Images at Rest: A Comparative Exploration of the Israelite Sabbath and the Neo-Babylonian Akītu Festival

Over a century of comparative scholarship has searched for thematic and ritual connections between biblical religion and the Babylonian akītu festival. Some scholars have gone so far as to suggest the overtly emulative nature of certain holidays like Yom Kippur and Shavuot. This paper fills a lacuna in the field by exploring several connections between the Israelite institution of Sabbath and the akītu. I suggest that the Sabbath’s origins have been transformed to the level of sacred ritual praxis by the Priestly authors of Genesis 1:1–2:3. It is plausible that the Priestly redactor is influenced by a similar cognitive environment within which several parallels arise between the Sabbath and the akītu. Most striking among these are the notions of the world’s need for cyclical ordering, the divine act of temple-building, and the place of humans as assistive “images” of the divine who participate in such cosmic ordering through enthronement rituals. These correlations are most apparent when considering affinities between the 4th day of the akītu, when the Enūma eliš is read aloud, the 11th day of the akītu, when Marduk and his “image” are enthroned together, and the text of Genesis 1:26–2:3 which is the Priestly author’s foundational account of the Sabbath’s origins. Sabbatical praxis can be seen as fulfilling a fluid role in Israelite theology, functioning in much the same way as the semi-annual akītu festival, an enactment of cyclical cosmic ordering and socio-religious reorientation that is beyond its beginnings as a day of work stoppage.