Zerubavel especially links the need for an interval of this length to the rise of market culture: there needed to be an agreed-upon time in which vendors and buyers could meet, and about four times every lunar cycle seemed a pretty good frequency.
(Dan Nosowitz. “Why Can’t We Get Rid of the 7-Day Week?” Atlas Obscura. September 17, 2015.)
Around the 6th century BC, the Babylonians were a dominant culture and their ideas spread far and wide, including the concept of the seven-day week. The Jews happened to be captives in Babylonia around that time, and adopted the week concept. So did the nearby Persians and the (not yet dominant) Greeks.
Zerubavel believes it is worth noting seven was linked to Jewish-derived traditions that took place in seven days. (Though it’s worth noting two things: first, nobody’s totally sure that the Jewish creation myth actually predates the Babylonian captivity, and second, that “days” in that case probably translates better to something like “periods” or “intervals.”) Anyway, the Jews got on board.
(Eviatar Zerubavel. The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week. 1989.)
Also, the Greeks began traveling and conquering around the time of Alexander the Great, from 356 to 323 BC, and they brought the seven-day week with them as far east as India and, either directly or, more likely, through Indian contacts, to China.
Dan Nosowitz, freelance writer and editor, reports …
“The last major society to fall to the tyranny of the seven-day week was the Romans; they had observed a strict 8-day week up until 45 BC, when the Romans adopted the new Julian calendar, which is extremely similar to the Gregorian calendar we use today. The Julian calendar used seven-day weeks, but the Romans observed, weirdly, both seven-day Julian weeks and (to a smaller degree) the older eight-day cycles until Constantine officially banned the eight-day cycle in 321 AD. By that time the eight-day cycle was barely used.”
(Dan Nosowitz. “Why Can’t We Get Rid of the 7-Day Week?” Atlas Obscura. September 17, 2015.)
Interesting Note: The Holy Scriptures say that there are seven Spirits of God (Rev. 3:1, 4:5, and 5:6). There are numerous places throughout the Scriptures where God denotes things in "sevens" or multiples of seven. The Bible also shows us that God uses "sevens" throughout the Scriptures to denote prophetic time.
Cha … Cha … Cha … Changes In the Seven-Day Week
David Henkin, a historian at UC Berkeley, argues in his new book, The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are (2021) argues that the week has taken on new power in the past 200 years as it has become a tool for coordinating social and commercial plans with ever-widening circles of acquaintances and strangers.
According to Henkin, urbanization is the major factor. He says, “It's about people wanting to be able to make schedules with others, especially strangers, either in a consumer context or socially … It’s become much more important to know what day of the week it is.”
Attempts for changing and reforming the seven-day week were sold as a business problem that causes bookkeeping irregularities when you have a different number of weeks in a month, a quarter, or a year and as a broader problem that deals with technical redundancy: for example, Henkin explains that “saying that today is “Tuesday, November 16, 2021” is technically a redundancy because there is no November 16, 2021, that isn’t also a Tuesday. And when people mix up weekdays and dates – say they mistakenly schedule something for Wednesday, November 16, which might not exist in a given year – it can cause all kinds of confusion.”
(David Henkin. The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are. 2021)
The solution? Change the calendar so that November 16 is always a Tuesday. The most popular calendar-reform proposal was for the year to consist of 364 days that always have the same weekday attached to them, and then to have a couple “blank days” at the end of the year that don’t count as part of any seven-day week.
Reforms like these were heavily supported by business interests in the United States, as well as the scientific community. This was the period when the international date line was established and when time zones were instituted. Reform movements were successful in getting governments to go along with Greenwich Mean Time. It just didn’t work with the week.
Why did they fail?
The main answer is a religious answer, because no Christian, Muslim, or Jew who’s attached to the idea that you can count seven-day weeks all the way back to creation is going to think that you can just move it around.
And, a lot of other people are attached to the weekly calendar for nonreligious reasons, despite knowing it’s not real. Once people got used to thinking of Tuesdays or Wednesdays as real things, it’s not surprising that they were hesitant to dispense with that notion
Zerubavel gives an interesting account of two attempts to reshape the calendar drastically, one during the French Revolution and one under Stalin. Both failed, chiefly because they were aggressively ideological in inspiration and a point-blank challenge to traditional beliefs.
The seven-day week and the Gregorian calendar are the standard time periods used for cycles of rest days in most parts of the world. There is nothing inevitable about a seven-day cycle, or about any other kind of week; it represents an arbitrary rhythm imposed on our activities, unrelated to anything in the natural order.
As for changes to the concept … in any field where people tend to be strongly conservative; even the mildest proposals for rationalizing founder in the face of deep social resistance.
Zerubavel concludes …
“We invented the week for ourselves … the week exists—and there have been many cultures where it doesn’t – it is so deeply embedded in our experience that we hardly ever question its rightness, or think of it as an artificial convention; for most of us it is a matter of ’second nature.’”
The seven-day week is nothing other than a human convention. Fortunately, to the joy of calendar manufacturers throughout the world, the 7-day week standardized by Constantine has remained unchanged and isn’t likely to shift anytime soon.
But, here is a story about one woman who tried to change all of that.
The World Calendar
Elisabeth Achelis – the daughter of Fritz Achelis, who was president of the American Hard Rubber Company and Bertha Konig – was born in Brooklyn and attended the Brooklyn Heights Seminary and the Ogontz School in Pennsylvania. Achelis was an ardent crusader for calendar reform.
After attending a lecture by Dr. Melvil Dewey (of decimal system fame) on the necessity of simplifying life, the New York socialite became a reform advocate, editor, and author. With personal funds and donations, she established the World Calendar Association, which she headed.
Achelis created the “World Calendar” – one of nearly 500 plans proposed to revise the present Gregorian calendar. The World Calendar is an attempt to give the year's measuring stick the stability and permanence of the clock, the ruler and the scale. She was a passionate promoter of her plan, going through every possible channel to create interest in adopting it.
Her World Calendar called for a perpetual, equal‐quarter, 12‐month calendar which she proposed to make every year the same. The calendar would divide the year into quarters of 13 weeks, each quarter beginning on a Sunday. The first month in each quarter would have 31 days, the others 30. Since this adds up to only 364 days, an extra day would be inserted between Dec. 30 and Jan. 1. This additional day is dated “W,” which equals 31 December, and named “Worldsday,” a year-end world holiday. It is followed by Sunday, January 1 in the new year. In leap years, another extra day would be inserted after June 30.
Advantages: Because The World Calendar is perpetual, there is no need to change out copies of it every year. Proponents refer to its simple structure. In each year, every weekday is assigned to the same date. Quarterly statistics are easier to compare, since the four quarters are the same length each year. Work and school schedules do not need to unnecessarily reinvent themselves, at great expense, year after year. The World Calendar can be memorized by anyone and used similar to a clock.
The chief disadvantages of the calendar were that each month of the quarter begins on a different day of the week, and that the Year-End Day interferes with regular religious observances, to the antagonism of church leaders.
(Jill Lepore. “How the Week Organizes and Tyrannizes Our Lives.” The New York Times. November 15, 2021.)
Jill Lepore, staff writer for The New York Times and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history, recently wrote …
“Achelis valued years, and cherished days. She did not admire weeks: 'It’s very disturbing to have five Saturdays in one month every now and then.' In her view, 'a new and better world cannot be built on a calendar with its faulty pattern of yesterday.' She wanted each year to be the same, the seven-day week be damned.
“'She is particularly opposed to the wandering Easter,' Geoffrey Hellman wrote of her, in a 1939 profile that appeared in this magazine. 'If her plan ever gets adopted,' he wrote, 'her name may make as profound an imprint on the history of measuring time as that of Julius Caesar, who gave the world the Julian Calendar, or Pope Gregory XIII, who established the Gregorian.'”
(Jill Lepore. “How the Week Organizes and Tyrannizes Our Lives.” The New York Times. November 15, 2021.)
Following World War II, Achelis solicited worldwide support for The World Calendar. As the movement gained international appeal with legislation introduced in the United States Congress, awaiting international decisions, Achelis accepted advice that the United Nations was the proper body to act on calendar reform.
The World Calendar was considered, but not adopted, in the United Nations in 1954. At the U.N., the United States significantly delayed universal adoption by withholding support "unless such a reform were favored by a substantial majority of the citizens of the United States acting through their representatives in the Congress of the United States."
Achelis died in New York City on February 11, 1973. During her life she supported many worthwhile charities. In 1975 a memorial grove in Humboldt Redwood State Park in California was named for her. Humboldt adjoins the Rockefeller Forest, which was purchased to save the redwoods by John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1931.
(Staff. “On This Day in History, January 24: Failed Promotion for World Calendar.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle. January 24, 2012.)
The Achelis and Bodman Foundation was established on November 25, 2015, from the merger of The Achelis Foundation and The Bodman Foundation.
The charter of The Achelis Foundation states that its mission is “to aid and contribute to charitable, benevolent, educational and religious uses and purposes for the moral, ethical, physical, mental and intellectual well-being and progress of mankind; to aid and contribute to methods for the peaceful settlement of international differences; to aid and contribute to the furtherance of the objects and purposes of any charitable, benevolent, educational or religious institution or agency; and to establish and maintain charitable, benevolent and educational institutions and agencies.”
From its founding through 2015, The Achelis Foundation made grants totaling over $48 million.
Lepore concludes …
“There is no Achelian calendar, with its fixed dates and its supplemental Saturdays and sedentary Easters. Instead, more than five hundred million people around the world use Google Calendar, where you can toggle from days to weeks to years. Google knows where you are every day this week, and where you’ll be every day next week, and you don’t much need to mind the day, or know whether it’s a Thursday or a Tuesday, even if you’ve got someone to meet, or a train to catch; Google will send you a reminder. It will ring like a doorbell. It will blink like a traffic light.”
(Jill Lepore. “How the Week Organizes and Tyrannizes Our Lives.” The New York Times. November 15, 2021.)
Days
By Philip Larkin
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.
Philip Larkin, "Days " from Whitsun Weddings
Source: Collected Poems
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