ANTIQUITY OF THE SABBATH.
By John Urquhart
Perhaps the most striking confirmation of the creation history which Babylonia has furnished is that touching the Sabbath. It has been confidently stated that the institution owed its rise to the Mosaic legislation, and that the account in Genesis is a mere shadow thrown back into the past, a prejudice which the writer took with him, and for which he scooped out this historical niche. That ghost has now been effectually and finally laid, and the Sabbath has been proved to be one of the very oldest, if not the oldest, of the institutions of humanity. A Babylonian calendar was discovered which shows that the seventh-day rest was observed in ancient Babylonia with more than Pharisaic rigor. Each day is sacred to some divinity; but the seventh, the fourteenth, the twenty-first, and the twenty-eighth are Sabbaths, on which no manner of work must be done. They are dies nefasti, the Assyrian terms applied to them having this distinct meaning. The monarch himself is rigidly bound by these most stringent of all known Sabbath regulations. He “must not,” says the calendar, “eat flesh that has been cooked upon the coals or in the smoke, must not change the clothes of his body, must not wear white robes, must not offer sacrifices, must not ride in a chariot; the prophet may not mutter in a secret place; medicine must not be applied to the body.” The rigidity of the Sabbath law proves that the institution in Babylonia must have been invested with a hoar antiquity. But the inscriptions enable us to get behind even that far-off time. The Babylonian creation tablet—“the Chaldean Genesis”—names the seventh day “the Sabbath.” The institution was, therefore, embalmed in that tradition, which led man’s thought back to the beginning of all things. And, better still, there is an Assyrian dictionary explanation of the word Sabattu, which explains it as “a day of rest for the heart.” That epithet takes us away beyond the Pharisaism of ancient Babylonia and sets us down amid the brightness and peace of the primeval time. There has7never been a sweeter name for the Sabbath than that—“a day of rest for the heart.” It has the fragrance about it of the time when the Sabbath witnessed the soul’s home-coming to God, and when man’s heart bathed in the infinite ocean of God’s love, and the weary were rested and the despairing grew strong again in renewed hope. Another explanation of the name in an Assyrian dictionary adds further testimony to the Scripture. Sabattu is there explained as “yum salumi,” “the day of completion” (of labors). There we have an echo of the truth recorded for us in these words of Genesis: “And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it; because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.” Gen. 2: 2, 3.—New York Observer.