The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week

by Eviatar Zerubavel

"Days, months, and years were given to us by nature, but we invented the week for ourselves. There is nothing inevitable about a seven-day cycle, or about any other kind of week; it represents an arbitrary rhythm imposed on our activities, unrelated to anything in the natural order. But where the week exists—and there have been many cultures where it doesn't—it is so deeply embedded in our experience that we hardly ever question its rightness, or think of it as an artificial convention; for most of us it is a matter of 'second nature.'

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Sociology

220 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 1985

Reviews

[Bart Everson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating exposition of a topic which is so ubiquitous as to be invisible to most of us: namely, the days of the week. The author points out that our cycle of seven days is so familiar that it takes on the air of inevitability, of a natural phenomenon. And yet it's not. The week is a human invention. Indeed, the author makes a powerful case that it is one of our most important innovations. He calls it "one of the most significant breakthroughs in human beings' attempts to break away from being prisoners of nature and create a social world of his own." (This striking passage is footnoted with a reference to The Discoverers: A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself.) I wonder if he'd use that phrase "prisoners of nature" if writing today.

The chapter on origins is engrossing enough, but my favorite parts of this book were the two that followed. Attempts to "repeal and replace" the seven-day week in Republican France and the Soviet Union show just how deeply entrenched the convention is. The different ways that weeks have been conceived in diverse global cultures reveal just how arbitrary our seven-day structure is.

The final chapters were slightly less luminous, becoming a little academic and repetitive for this lay reader. Still lots of interesting food for thought on the rhythm which our week imparts to our lives.

Recommended.

[Clara · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up.

I didn't realize how much I took the 7-day week for granted until I heard about this book and suddenly started wondering wait, why tho? THE SEVEN DAY CIRCLE is an excellent and thorough sociological study of the 7-day week and of the function of the week (and its subdivisions) more generally. I could have done with a lot less of the chapter on "The Harmonics of Timekeeping," but other than that I think it was really well done.

Among the things I learned: not only have there been weeks of a wide variety of lengths, but there still are countries that don't use the Gregorian calendar, and some of those don't use the 7-day week; there's a Catholic tradition of Dominical Letters that makes it easy to figure out what day of the week any given date falls on; there have been several attempts to change the 7-day week to something else, usually as part of a broader sociocultural revolution (e.g., during the French revolution and under Stalinist rule in Russia), usually as an attempt to diminish the role of religion on social life, and in every case a failure.

So yes, this book is academic and a bit dry and repetitive in places, but it's well worth the read if you've never thought seriously about what the week is for.

[Terrence O'Hare · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zerubavel presents his thorough research into the phenomenon that we call a “week.” While most understand the week as a seven-day period, Zerubavel introduces his readers to alternative day-periods. As such, he defines the week as a recurring sequence of days that is independent of the planetary measure of time that provides order for society. This book was enjoyable to read as he reviews the different “weeks” that are or have been in use throughout the world and through the centuries. Of course, he acknowledges the ubiquitous seven-day week as the contribution of the Judeo-Christian religion to the world. But French and Russian attempts to remove this particular sequence from society, with the aim to remove a theistic religion from contributing to the societal management of time, proved futile and short-lived.
Having read multiple books on this topic, the strength of this book is in the comprehensive coverage of the concepts of “weeks” as defined above and “quasi-weeks” that attempt to relate a sequence of days to lunation. He discusses the multiple issues involved in time accounting and surmises that the week is a human invention designed to give people and the societies in which they live, a shorter, recurring period of time management that purposely stands apart from natural phenomena. He suggests that the impetus for this is in the subliminal need for humans to assert their independence from the cosmos.
Since the author is obviously Jewish, I delighted to read about the incidentals of Jewish life surrounding the week; however, to him, the creation story is but a myth. This includes (obviously) the historical occurrence of Jesus’ resurrection of on the first day of the week. In his opinion, the Sabbath was not of divine origin, given to the Jews as they approached their wilderness wandering, but an artifact of Jewish minds assisted by the surrounding cultures in the 6th century BCE. He does admit that the seven-day week is specifically Jewish in origin—an incontrovertible fact of history—and that Christianity took this weekly concept across the globe. However, he omits the impact of Constantine in this regard, not even mentioning his name, and simply states that the Romans were favorable toward the seven-day week. He notes the philosophical and political regimes will often control society via the calendar, and that Christianity “deliberately modified the internal structure of the Jewish week” (p. 27). Though as I see it, Christianity lived in the Jewish week, since, as he noted, the early Christians were Jewish. The Sabbath remained the Sabbath and the first day of the week continued to be the first day of the week. Christians did abrogate the observance of Shabbat for themselves (p. 23), but they did not prohibit it or interfere with its observation by Jews (except during brief periods of persecution). Instead, Christians gave more significance to the day following the Sabbath as a weekly commemoration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

This book brings up an interesting question for Christians: In view of the previous attempts in history by totalitarian regimes hostile to Christianity to eliminate the seven-day week as we know it, would Christians resist or acquiesce to such attempts in the future? While this is highly unlikely, this does not reduce the Christian’s obligation to understand the meaning and importance of Sunday congregational assembly for ministry and worship.

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The subtitle “The History and Meaning of the Week” summarizes this book in seven words well. It is a scholarly, sociological work with many footnotes, about the week, which he points out, unlike the month or the year, is totally a human construct. The use of the week for organizing peoples’ activities and how people feel about the various days are major concerns of the author. He shows that not all “weeks” in human history are seven days, citing Central America and Java as examples of places, having several "weeks" simultaneously of lengths other than seven days. He also cites the attempts Revolutionary France and the Soviet Union as places where the government tried but failed to impose weeks not of seven days. He has spent considerable effort in comparing linguistically the names of days to show the cultural and religious influence associated with our week. This may be more than you wanted to know about the week but reading it will guarantee that you learn something you did not already know.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those books that explores a subject very completely, exhaustively, thoroughly, and definitively. You'd be hard-pressed to find a more comprehensive book on the subject of the Week. It's a bit of a slog to get through; no attempt is made to make it "fun". But there are some really fantastic insights in here. Here's one example:

We talk about "Saturdays", yet never about "July 15, 1967s."

This is in a section describing the cyclical nature of a week vs. the endless progression of days. We take comfort in knowing there have been Saturdays and there will be more Saturdays. It's less comfortable to talk about days that come and go and will never come again.

We take something as basic as the Week for granted. But we can learn a lot about ourselves by taking a closer look at really basic things like this.

[Elisabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a hard book to rate; I'd say it's 3.5 rounded down to 3 as I don't think I can justify a 4/5. Mostly because it was such dry reading (more anecdotes would have been nice!) and I think it had so much potential to be more engaging. Then again, I don't think that was Zerubavel's main goal. As a historical overview of the why and how of our ubiquitous seven-day weekly cycle, this book covers the bases. It's an exhaustive look at how important the weekly cycle is to society, how deeply the Judeo-Christian organizational pattern impacts our view of time, and covers two fascinating instances of societies trying to break the link between religion and state via alternative length weeks (spoiler alert: the proposed changes didn't stick).

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a lot more to a week than I imagined. The author posits that the 7 day week isn’t sacred, except that we need something to distinguish sacred from ordinary days.

* Some cultures have a week length that is different than 7 days.
* Attempts to change the length of the week failed:
- French 5 days
- Russian 10 days
* This book has a number of tables that I didn’t work to decipher.

[Lisa Houlihan]

I remember being fascinated that attempts to change to a 10-day week failed, during the French Revolution and by others as well.

[Laura Boudreau · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting facts and concepts but a bit dry.

[Jean Gabriel · Rating 1 out of 5]

Terrible writing. The author must have written "essentially" about 1,000 times--to sound scholarly I suppose.

[Sally · Rating 4 out of 5]

The week is a unit of time not connected with natural cycles of sun, moon, etc., and so varies widely from culture to culture. The current seven-day week associated with the seven planets of the ancients arose from a melding of Hebrew, Egyptian, and Babylonian elements. Particularly interesting are accounts of non-sevenday weeks, modern and traditional.