It’s a rainy Sunday and nothing could more epitomize rest.  I’m so declined on the couch sipping my tea that some might say I’m lying down. I prefer to imagine myself as a Roman aristocrat in his triclinium.  Why though do I have the luxury of a lazy Sunday? Almost everyone knows why Sunday is the day of rest; most know that labor activists in the nineteenth century agitated for the five-day workweek.  But how exactly did the Jewish Sabbath(Saturday) end up as the legal day of rest for everyone?  I did some investigating.  

 
Well let’s start in principio, so to speak.  ”In the beginning, God created_____okay, fill in the blanks here____and then on the seventh day, he rested.”  Genesis (Hebrew Bereishit) narrates this first week in chapters one and two (it actually tells it twice…)and thus explains the origin of the Lord’s day, or Sabbath, in the Israelite/Jewish tradition.  Sabbath stems from the Hebrew verb for ceasing, i. e., ceasing work, so any day or period of time in which one rests in honor of God is “Sabbath.”  There are Sabbath weeks, years, etc. Now, of course, the seventh day for Jews is Saturday as God started on Sunday (Rishon)—- Jews had a seven-day week already, but in the the Hellenistic period  the Jews equated their days to the Greek seven-day week.  Thus, Rishon (day #1) became equivalent to ἡμέρα Σελήνης (Hemera Selenas), or “Day of the Moon,” and thus Sabbath became equivalent to ἡμέρα Κρόνου (Hemera Kronou), or “Day of Saturn.”   

Here, we need to jump to the calendar as it relates to one Jew in particular, Jesus of Nazareth.  Despite some discrepancies or confusion among the Gospels—-I’m not even going here, but let’s just say it’s a little unclear—-early Christians come to the consensus that Jesus was crucified on Friday and that he rose on Sunday.   Alright, we are cooking with gas.  The first Christians were Jews, but Jews living in a Hellenized part of the Roman empire, so they understood that Sabbath came on Greek Saturday.  Their Lord had been resurrected from the dead on Sunday though.  ”Hmmm, on which day should we celebrate?,”  They asked themselves.  Let’s just agree, despite some problematizing of the “partitioning of Judaism and Christianity” à la Daniel Boyarin, that eventually Christians came to think of Sunday as their Sabbath, or day of rest.  

Moving right along, there are some persecutions, some martyrs, and eventually Constantine the Great legalizes Christianity with Edict of Milan in 313.  Hooray, now Christians can openly not work on Sunday without worrying about arousing suspicion.  Despite the version of the Constantine story as told by Eusebius, Constantine did not stop patronizing other gods.  In fact, he kept Sol Invictus (the unconquerable Sun) as his patron god and the god with which he is identified on public insignias. In 321, Constantine declared Dies Solis, or the day in honor of his patron god, as the official Roman day of rest.  No courts, no government work, and no shops or markets.  Of course, this also happened to be day of rest for his other supporters, the Christians  (Debate can go on endlessly about Constantine’s intentions or motives with such policies). This practice was kept after the empire was Christianitized and even after it fell—-from the early middle ages to the modern! 

Thank heavens, though,  for those wonderful nineteenth-century troublemakers who got us Saturday too!