Note 741 — Chapter VII · THE BABYLONIAN “EVIL DAYS” AND THE SHABATTUM

H. Radau, Early Babylonian History, New York, 1900, pp. 314 sq. The text on the statue of Gudea, a chief, or patesi, of Lagash (c. 2350 B.C.), bears record of a rest day which has been interpreted as a full-moon day, therefore as a shabattum: “No one was struck with the whip, the mother corrected not her child, the householder, the overseer, the labourer ... the work of their hands ceased. In the graves of the city ... no corpse was buried. The Kalû played no psalm, uttered no dirge, the wailing women let no dirge be heard. In the realm of Lagash no man who had a lawsuit went to the hall of justice.” See A. Jeremias, The Old Testament in the Light of the Ancient East, London, 1911, i, 203; compare H. Winckler, Religionsgeschichtlicher und geschichtlicher Orient, Leipzig, 1906, p. 61. Professor Morris Jastrow holds, however, that this passage from the inscription of Gudea has no reference to the full moon (American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures, 1914, xxx, 98 n.²).