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It may very possibly be also the case with Plutarch, for it is significant that his lost dialogue on the order of the planets in the week follows immediately on two others on 'Why the Jews refuse to eat pork,' and 'What is the God of the Jews?' We may fairly assume that, if planetary devotion, as I suggested above, often led to Sabbatarianism, it is still more true that the latter gave support or something more to the former. And I should be inclined to go further and suspect that among the more educated classes the Sabbath was for long a more familiar idea than the planetary week and that they regarded the latter as a semi-Jewish business. It is only by looking at that keystone of the whole subject, the order of the days, that we can assure ourselves that the planetary week had a quite independent origin. If it were nothing more than a pagan interpretation of the Jewish week, which assumed that the Sabbath was Saturn's day and then proceeded to fill up the other six, we should presumably find the planets in their normal order which, we should remember, was believed to be their real order. We should expect that the series would either adopt the Jewish view that Saturn ended the week and culminate with that planet or else ignoring this take Saturn's day as the first and work downwards. In the first case we should get a week running:
Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn.
