Now the Israelites have always had the lunar month. That a day determined by the moon should be detached from the living lunar month and made into a shifting seven-day week is quite incomprehensible and entirely without analogy. The Babylonian septenary days do not help us here, since they always remained days of the lunar month. In the light of the foregoing investigations into primitive chronology such a process would be a sheer miracle. It remains therefore to regard the creation of the seven-day week as an act of pure volition on the part of the makers of the refined exilian legislation, who took the name of the ancient sabbath, a festival-day of uncertain position, and applied it to the seventh day of a shifting period. And this is equally difficult either to prove or disprove. It is seldom found that a new creation proceeds entirely from nothing, and no analogy to the shifting seven-day period is anywhere to be met with--except in one case to be mentioned presently, the market-week. Especially in matters chronological would it appear that the Jewish legislation did not radically break with antiquity, but systematised and cultivated already existing tendencies, if we may judge by the few points of departure handed down from the earlier period; hence the numbered months, hence the fixing of the great festivals on the day of full moon. We are speaking here not of the changed religious character of the sabbath, but of the chronological question. If therefore fundamental grounds are lacking for the creation of a shifting seven-day period by the legislation of the Exile, we must cling to the other hypothesis, viz. that in pre-exilian times also the sabbath was the seventh day of a shifting period, which the legislation has transformed in its own fashion.