Observance of Both Saturday and Sunday as Holy Days

The dual observance of Saturday and Sunday survived a direct attempt to end it. Portuguese Jesuit missionaries had worked in Ethiopia since the sixteenth century, and in 1622 the reigning emperor, Susenyos, converted to Roman Catholicism and began imposing Latin liturgical practice on the church by decree, including an order that Saturday observance, which the missionaries read as a Judaizing survival rather than a Christian custom, be dropped in favor of Sunday alone. The order provoked open rebellion among a population that read the double Sabbath as inseparable from its own church's identity, and Susenyos abdicated in 1632 in the face of that resistance. His son and successor, Fasilides, expelled the Jesuit mission from the kingdom the same year and restored the traditional practice his father had tried to suppress. The episode is remembered within the tradition as proof that the double observance was never a peripheral custom that could be traded away for closer ties with Rome, and read by outside historians as one of the clearest cases anywhere of a Christian community treating a specific liturgical practice, rather than a creed or a doctrine, as the line it would not let an outside church move.

Historians disagree about how the double Sabbath actually began, and the disagreement matters because the two answers tell very different stories about the tradition itself. One reading holds the practice descends directly from a documented ancient link between the kingdom of Aksum and the wider Jewish and Israelite world, the same link the church's own Kebra Nagast narrative places at the founding of its royal line; on this reading Saturday observance is one surviving strand of a Judaic layer within Ethiopian Christianity older than the church's own conversion. A second reading treats the practice as a later development, part of a broader wave of scripturally minded reform inside the Ethiopian church centuries after Christianity's initial arrival, when biblical precedent rather than continuous unbroken custom drove new observances into practice. Edward Ullendorff's own scholarly assessment of the Ark and tabot tradition the church connects to this history takes the second, more skeptical position seriously without dismissing the tradition's own account outright, treating the evidence as genuinely unsettled rather than as a case already closed in either direction. The double Sabbath itself is not in question; only how far back its Israelite framing actually reaches is.