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The favourable sun (1)

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03 Religious festivals, cults, rituals and practices
05 Scientific knowledge and scholarly lore
05 Scientific knowledge and scholarly lore


 		Keywords
astrology
Jews
omens
Period
No period specified 		Channel
Jewish philosophers and scholars

Text
The Talmudic clause ‘(a day) in which the sun is entirely favourable’ might be a calque on Akkadian kališ magir ‘entirely favourable’, applied to a day in which the magical effect of the sun is being noted, as happens in hemerologies.

Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 129a:
Ea-uballiṭ found Samuel lying in the sun. He said to him: “Scholar of the Jews, can something bad be something which is good?” He (= Samuel) answered him: “It is the day of letting blood.” But it is only that there is a day in which the sun is entirely favourable, (namely in) a year: the day in which the summer solstice (lit. ‘period of Tammuz’) occurs. He (= Samuel) decided that (the day) should not be revealed to him (= Ea-uballiṭ).

Source (list of abbreviations) (source links will open in a new browser window)
Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 129a

Bibliography

Geller 1998, 455-456Geller, Mark J. “Review of Reiner 1995.” Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 93 (1998) 455-456.

Amar Annus


URL for this entry: http://www.aakkl.helsinki.fi/melammu/database/gen_html/a0000995.php

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