Senbet, and a Church That Keeps Two Sabbaths

Senbet, the Ge'ez word for the sabbath, begins with this letter, and the word carries a distinctive observance. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church keeps both Saturday and Sunday, the first as the sabbath of the Jews and the second as the sabbath of the Christians, and the two are named in Ge'ez as the first and the second senbet. Very few Christian bodies do this, and it belongs to a set of practices, along with dietary rules and the tabot in every church, that has made the Ethiopian tradition a standing subject of argument about how far its Jewish elements are inherited and how far they are a later reading back of the Old Testament.

That argument is old and the atlas does not settle it. Edward Ullendorff argued a strong case for early and direct Jewish influence in his Schweich Lectures on Ethiopia and the Bible. Other scholars read the same practices as developments internal to Ethiopian Christianity, drawn from an Old Testament the church has always read as scripture. Both readings account for the same observances, and neither has produced evidence the other cannot absorb.

What can be stated without taking a side is the practice, the word that names it, and the fact that the word is spelled with this letter rather than with sawt, a distinction no living pronunciation preserves and every copyist has to know.