Reason for fixing 7 days a week?

Question

12 months are there for an year( 365.25 days) for the earth to tour around the sun it is OK with 5 days added plus 1 day for the leaf year.This 365.25 days have been allocated among 12 months.

i am not able to understand the Reason for fixing 7 days a week.

The common explanation is that the seven-day week was established as imperial calendar in the late Roman empire and furthered by the Christian church for historical reasons. The British Empire used the seven-day week and spread it worldwide. Today the seven-day week is enforced by global business and media schedules, especially television and banking.

Answer 1

the seven day week is a consequence of the ancient babylonian religion. some 2600 years ago, the babylonians worshiped seven "deities": sun, moon, mars, jupiter, mercury, venus, and saturn. these were the known planets at the time. the babyloians chose to divide the day into 24 equal time periods. they chose 24 because it is divisible by a lot of smaller numbers. they dedicated each hour to one deity in order of its speed across the sky. it happens that the first hour of each day is therefore dedicated to a different deity and that day was named for that deity. the first day of the week is sunday (sun day, if you wish). the second day is monday (moon day), if you know the names of the next few days in french or spanish then you will recognize that tuesday (mardi, martes) is named for mars, wednsday (jeudi, jueves) is named for jupiter, thursday (mercredi, miércoles) is named for mercury, and friday (vendredi, viernes) is named for venus. the last day of the week is saturday (saturn day).

look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Week#Origin_of_the_seven-day_week

Answer 2

There is no reason, it is a mystical choice made a long time ago by the Jewish faith and was used thereafter by christian and Muslim faiths.
By the way there are many cultures that did not use 7 days a week (far-eastern countries for example).
The decision to use 12 months a year is also arbitrary, and it is probably derived from the early Assyrian mathematical method (using a basis of 12)
You might say the 7 days a week is a good way of dividing a (nearly) 28 days lunar cycle into 4 equal segments (full moon, half-moon, dark moon, half-moon....), but then again you can also divided it into 7 4 day parts and even so it is not exact because the lunar cycle isn't exactly 28 days.
Hope this helps

Answer 3

It takes 28 days for the moon to orbit the earth, so a lunar month has 28 days. You can divide 28 by 1,2,4,7 and 14. As it would make sense to have the week a number of days that divide the number of days in a month you could chose from these numbers.
But there is no reason that a week has to have 7 days. Probably happened some time and the people just got used to it.

Answer 4

Well before Jewish scripture said 7 days, there were pagan religions that ascribed 7 days to a week in honor of the seven brightest objects in the sky.

1st day = Sun-day
2nd day = Moon-day
3rd day = Venus, check out Norse mythology for the actual name Tuesday
4th day = Jupiter, or Oden's Day
5th day = Mar's or Thor's Day
6th day = Mercury, I for get the Norse goddess's name
7th day = Saturn's Day, otherwise know as the Sabbath

Answer 5

It started in biblical times, they believed 7 is the perfect number (heavenly). So, the number 7 or even a combination of numbers that equals 7 is the sign of heavenly perfection.

Some believe that Christ when he died was only 33 and adding the 2 digits of his age up did not equal 7. So, it has been suggested that Christians of that time may have recorded his age as 34.

Answer 6

following on from the previous 2 answers the romans had an 8 day 'week' (specifically market days were every 8th day) so the jewish/christian '7 days of creation' would fit in quite well with that

a 14 day week would be too long and a 4 day week would be too short

Answer 7

There is one major reason to keep 7 day's week. It would be terribly complicated and expensive to change it because:
>People are used to it.
>Consensus among nations would have to be reached.
>Software, watches, some appliances would have to be changed.
>etc.

And after all how many days do you think a week should have?

Answer 8

Because the number seven is symbolic in the Bible. see Revelation Devotional Study Bible.

Answer 9

7 is as good as any number. 2 off 5 on. Is that any better/worse than 4 on, 1 off?

Actually when you divide it down 365 is nearly evenly divisible by 7. It's only off by a remainder of 1 day.

I'd personally go with 7 days/week, 4 weeks/month, 13 months/year + 1 intercalary day (2 on leap years). Things simply align better than with a 12-month year. There's too much remainder when dividing 365 by 12, so it hs to be unevenly redistributed over each of the 12 months leading to the mess we have now.

13 months of 4 week of 7 days make a LOT more sense. Plus you get the symmetry of a 13 month year and a 13 week quarter. Each week starts on a Sunday and ends on a Saturday, or starts on a monday and ends on a sunday. Same for every month same for every year. Ad infinitum. The intercalaray day would be outsideof the normal calendrical year to keep the days of the week aligned with the specific numerical dates ad infinitum.

Makes weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly math much simpler 'cause everything's basically evenly divisible and neatly ordered, with the intercalary day being the only "exception." Heck you could even align the intercalary day with the solstice or the equinox so we're even in line with solar cycles. So, the beginning of the solar year coincides with the beginning of the calendar year.

Presto change-o unified calendar!

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Ohh, and if you're still wondering about why 7 days/week is a good number, consider it mathematically:

365 / 3 = 121.666 weeks (large remainder, way too many weeks per year)
365 / 4 = 91.25 (smaller remainder, but still fairly large, way too many weeks if we go with a 4-day week)
365 / 5 = 73 (divides evenly, but that's still a LOT of week, and it doesn't divide evenly; consider: 73 / 4 = 18.25, so a quarter would be 18.25 weeks? Even if we were going with trimesters, it would be 24.33 weeks. Just doesn't divide evenly. Also, how would we work weekends? Eithre you're going to have a much smaller percentage of time off per year, or much more. Consider, 1 off, 4 on. Youd have 20% of your time in "off" periods. Consider 2 off, 3 on. 40% off time? Versus the current 7-day 5 on, 2 off schedule. We have appx 28.57% time off. More of a hppy medium)
365 / 6 = 60.833 weeks... (Again too big a remainder)
365 / 7 = 52.14 weeks. (much smaller remainder, equates to only 1 day per year. Much easier to deal with.)
365 / 8 = 45.625
365 / 9 = 40.555
365 / 10 = 36.5

As you can see, 5 and 7 are the two divisors with the least remainder. But 5 is harder to do time on and time off math with for like work and whatnot.

So, 7 seems like the next best candidate...

Assuming we've got a 7-day week, we get 52 weeks a year + 1 day (that just can't really be helped...).

So, then we come to how to divide those weeks into months, halves, quarters, etc.

52 / 2 = 26 weeks (this is half the year: 26 weeks @ 7 days/week)
52 / 3 = 17.333... (eww, this is an ugly number. Thankfully nobody really uses trimesters, except maybe some achools)
52 / 4 = 13 weeks (13 weeks to a quarter! I love it when numbers are easily divisible with no remainder)

So, what about months? How many weeks should we have in a month?

Well, currently months range about 3-4 weeks.

Well, if we want to figure out how many months we should have, we actually have the same math as above...

52 / 2 = 26 (would we really want 26 months? @ 2 weeks per month? We could, but we'd have to name 14 new months...)
52 / 3 (we already know this doesn't divide evenly. eww)
52 / 4 = 13 (hmm, pretty close to the 12 months we already have, just one extra month and much easier maths!)
52 / 5 = 10.4 (10 months would make things a bit closer to our base 10 math, but there's an ugly remainder.)
52 / 6 = 8.666... (even uglier remainder than dividing by 3)
52 / 7 = 7.42857 (still an ugly remainder)
52 / 8 = 6.5 (remainder)
52 / 9 = (I predict this gets ugly with remainders) - 5.777 (yup!)
52 / 10 = 5.2 (remainder)
(do we need to keep going? Do we really want a month that's 10 weeks long? Longer? I doubt it.)

So, really, if we'reassuming a 7-day week, our best option is to go with 7 days per week, 4 weeks per month, giving us 13 months (1 more than currently, but it divides better with a smaller remainder.), but it also gives us the symmetry of a 13 week quarter (since a month is 4 weeks, the nnumber of weeks in a quarter equals the number of months in a year; neat, huh?). Of course we have one extra day per year that doesn't divide evenly. But that can be taken as an intercalary (or between-years) day. This would be New Year's Day or some equivalent. Likewise, on leap years, there would be one extra intercalary day. To keep numbers alighned with specific days of the week, the intercalary days would not have a day-of-the-week assignment. They'd simply be intercalary (between years, between ending and beginning months, between ending and beginning weeks, between ending and beginning days of the year).

Presto, yearly math makes a heck of a lot more sense.

Sorry it was so long. I added the last half to explain what I meant above. ;o]