It is absolutely certain, historically, that Sacæa and Zakmuk cannot be
identical. They were as remote in date as they well could be. For the
conflicting evidence of ancient writers as to the date of the month of
the Sacæa, namely the Macedonian month Lous _Λῶος_ Mr. Frazer gives two
references. The first is to Mr. Robertson Smith's proof that Lous is
July.[10] That does him no good. The second is to Smith's 'Dictionary
of Greek and Roman Antiquities.'[11] In that work I read that the only
doubt as to the month Lous is whether it fell in July or September.
Smith's 'Dictionary' is a book so common and accessible that I need not
inflict on the reader the nature of the conflicting evidence. It is
enough to say that the month of the Sacæa, Lous, was almost certainly
July, but, if not July, was undeniably September. Now neither July nor
September is Eastertide, or near it. So that the effort to make the
Sacæa identical with Zakmuk, and therefore more or less coincident with
Purim, and with our Easter, is an absolute failure. The Jews, then,
could not (as in Mr. Frazer's theory) borrow abroad a July or September
mock-king, and attach him to a vernal festival, their Purim. Thus, as
Zakmuk is several months remote from the Sacæa, it is not identical
with the Sacæa. Mr. Frazer himself says: 'If the Sacæa occurred in July
and the Zakmuk in March, the theory of their identity could not be
maintained.'[12] But he loses, rather than gains, if the Sacæa were in
September, and that is the only possible alternative. The game is over;
the mock-king of Babylon died, if at all, in July or September, at the
Sacæa; not at Zagmuk or Zakmuk, in March-April. There is not a known
hint that any mock-king died in Babylon about Eastertide, or earlier,
at the feast of Zakmuk.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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