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days, and finally its disappearance on the thirteenth day, being the time of conjunction
with the sun. In this description, which for minuteness recalls the Polynesian naming of
the nights from successive aspects of the moon, the fifteenth day again appears as shab-
attum (ibid., pp. 238-239).

In the next several pages of his book, Hutton Webster makes these observations --

The choice of the FIFTEENTH DAY as the shabbatum was obviously determined by the
length of the Babylonian month, which in the earlier period was regularly taken at thirty
days duration. We have seen, however, that, where lunar reckonings are employed and the
month begins at sunset with the visible new moon, the fourteenth day more commonly
coincides with the full of the moon. SHABATTUM being the technical expression for the
FIFTEENTH day as the time of full moon, it is only reasonable to conclude that, if not
the name, at any rate the observances belonging to this day would be often transferred to
the fourteenth of the month, or to any other day on which the moon became full...And if
for practical purposes the fourteenth day might be a SHABATTUM, it is not difficult to
assume that this was also the case with the days (seventh, twenty-first, and twenty-eighth,
perhaps, also, the nineteenth), which marked other characteristic stages of the lunation.
In the developed Babylonian cult all these were "evil days," when the gods must be propi-
tiated and conciliated. In the primitive faith of Semitic peoples they were occasions ob-
served with superstitious concern as times of fasting, cessation of activity, and other
forms of abstinence (Rest Days, pp. 240-241).

Webster goes on to associate the Babylonian "shabattum" with the Hebrew "Sabbath" as
found in the Old Testament:

"And it shall come to pass, that from one new moon to another, and from one Sabbath to
another, shall all flesh come to worship before me, saith Jehovah." This remarkable
association of the Sabbath with the day of the new moon had been previously noticed
by such acute critics as Wellhausen and Robertson Smith, who were unable to offer a
satisfactory solution of the problem thus presented. When, however, the cuneiform re-
cords disclosed the fact that the Babylonian SHABATTUM fell on the fifteenth (or four-
teenth) day of the month and referred to the day of the FULL MOON, it became clear that
in these Biblical passages we have another survival of what must have been the PRI-
MARY MEANING of the Hebrew term SHABBATH [SABBATH]. As late, then, as the
eighth century B.C., popular phraseology retained a lingering trace of the original colloca-
tion of the new-moon and full-moon days as festival occasions characterized by absti-
nence from secular activities. How long-lived were the old ideas is further illustrated by
the provision in Ezekiel's reforming legislation that the inner eastern gate of the new
Temple at Jerusalem should be shut during the six working days, but should be opened on
the Sabbath and on the new-moon day for the religious assemblage of the people. That the
term SHABBATH [SABBATH], the designation of the full-moon day, should have come
to be applied to every seventh day of the month seems to be quite in accord with BOTH
Babylonian and Hebrew usage, which, as we have seen, led the month itself to be called
after the new-moon day.

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