Weekday Names to Honor the Lord

by John P. Pratt
16 Sep 2018, 1 Jeshua (P), 7 Condor (SR)

©2018 by John P. Pratt. All rights Reserved.

Index, Home

Contents

1. Weekday Names

1.1 Begin Day

1.2 Pagan Names

2. Historical Names

2.1 Greek

2.2 Roman

2.3 Constantine

2.4 Martin of Braga

3. New Proposed Names

4. Conclusion

Notes

New weekday names are proposed for four sacred calendars based on existing Christian versions.

The names of the weekdays used by most countries are based on names of pagan gods which were associated with the seven anciently recognized planets. That has seemed acceptable to me until now because some of the sacred calendars are indeed planetary in nature. Recent developments have made it clear that it would be beneficial to switch to Christian names for certain sacred calendars. After this article discusses the need for new names, the history of the current names, and the already extant Christian names, the new names are then proposed.

1.1 Begin Day

First, the time of the beginning of a day differs on sacred calendars from that of our usual calendar. The day on the Gregorian Calendar begins at midnight. None of the sacred calendars which are based on the week begin the day at midnight. Two of those calendars are the Enoch and Perpetual Hebrew. Those two, and well as their uniform versions, all use the same 7-day week and they all begin the day at 6 pm sundial time.

The time of the beginning of the day has been somewhat confusing in my papers where the timing of most sacred events is given with quarter-day accuracy.[1] An event often happens at a time of day which is holy on several calendars, which may all begin the day at different times. For example, some events happen on a Saturday evening which may be reported in my article as being on Easter Sunday on the Enoch Calendar. Surely some readers may wonder why an Easter Sunday event occurred on Saturday!

Thus, if the Enoch Calendar day names differed from the Gregorian names, then it would not be called Easter Sunday on that calendar, thus helping to avoid confusion.

1.2 Pagan Names

Second, in most languages, the names of the days of the week are named for pagan gods who were associated with the planets. As an astronomer, in my mind that was not a big problem because I think first of the planets. Anciently some true prophets were associated with certain planets, such as Enoch with Mercury and Abraham with Jupiter. To me it is plausible that the planet names came first, which were later associated with great men who later may have been worshipped as gods. That is, Enoch is often identified as the Greek Hermes and the Roman Mercury. Perhaps back in the beginning the planets may have been symbols of the seven angels of God, but then it got perverted.

Most people do not relate the weekday names to planets. If they care at all about the names, they think first of the gods and may not even know of the associated planet. Tuesday is named for the Norse god Tiw, Wednesday for Woden, Thursday for Thor, and Friday for Frigg. Do those names immediately bring certain planets to your mind?

Bracelet showing Roman gods/planets associated with weekdays.
(In Walters Art Museum. Click to enlarge.)

One point that tipped the scales for me that a name change is needed is that in modern revelation the Lord apparently avoids the use the pagan names of the days of the week. When He revealed to the Prophet Joseph Smith the day of the week on which to worship, He did not refer to it as "Sunday", even though that would have made the meaning perfectly clear. He referred to it as the "Lord's Day" (D&C 59:9-13), even as John the Revelator had done (Rev. 1:10). The only second witness of what day He referred to for Joseph was that He also called it "this day". If the reader refers to the date of the revelation, he finds it was indeed given on a Sunday. Thus, it appears that the Lord was purposely avoiding using the pagan name which associates that day with worshipping the sun.

Weeks of seven days have been used since ancient Chaldean times and were associated with the seven visible planets: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn (listed here in order of distance from the earth as understood by the ancients). The order of the names of the days of the week was chosen by having each planet take turns ruling in order over each of the 24 hours every day, continuously cycling through the day and even the entire week. The days were named for the planet which ruled over the first hour of that day.[2] That sounds like the work of very educated men who did not simply order them in a simpler manner. It is worth noting that the Priest Calendar groups weeks of 7 days into sets of 24, which suggests that more research is needed in this area. Let us now trace some weekday names throughout history.

2.1 Greek

Table 1. Early Greek weekday names.

Before their conversion to Christianity, the Greeks used the Chaldean planet name order for days of the week as shown in Table 1. That order has been preserved in many languages where the names of the weekdays are essentially the same as the planets. In English that is seen in the names of Sunday (Sun) and Monday (Moon).

When Greece became converted to Christianity they changed the names of the weekdays to those shown in Table 2. They are still used today.[3] Clearly the name of the first day was designed for Christians who worshipped on that day. The last two names were to reverence the Jews and the Old Testament acknowledging the seventh-day Sabbath and also Friday as the day of preparation for the Sabbath.

Table 2. Modern Greek weekday names.

Knowing this clarifies certain points of question. First, when John the Revelator referred (in Greek) to the "Lord's Day", there is no question that he referred to what we now call Sunday because the seven day week has not changed since then. Second, all of the gospels refer (in Greek) to the day of the Crucifixion as the "preparation" (Matt. 27:62; Mark 15:42; Luke 23:54; John 19:42) which is the Greek word for "Friday". Many modern translations of the Bible simply translate the word as "Friday", which makes the meaning clear. Modern proponents of a Wednesday or Thursday crucifixion suggest that perhaps that word referred to preparation for Passover which could occur on other days. That only confuses the scriptural witness which declares that it was a Friday. The Crucifixion day being a Friday is also indicated because the women could not anoint the body with spices on Friday evening because that began the Sabbath, so they came early Sunday morning instead (Luke 23:54-24:1).

2.2 Roman

The Julian Calendar was named for Julius Caesar who implemented it for the Roman Empire on 1 Jan 45 BC (Julian). It was a huge step forward to fix the length of the year to be 365.25 days with a year of 365 days and an extra day in February every four years. At that time there was no official use of the 7-day week at all in the Roman Empire. It was kept, however, for religious purposes by the Jews and Christians.

The Romans had an 8-day cycle of market days which was not always of fixed length. It was to designate business days rather than to accurately keep time. Thus, references in the New Testament about days of the week refer to the traditional Hebrew cycle.

The Romans associated gods with the planets, following the Greek tradition, but before Constantine it is not clear from my research that those gods and planets were associated with certain days there. All of this changed when Constantine the Great was converted to Christianity.

2.3 Constantine

Constantine the Great.

Constantine became Emperor of the Roman Empire in AD 306. During a battle in AD 312 Constantine prayed to the Christian God of whom he had been taught by his father. The Church historian Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, knew Constantine personally and wrote a biography of him. He reported that as Constantine prayed at midday for God's help, he and his whole army saw a cross in heaven, brighter than the sun, bearing the inscription "By this sign you shall conquer." Constantine testified that when that night he prayed for an interpretation, Christ appeared to him in a dream and commanded him to make a likeness of that sign to use as a safeguard in battle against his enemies.[4]

In AD 313 Constantine established religious toleration and criminalized the persecution of Christians in the Edict of Milan. He had succeeded Diocletian under whose reign had been the most severe persecution of Christians, so that was a total reversal of policy for the empire.

Then Constantine wanted to unite his pagan empire together with Christians. He knew that some pagans worshipped the sun on the first day of the Greek week and that some Christians in Rome reverenced that same first day of the week to celebrate the resurrection of Christ,[5] so on 7 Mar 321 (J) he issued an edict which integrated the 7-day week into the Julian Calendar and mandated the entire empire to keep the weekly day of the sun holy by closing businesses on that day,[6] hopefully uniting both pagans and Christians.

One researcher states that Constantine named the weekdays, making a change to the Christian and Jewish tradition of simply numbering the days from "first" to "seventh" (Luke 24:1). Probably following the Greek usage (see Table 2), he reportedly changed the name of the first day from "feria prima" (first holiday) to "Dies Dominica" (the Lord's Day). Moreover, the name of the seventh day of the week was changed to "Sabbatum" (Sabbath) to honor the Jews. The proposed names had been previously applied by the Church in Rome only to the days of the holy week before Easter, but Constantine mandated that these liturgical names be given to every day of every week![7]

These new names apparently did not come into general use in the empire. Today they are known only as the Latin liturgical day names because the Church kept them. Those names are Dies Dominica, feria secunda, feria tertia, feria quarta, feria quinta, feria sexta, and Sabbatum. Many researchers are unaware that Constantine proposed these names[8] and I have not been able to verify it through multiple sources. The planetary gods had been associated with a 7-day cycle in Greece and apparently that usage for the week became popular throughout the empire. One country, however, later began officially using the Latin liturgical day names as discussed in the next section.

2.4 Martin of Braga

Archbishop Martin of Braga.

In science many laws or principles are associated with two names, one of the man who discovered or invented the idea and the second of the man who convinced others to use it, which seems equally important or it would have to be discovered again.[9] Moreover, the typical case is that the one who sold the idea is remembered only to later discover that he did not originate the idea nor claim to have done so, but was only making people aware of it. Such is the case with Martinho de Dume, known also as Martin of Braga, who was responsible for getting the existing liturgical weekday names used in Portuguese.[10]

In the sixth century AD, Archbishop Martin of Braga (a district in Portugal) taught while converting the Portuguese to Christianity that weekday names should not be used which refer to pagan gods.[11] He advocated the Latin liturgical names. The Portuguese and their Brazilian descendants took this to heart and renamed their weekdays domingo ("Lord's Day"), segunda-feira, terça-feira, quarta-feira, quinta-feira, sexta-feira, and sábado. These names, translated into Portuguese by St. Martin, are still used today in Portugal and Brazil.[12]

One thing I noticed while living in Brazil was that by having both the names sábado and domingo for day names there was no confusion between them. Those were just the names of the days. In English, people use the word "Sabbath" for the holy day of rest, which is Sunday for most Christians. In my church I heard children being taught that God made the earth in six days and then rested on Sunday, the seventh! Moreover, some calendars now show Saturday and Sunday as the last two days of the week (the "weekend"), which was even done in the bracelet illustrated above. I grew to really like having the two distinct names for the first and last days, which avoided confusion. Moreover, using numbers for the other day names made it clear that sábado was the seventh.

That these names refer to both Saturday and Sunday as holy also works well with sacred calendars because the holy weekday on the Priest Calendar begins at noon on Saturday and ends at noon on Sunday. Thus, half of Saturday and half of Sunday are holy on that calendar. For this reason it may be best where possible to hold Christian Sunday worship meetings in the morning.

Given this history and even current usage, let us now turn to proposing new names for the weekdays on the Enoch and Perpetual Hebrew calendars, which are based on our usual 7-day week but begin the day at 6 pm.

Notes