From where did the concept of week came from ?

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I can understand about day , month and year it’s related to repetitive sunrise , moon’s phases and repetition of seasons respectively but there’s nothing I’m able to think about when is comes to week .

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4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Let’s start with another set of time units: hour, minute and later seconds came from the need to find smaller divisions beyond the natural time measurement (day) that help to structure your time planning. There is not much more to it than this.

Now there is also a natural time measurement which is a full circle of the phases of the moon – about 28 days, but this is a rather long period. It makes sense to split it into four parts, each 7 days long. Voilá, the week was born.

Of course, the definition of “month” has later changed and is now no longer tied to the moon, but the 7-day week has still proven to be useful, so we stick with it.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Weeks are broken up into 7 days for two main reasons. The first was that ancient-to-renaissance astronomers had an obsession with the number 7 because of the 7 major bright/moving astronomical objects: Sun, Moon, and the 5 other planets out to Saturn. In fact, the days are all named after these (SUNday, MO(o)Nday, Tuesday-Saturday are named after Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn in that order)

The other reason is that 7 divides pretty nicely into the ~28 day moon cycle/month

Anonymous 0 Comments

You are right that astronomically you have the day and the month but not the week. But we do have records of weeks as a time unit since the earliest recorded writing. But there are things that suggest it was a new concept at the time. For example the length of a week varied and could be 6 days or 10 days depending on the culture, and even the same civilisation could use different length weeks for different purposes. This suggest that the week came about with civilisations. As people went from being farmers and merchants to living in cities with organised militaries, work sites, administration, etc. A week is a convenient time unit when doing labor, you work for 5-9 days and then rest for one day.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The Bible actually.

Different cultures had different versions of something like a week, but the 7 day week was something that was part of the religious tradition in the middle east and thus baked into Christianity. When the Roman Empire converted to Christianity they adopted it and made everyone else adopt it and those countries centuries later went out and did colonialism and imperialism and made everyone else adopt a 7 day week.

The length appears to be based on the length of the month A full cycle of the phases of the moon takes about 29 and a half days. This means half a month is about 14 days and a bit over 6 hours and a quarter if a bit over 7 days. If you have a calendar based on the phases of the moon, concepts like a fortnight and a 7 day period for a a single phase crop up, even if you occasionally have to add extra days to make everything work.

In places close to the equator where there aren’t strong difference between seasons and Lunar calendars are more common than at higher latitudes where the difference between winter and summer is starker. The ancient Levant region was one such place, also not completely and the 7 day week we use today spread from there.

So TL;DR: You can actually blame the Jews for this one.