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consecrate the number seven, and this sense of consecration may have led the Israelitish mind to make each rest-day or market-day the seventh from the preceding one. I have implied this already on pp. 4 and 56, but feel that a definite statement of it here may disarm some criticism.
It is worth noting that not only does Cicero so far vacillate about the order of the planets, that in one place he puts Venus below Mercury, but this order is also given by Philo (Quis Rer. Div. Her. 4.5 (224)) who declares his preference for it, though he states that others have been suggested. As Philo lived some 80 years after Cicero, the statement on p. 19 that the order on which the week hour-system was based, which I have called the normal order, was the accepted order from the second century B.C. requires perhaps some modification. And this also has some bearing on the value of Dion's statement that the planetary week emanated from Egypt. For Dion also calls the 'normal order' the 'order accepted by the Egyptians' (v. p. 44). If the belief in this order was especially characteristic of Egypt, it is strange that the Alexandrian scholar should give a different one.
It will be seen that an hour-cycle with Mercury in the fifth place and Venus in the sixth, would produce a day-cycle with Mercury in the sixth and Venus in the fourth place, or in other words Wednesday and Friday would change places. It is perhaps possible that this form of the Planetary Week may have been current for some time side by side with the form that has survived. There is nothing in any evidence existing for the Planetary Week (v. pp. 32–35), till we come to the discoveries at Pompeii, which would forbid this.
