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Crescent Moon (Muharram 1422) - Photo provided by Rich Lobert Phoenix, AZ 03/25/01 - 7:24 PM Mountain Standard Time Moon age 25 hours 3minutes, Elevation 1.2 degrees |
LUNAR CYCLES
AND THE
HEBREW CALENDAR.
For an excellent online resource on the Hebrew calendar Claus Tondering
has
a website with some very informative
articles on calendars. There is also an excellent Jewish resource
giving valuable and helpful details on the Hebrew Calendar at
this website.
Like many calendars before Roman times the Hebrew calendar was a lunar calendar. It was based on the moon as well as the sun. It was a wonderful calendar in that the phase of the moon told the day of the month. Anyone looking up into the night sky could tell the day of the month with some degree of accuracy. And amongst the populace at large they knew the month of the year in which the moon above them was shining. The first day of any given month was determined by the first sighting of the new moon. The new moon is not usually visible to the naked eye until it is 24 hours old. (See the photo above from the Islamic website moonsighting.com/moonphoto.html).
In the early days of lunar calendars the Hebrew calendar was set by the priests of Israel every spring. The Nisan moon was the 1st full moon seen after the passing of the spring equinox. This moon, by definition was the month of Nisan. Nisan was the first month on the Hebrew calendar and marked the beginning of the religious year and the month in which Passover would be celebrated. Every three years or so the religious authorities would find that after the passage of 12 moons the upcoming moon was going to come to fullness short of the spring equinox. It would therefore fail to qualify for the Nisan moon. In such a situation this moon was reckoned to be a 13th month of the year. This extra or embolismal month would "push" the next moon, (which of course was the moon of Nisan), up across the threshold of the spring equinox. So the Paschal month of Nisan would come later than usual and in that particular year Passover would be celebrated well into our Roman month of April.
The following year the month of Nisan would fall back 11.24 days. The year after that it would be 11.24 days earlier still. Perhaps on the third year, after the passage of the 12 lunar months, the lunar calendar would again present a moon that was going to fall short of the spring equinox. Once again the lunar calendar would have to be adjusted. Another embolismal month would need to be inserted. These extra months would be considered a second month of Adar or "Adar 2" on the Hebrew Calendar.
The lunar calendar worked pretty well in its time. For agriculturally based societies and for pilgrim travellers this solar-lunar calendar was very useful. Their calendar was very practical and handy. It was, in effect, a calendar that was posted up in the sky at night for everyone to see.
In its early days of the semitic peoples and before the metatonic cycle was discovered the lunar calendar needed attention early every spring and an adjustment was called for 7 years in 19. The Hebrew authorities made their determination of Nisan in the early springtime. When the new moon on approach to the spring equinox was first seen they would determine if it was going to qualify for the month of Nisan. If it failed to qualify they would consider it a 13th month and declare the next moon following it to be the month of Nisan.
Twelve months of 29.5 days makes for a lunar year
of 354 days. This is ok about two years out of three.
This lunar year of 12 lunar months is 11.24 days shorter
than the solar year of 365.24 days.
So a calendar containing 12 lunar months
falls back 11.24 days with the passage of each solar year.
Obviously this won't do. It turned out that seven times in every 19 years
the Hebrews and other semitic peoples using the lunar calendar
would end up adding an extra month into the calendar year to make 13
months for that year.
This allowed the lunar calendar to "catch up" and keep pace
with the spring equinox each spring and
not fall too far behind.
This embolismal year happens once in three years
and every decade or so it is once in two years.
THE METATONIC CYCLE IS DISCOVERED. IT IS THEN
INCORPORATED INTO THE LUNAR HEBREW CALENDAR.
It was around 400 B.C. that a Greek from Athens
was doing what the Greeks did well. He was using Greek logic
to look for patterns in nature in an attempt to quantify
the natural world. He was deliberately seeking
a deeper understanding of the rhyme and reason of things in the universe.
When he looked back at what the lunar calendar had
actually been doing down through the years he made a very important discovery.
He noticed that
19 solar years was exceedingly
close to being exactly 235 moons in length.
And so every 19 years 7 extra months
had needed to be inserted into the lunar calendar to bring it into balance.
This was truly a "Eureka" moment in the history of the calendar.
The
metatonic cycle had been discovered!
The lunar calendar down through history is observed to have a certain cadence to it. (See the "oomp" and the "pa" after each year in the sequence below.) Those 7 extra moons coming into the calendar had a certain pattern of appearance over 19 years. The extra months of Adar are shown in red. Note how this extra month of Adar 2 pushes the following lunar calendar year up 29.5 - 11.24 = 18.26 days ahead. This is about two thirds of a month further than the year before it. The first month, (in bold lime color), is the springtime month of Nisan. This is the first full moon to appear after the spring equinox. Most of the time, (as can be seen in the schematic), it lunges one big step forwards up into the solar year after an an embolism, then takes a small step backwards in the two years following.
THE METATONIC CYCLE |
The metatonic cycle had a certain cadence. It was discovered in Greece by the great Jewish scholar Rabbi Hillel II around 360 B.C. After this it was easy to incorporate the metatonic cycle into lunar calendars. This saved the authorities of the day from having to reset the month of Nisan every spring based on how they saw the moon come through on approach to the spring equinox.
The agricultural criteria before Hillel had been as follows. The first full moon after the spring equinox was by definition the Nisan moon. This was the first month of the Hebrew calendar. If the moon after the 12th moon was not going to make fullness before the spring equinox then an extra, or second month, of Adar was inserted into the lunar calendar. This would push Nisan further up into the year to make for a late Passover for that year.
The Hebrew calendar year was 12 months of 29 or 30 days. A lunar cycle was close to 29.5 days. So this made for 12 months averaging 29.5 days or 354 days. But the solar year was 365.24 days. So with each 12 month cycle the calendar would fall back 365.25 - 354 = 11.24 days earlier. So the calendar needed to be adjusted by adding in an extra month of Adar every 3 years or sometimes two years.
The metatonic cycle as discovered by Hillel II was a great boon. It more or less predicted what an observer would see each spring. It would predict whenever the new moon following Adar was or was not going to fall short of the spring equinox. It would predict the Nisan moon quite accurately from year to year.
When the Romans came to power it was Julius Caesar who established the Julian calendar. This completely divorced the lunar cycles from the calendar months and rigidly locked them into 12 "months" that added up to 365 days. Pope Gregory refined this calendar with leap years and this solar calendar with a further fine tuning adjustment every century is the one we use today.
LUNAR CYCLES: USING THE HEBREW CALENDAR AS A
TIMEPIECE TO DETERMINE THE EXACT DAY IN WHICH
THE EDICT OF ARTAXERXES WAS GIVEN TO NEHEMIAH
TO START OFF THE SEVENTY WEEKS OF DANIEL.
The 20th year of Artaxerxes is well established from historical
records as being 445 B.C.
Nehemiah records that he went before the king "in the month
of Nisan". - Neh.chapter 2.
Sir Robert Anderson assumed that the edict came forth at the
very beginning of the month on the first day of the month
and at the time of the new moon.
This was traditionally the time
when royal edicts were made.
The arrival of the Passover moon for the exiles of Judah in Susa and out in the Persian Empire would have been a sombre time. Each year at this time they would see the Passover moon and remember what it meant to them. Something inside them would be grieving as they pondered just how far away from home they were. The pious among them, like Nehemiah, would have remembered the idolatry their nation had engaged in which had brought them down as a sovereign people and had sent them off into exile.
Using astronomical data we can know quite accurately when that Nisan moon came up in the 20th year of Ataxerxes. Sir Robert Anderson's data from the Astronomer Royal in 1877 is extremely accurate. The lunar data for 445 B.C. shows us that the true new moon for the Passover month of Nisan, (the first moon to come to fullness after the spring equinox), occurred in Jerusalem on March 13 at 07:09 hrs. 500 miles to the east over in Susa it would have occurred just a half an hour earlier. As we have seen, the new moon is not visible to the naked eye until it is at least 24 hours old. Nehemiah would not have seen the new moon until the following day, the morning of March 14 as the new moon arose with the sun in the eastern sky. Perhaps it was not seen until even the morning of March 15.
The new moon rises and sets with the sun. It is sometimes difficult to see especially in those days when the spring rains come or clouds obscure the thin crescent of the new moon as it arises in the eastern sky.
Thus the 1st day of Nisan for the year 445 B.C. was probably on March 14th. This is precisely as Sir Robert Anderson had stated. As we shall discover in article 8 the consensus of both the solar and lunar cycles is that the actual edict came a day later on March 15 of 445 B.C. and this was probably on Nisan 2 or 3. This was a day or so later than the March 14 and Nisan 1 date that Sir Robert Anderson had calculated. Is this a big discrepancy? Not at all. Our calculations later on in this study will have us hitting near a bullseye. We shall be hitting the mark within just one or two days after a long passage of 173,880 days or 476 years!
THE LUNAR CYCLES, THE HEBREW MONTH OF NISAN, AND THE DETERMINATION OF THE EXACT DAY IN WHICH JESUS CHRIST PRESENTED HIMSELF TO HIS OWN PEOPLE IN JERUSALEM AS 'MESSIAH THE PRINCE' TO CONCLUDE THE FIRST 69 WEEKS OF THE SEVENTY WEEKS OF DANIEL.
So much for the beginning date of the 70 weeks/69 weeks. Let us now turn our attention to the terminus of the 69 weeks timeline. The new moon of Nisan (the Paschal Moon) of 32 A.D. was March 29 at approx. 8 p.m. UTC or 11 p.m. Jerusalem time according to U.S Naval Observatory data. This is similar to the 22 hrs 57 min time for the new moon Sir Robert Anderson had received from the Astronomer Royal, Greenwhich Observatory, in 1877. Since the Rabbis in Jerusalem in 32 A.D. (or their observers from wider Israel) would not have seen the new moon with the naked eye until it was at least 24 hour old then there is no way they could have seen the new moon on the following morning of March 30th when it was just 7 hours old nor the following evening when it was 19 hours old and before it set with the sun. The morning of March 31st would have given them their first opportunity to see the new moon. By that time it would have been 31 hours old. Accordingly they would have called March 31st the first Day of the Passover month of Nisan. The 10th of Nisan, Palm Sunday and four days before the crucifixion of our Lord, the date of His "Triumphal Entry" into Jerusalem as "Messiah the Prince" or "Messiah the King" would therefore have been 9 days later on April 9th of 32 A.D.. This tenth day of Nisan was the day when the Passover lambs began to be presented to the priests. They had to be accepted as spotless and without fault before they could be sacrificed. This was that crucial day for which all of Israel should have been watching.Their Messiah was the promised Sacrifice Lamb.
He was prophesied to appear on this very day.
Alas, the people of Israel were not watching. They had gone with rabbinical Judaism and taken the road down into religious legalism. They had drifted away from a true devotional faith in YHVH, the God who was, is, and evermore shall be. Faith in God had always been a matter of the heart. They had turned it into a head trip and merely an exercise in legalism. They did not recognize their Suffering Servant when he came amongst them. There He was, teaching, healing the sick, and casting out evil spirits. But they did not recognize Him.
As for diligence in the matter of the prophecy of the 70 weeks the scholars and scribes should have been able to count out 69 weeks (sevens) of years and lay out a timeline from the Nisan month and the year Artaxerxes's edict which Daniel had said came in the 20th year of his reign. This had been given to Nehemiah at the beginning of the Nisan moon of 445 B.C.. Unfortunately Rabbinical Judaism in the first century A.D. no longer held to a literal interpretation of scripture. They lacked the diligence in devotion and knowledge to recognize their Messiah. He came into Jesuslem riding on a donkey precisely as prophesied. - Zech.9:9 It was on that day, (and that day only), that Jesus/Yeshua entered Jerusalem at the head of a royal procession. He presented Himself to His people as 'Messiah the Prince'. And yet how few there were there to greet Him. When Jesus rode into Jerusalem on that first Palm Sunday He lamented,
"If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace -- but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God's coming to you. -Luke 19:42Some no doubt were indeed watching. They knew the date of this epic day had arrived. And so they were waiting for His appearance. These people knew their Messiah. There He was! He was entering the city through the Eastern Gate! They greeted Him with shouts of "Hosanna!" as He came into Jerusalem riding upon a donkey. They laid palm branches out before Him as their victorious coming King. But they were not a quorum. The learned priests, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the High priest himself were not watching. They had access to all the data. They had the very same book of Daniel and chapter nine as we are studying right now. And they could count the years. Had not the Magi, gentile kings from the east, come to bring gifts to Jesus at His birth in Bethlehem years before? But the Pharisees and Sadducees were not inclined to treat God's Word with the reverence which it was due. They had not done their homework.
The Pharisees were to be the watchmen of Israel.
And here it was, their own Messiah was at the gate.
And they were not keeping watch.
What can be said about us in the church today? Have we taken time to aquaint ourselves with our part of the seventy weeks of Daniel. Do we know something of the the 70th week of Daniel and the final seven years of this age? Have we checked out what the Bible says will happen at its beginning, its midpoint, and at the end? All we need is a rough thumbnail sketch. Shouldn't we get a basic understanding of what will happen? And wouldn't it be wise of us to make the preparations of heart that we are being called to do?
On to Section 6
The 69 WEEKS:
A SPAN of 173,880 EARTH DAYS
