Days

Everything in the Jewish Calendar centered around the Sabbath days — the seventh day of the week — and the apostles acknowledged this fact in various parts of the New Testament. Do you know that everyone of the days of the week in Jewish terminology had the word “Sabbath” or “Sabbaths” associated with it and the apostles used these week-day terms in the New Testament? For example, in the original Greek the day on which Christ arose from the dead was not simply “Sunday” (or, what we call the first day of the week). The apostles actually wrote: “One [cardinal number] of the Sabbaths” and once in Mark 16:9 we read “First [ordinal number] of the Sabbath.” That’s right. In both cases, the apostles mean that day was “one day” away from the Sabbaths or the “first day” away from the Sabbath.

 

Now note this. In the first century, Jews often used plural and/or singular Sabbaths to refer to a single Sabbath in the same fashion that they used the word Elohim [plural] to refer either to a plurality of gods as well as to the single God Family. This usage of using the plural for the singular in many instances is a peculiarity of the Hebrew language that is even found in the Greek when Jews translated the Hebrew into Greek. Thus, in the account of Christ and his disciples going through the grain fields on the Sabbath, Matthew uses the plural [Sabbaths] in 12:1, and the singular [Sabbath] in verse 2. Mark uses the plural in both instances in chapter 2:23,24, and Luke uses the singular in the first instance and the plural in the second in chapter 6:1,2 which is exactly the reverse of Matthew, and each account records information about the same incident Hence the use of the plural “Sabbaths” does not necessarily require a plural translation to make sense in the Hebrew/Greek manner in which the apostles used the word.

 

The days of the week were rendered with the Sabbath day found in every day of the week. For example: The first day of the week was written as “One (or First) day of (or from) the Sabbath.” Note the other days of the week. The “Two (or Second) day from the Sabbath; the Three (or Third) day from the Sabbath; the Four (or Fourth) day from the Sabbath; the Five (or Fifth) day from the Sabbath; and the sixth day of the week was always called “the Day before the Sabbath.” Often (but not always) the word “Sabbath” in the above phrases is also plural, “Sabbaths.” There was a variant to this normal usage as recorded in the Talmud. We read: “The first day of the week and the second and third are called ‘after the Sabbath’; the fourth and fifth days and the eve of the Sabbath are called ‘before the Sabbath” (Gitten 77a). In the Greek translation of the Psalms (the Septuagint Version or the LXX), you will find these titles in certain Psalms (Psalm 23 in the LXX is our 24); Psalm 47 (our 48); Psalm 92 (our 93); Psalm 93 (our 94). The apostles in the New Testament simply adopted these common Jewish titles for the seven days of the week. This means that the word “Sabbath” (the seventh day of the week) was found in every day of the week in Jewish nomenclature, and the apostles followed this custom of the Jews consistently. As a matter of fact. our phrase “the first day of the week” is not even found in Scripture. The apostles actually said either “One day from the Sabbath” or “the First day from the Sabbath.”