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When you look at the Hebrew names for the days of the week, יום ראשון, יום שני, יום שלישי, etc., how would you translate them literally?

Most likely, you’d say “first day,” “second day,” “third day,” and so on. ראשון, שני, שלישי are ordinal numbers (מספרים סודרים), and probably serve as adjectives (שמות תואר).

But they’re not adjectives!

How would you say “next Tuesday” (as a noun, not as an adverb of time) in Hebrew? In Hebrew, adjectives match the nouns they describe in definiteness. If days of the week were simple noun-adjective pairs, then you’d say “היום השלישי הבא” — “the next third day.”

But this is incorrect — the actual phrase is “יום שלישי הבא.”

So, you might say, perhaps this is an exception. Perhaps days of the week are fixed expressions in which the adjectives are for some reason not inflected for definiteness. But this is also not the case — we’d have had something like “היום־שלישי הבא,” because that would be the way to make the whole thing definite.

What’s the actual answer?

The key lies to understanding this lies in the plurals — and Arabic. How do you translate “the coming Tuesdays”?

ימי שלישי הבאים

Here the situation becomes clear. ראשון, שני, שלישי, etc., are being used not as adjectives, but as nouns! ימי שלישי הבאים shows a סמיכות (noun construct state) relationship between ימים (days) and שלישי (third). The literal translation here is:

“the coming days of [the] Third”

And that’s the idea! The literal translations of the days of the week are not “first day,” “second day,” etc., but “day of First,” “day of Second,”…

Next question: If this is a סמיכות relationship, and the second word is a noun, why do we never see a definite marker (ה), e.g. יום השלישי?

I can’t tell for sure, but I suspect that the ordinals here are being used as proper nouns. When the סומך, the second noun in the סמיכות construct, is a proper noun, the whole construct is definite even though there is no ה — for example, “בית דוד” (the house of David).  Thus, שלישי is appearing as a name, just as דוד does.1

Interestingly, the whole premise of this post is apparent in one of the days of the week. The seventh day, שבת, is fully known as “יום שבת” or “יום השבת” (the day of [the] Sabbath). It turns out that the other days’ names, even though they look like adjectives, follow the same example.

So where does Arabic come in?

Looking at the days of the week in Arabic makes this whole idea a lot clearer.

In Arabic, the days of the week are very explicitly noun constructs (الإضافة, al-iDaafa), not noun-adjectives. In fact, although the first five days are named after their numbers, instead of using the same words as the ordinal adjectives, Arabic actually has separate words for these five “number-nouns” (my made-up term).  These words have the same roots as the regular numbers, but rather different forms — compare the Arabic days of the week, and cardinal and ordinal numbers in the table below.

The difference from Hebrew is that the Arabic “number-nouns” are not proper nouns, which is why the definite marker (ال, al), is used.

How far back does this go?

The fact that the noun construct is used for days of the week in both Hebrew and Arabic suggests fairly early roots — it would be interesting to find out how this worked in earlier and parallel Semitic languages.

As for Hebrew itself, the usage can arguably be seen in Genesis:

וַיְהִי־עֶרֶב וַיְהִי־בֹקֶר, יוֹם אֶחָד2

וַיְהִי־עֶרֶב וַיְהִי־בֹקֶר, יוֹם שֵׁנִי

וַיְהִי־עֶרֶב וַיְהִי־בֹקֶר, יוֹם שְׁלִישִׁי

I would highly doubt that these meant “one day (indef.),” “a second day,” “a third day,” and so on.  It seems more likely that the narrator of Genesis was using the established names for the days of the week from the outset.

To summarize…

1. In Hebrew as in Arabic, the names of the days of the week are noun constructs, rather than noun-adjective pairs. This is why the words שני, שלישי, etc., don’t get inflected for number.
2. In Hebrew the “number-nouns” function as proper nouns, while in Arabic they’re regular nouns. That’s why Arabic uses the definite marker where Hebrew doesn’t — proper nouns are inherently definite.
3. The account of creation in Genesis is probably using this very construction, rather than using the phrases to mean “a second day,” “a third day,” etc.

 Please comment with any responses or further insights!

1. 1. Another possibility is that these are actually examples of סמיכות כבולה, the fixed noun construct, but I think that at least in this case, that's effectively the same thing.
2. 2. Note that this says יום אחד, not יום ראשון. So that's probably the original name for Sunday. And this follows the Arabic (yaum al-aḥad, “day of the one”), so that's a reasonable assumption to make.