BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

How Many Days Were in the Israelite Week?

Numeracy at Arad

Arad Ostracon 18 (early sixth century). CC-BY 4.0, courtesy פעמי-עליון, via Wikimedia Commons.

Imagine time not being organized into weeks and months or not having set units of measurement to gauge distance. Metrics come to feel familiar over time, and even natural, but few of them actually are. They are human inventions created to organize the world in ways that make sense within a given cultural context. What I weigh in pounds, for example, ancient Israelites conceived in donkey loads.

Much scholarship about ancient Israel focuses on literacy: the ability to read and write. Far less has been done to understand numeracy: the ability to quantitatively measure the world. A recent study by Amir Gorzalczany and Baruch Rosen works to rectify this issue through analysis of the Arad Ostraca (early sixth century BCE). These inscribed pottery fragments, discovered at a Judahite fortress, record a wide range of information about life and administration at the site, including the accounting and distribution of food.

Even in prehistoric eras, people perceived and tracked natural cycles of time, such as the lunar month and the solar year. These broad patterns did not provide much help, however, when it came to organizing the day-to-day tasks of administrative life. At a military outpost such as Arad, where food, labor, and movement had to be tightly controlled, a more precise, if artificial, organization of time was necessary.

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The Arad Ostraca record the sending and receiving of goods such as wine, grain, and bread. They refer to quantities (“three baths” of wine), transport capacities (“two donkey loads”), and destinations (e.g., from Arad to Beer-Sheba). They also include instructions to count goods, reflecting an environment in which keeping track of resources was essential. Time, too, was operationalized: specific days of the month are noted, and rations are sometimes broken down by daily needs.

This last part is especially interesting: Numeracy permeated thought to the extent that the temporal unit “day” also came to function as a unit of food measurement. It is not surprising to learn that numeracy structured administrative practice at Arad; that it also shaped and brought new dimension to language is a fresh angle on the material.

Gorzalczany and Rosen propose on the basis of texts AO 7 and AO 8 that Arad’s administrators may have operated on a six-day week. They suggest that a 30-day month was divided into five six-day segments, since the two ostraca appear to describe goods intended to last just that long. Distributing supplies on a fixed schedule helped to manage labor and reduce spoilage. The scholars are clear that the evidence of the six-day week may be coincidental, and also that it may be specific to administrative contexts (thus not generalizable to ancient Israel as a whole). But still, they propose a new idea and provide initial evidence to support it. Future studies will bear out its validity.

Hieratic numerals (an Egyptian numerical notation) were used in the Arad Ostraca, particularly in AO 34. What are Egyptian numerals doing in an otherwise Hebrew text? By adopting this internationally influenced system of numerical writing, Arad’s officials demonstrate an investment in administrative accuracy, and seem to be participating in “best practices” vis-à-vis the management of goods.

Even without a definitive six-day “week,” it is clear that numerical thinking was integral to life in the Arad fortress. The inscriptions reveal a world in which numbers were practical tools for organizing labor, distributing resources, and structuring time in the service of daily administration.

Lauren K. McCormick is an assistant editor at Biblical Archaeology Review and a specialist in ancient Near Eastern religions, visual culture, and the Bible. She holds degrees in religion from Syracuse University, Duke University, New York University, and Rutgers University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship on religion and the public conversation at Princeton University.

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