~ 120 ~
explanations would be possible: (1) that it means 'eve' or 'vigil' and is the equivalent of the Church term 'preparation'; (2) that we have here the other name for Venus, 'Hesperus' or 'evening-star,' v. p. 102. The freedom from Church influence shewn in the other names tends to support the latter.
The question whether these were originally connected is discussed by Boll (articlon 'Hebdomad' in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-cycl. VII, 2551), and Nilsson (v. Note C, p. 330). Boll adduces several passages from Varro, Philo, Clement and others where it is assumed that the moon completes its circuit in four periods of seven days each. The earliest and therefore the most important of these is a Babylonian 'Creation Epic,' in which the Creator addresses the moon as follows: 'At the beginning of the month shine in the land. Beam with thy horns, to make known. six days. On the seventh day halve thy disc. On the fourteenth thou shalt reach the half of the monthly growth.' (The rest is lost or at least does not indicate the days.) The question however is whether this loose idea of the moon's movements has produced the septenary arrangement, or (as Nilsson argues) been produced by it. In Babylonia, as has been stated, the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first and twenty-eighth were marked days, that is to say the months had been subdivided into periods in which seven predominated, or in other words they had what I have called lunar weeks, though not that very different thing, the continuous week. When this has once been done, the septenary periods are for practical purposes so near to the lunar phases, that the latter are in popular language expressed in terms of the former. I think we should all to-day follow this practice and speak of the full-moon as coming a 'fortnight' after the new moon.
