CHAPTER 7

                CALENDARS & CONSEQUENCES

    Calendars can be complicated! Most people are only aware of the Gregorian Calendar which has dominated the world for a long time, even in places where other calendars operate, e.g. in Arabic countries and in Israel. So let’s have a brief survey of calendars and their origins, so that our minds can be adjusted to what it was like in Israel 2,000 years ago. This is absolutely necessary to our task. We have already seen how vitally important it is to understand New Testament idiom, and now we shall find it equally important to understand New Testament time measurement.

    Our present-day calendar has 14 different types of year. This comes about because January 1st can begin on any day of the week, making seven possibilities, but each one of these years can be either a normal year or a leap year, making 14 in all. In Whitaker’s Almanac, an extensive yearly guide to almost everything, all 14 types of year are always printed.

    The Jewish calendar is far more complicated. Instead of 14, there are no less than 61 different types of year, and to master all the variables that make up that profusion of types needs a very clear thinking brain! It will not be my purpose to explain all the whys and the wherefores, but a few comments will be necessary, here and there, to explain certain facts.

    Back in the days of the Roman Empire, when Augustus reigned supreme, and Israel was a servant nation, Roman and Hebrew calendars were both operating in  Judæa. For this reason it will be helpful to say a few things about the Roman calendar.

    Julius Cæsar established a revised Roman calendar in B.C. 46, thereafter becoming known as the Julian Calendar.  It was used extensively in the Western World until A.D. 1582, when the Gregorian calendar began to be adopted.

    Astronomers still use the Julian Calendar as a means of establishing historical dates. Every day in the past, from January 1st B.C. 4713, has been assigned a serial number, changing at noon Greenwich Mean Time. This is of inestimable value, not only in astronomy, but also for historical research. In this treatise I have used the abbreviation J.D.N. when referring to Julian Day Numbers.

     It was after accepting the advice of the Alexandrian astronomer Sosigenes, that Julius Cæsar reformed the local calendar in accordance with his suggestions. This reformation began in B.C. 46 but never reached its final form until A.D. 8. The Julian calendar operates on the assumption that the year-length is exactly 365¼ days. Hence three years of 365 days has to be followed by a year of 366 days to allow for the quarter day. This extra day was introduced at the end of February. 

    The reason for this was as follows. In the earlier system at Rome, the year began with March, and ended with February, hence the intercalary day was added at the end of the year. We still retain a vestige of this system in the names of some of our months, also our leap day is February 29th. September, October, November, and December derive from the Latin Septem, Octo, Novem, and Decem, meaning Seven, Eight, Nine, and Ten. December was therefore the Tenth month in the year, January the 11th month, and February the 12th. All this was changed long before the days of Julius Cæsar. For Rome, January 1st became New Year’s Day in B.C. 153. 

    In ancient Rome, the intercalation had been so badly neglected, that Julius Cæsar found the calendar out of step with the seasons by as much as two months. As a result he instituted B.C. 46 as a special year with 445 days in order to bring it back into line, and then chose B.C. 45 as a leap year.

    However, things did not go well for some years, and there was widespread confusion. So much so that Augustus ordered no further leap years between B.C. 8 and A.D. 8. After that the Julian calendar was used without change until 1582. All this spells disaster to anyone trying to nail down specific dates for Roman events in those calendrically disturbed years. We shall have occasion to see this in one specific example later.

    The Roman Abbott Dionysius Exiguus, who attempted to determine the year of Christ’s birth, and use this as a new benchmark, was the first to use the “Christian calendar”. In his own words, he said, "We have been unwilling to connect our cycle with the name of an impious persecutor, but have chosen rather to note the years from the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ." He calculated that the 248th year of the Diocletian era corresponded with the 532nd year from Jesus’ birth. He prepared his new chronological table to begin at A.D. 525. (A.D. stands for Anno Domini, Latin for "in the year of (our) Lord.") However, modern students of the Bible are of one mind, that Dionysius made a mistake in his reckoning. But although they agree about the fact of the mistake, they are of numerous different opinions as to the size of his mistake. According to Dionysius, Jesus was born on December 25th, A.D. 1. In this work we shall find that he was only a couple of years in error, which is but a trifle. However, some scholars insist that he was as much as 13 years in error, which hardly does the Abbott justice for his extensive labours!

    In 1582 Pope Gregory XIII instituted a new calendar to replace the Julian calendar. His main purpose was in regulating the date of Easter. He realised that the Julian year of 365¼ days was only approximate, though a good approximation. In fact the error only amounted to some 11 minutes and 14 seconds, but over an extended period of time the accumulated error had the effect of throwing the seasons out of phase. And so in that year he instituted a change whereby October 4th was followed immediately by October 15th to bring the seasons back into line.

    This system, later to become the Gregorian Calendar, was not enacted immediately throughout the world, in fact some countries dragged their feet until the beginning of the 20th century. A case in point is the so-called Russian "October revolution" of 1917, which actually occurred in November, Gregorian style! In Britain there was an Act of Parliament in 1752 making that year the first in Gregorian style. And the beginning of the year was changed from March 25th to January 1st, a fact that some may now find hard to believe, who thought January 1st was always new year.

    We seem to have passed over a variety of national calendrical changes in this survey, and some of them may not appear to be of significance to our enquiry, but I have travelled this route to make a connection between the calendar as we now use it and the ones which were in use in Jesus’ day. This has been necessary before returning to the requirements of the Hebrew calendar.

    The Hebrew calendar as it is now, was settled once and for all by Rabbi Hillel II in A.D. 344. Scholars therefore assert that all dates before that time are liable to be imprecise. I believe that such an assertion is without satisfactory reasoning. The Rabbi was setting down all the rules that had been known and observed for centuries, even millennia. He couldn’t help himself, because the calendar is based upon the cycle of the Moon, and therefore has to follow an astronomical pattern that never changes.

    For many years the children of Judah were in captivity in Babylon, and the Babylonian calendar, also based on the Lunar cycle, had tended to be somewhat hit and miss, and therefore the same liability to capricious variance has been attributed to the Jews. For example, the Babylonians never seemed to have a fixed method of introducing their "Intercalary months". Whereas we have an extra day every four years, the Jews had to insert an extra month every three or four years. Our calendar is based upon the year length, but the Hebrew calendar is based upon the lunar month.

    There are two statements in the Old Testament, maybe more, which indicate very strongly that a calendar was in force from antiquity. First of all, in Exodus 12:40-41, "And the living time which the children of Israel lived in Egypt was thirty years and four hundred years. And it was from the end of thirty years and four hundred years on this very day (Hebrew "bone day") that all the armies of the Lord went out from Egypt."

    I have exactly copied the form of the Hebrew text to show how it reads. The important part is the "Bone Day", the "Self-same Day", and there can be no doubt about its meaning. The Hebrew word "Bone" used here is identical to that used by Adam to describe his wife’s origin. "She is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh." It is an easily understood figure of speech to emphasise the exact correspondence between two things, and in the Exodus text, it emphasises the beginning and the end of the 430-year period. Moses was saying "The very day we left Egypt was exactly the same calendrically as the day when the promise was given to our forefather Abraham, 430 years ago." How did he know that? How did he know that it was Abib 15th back then? And what is more, how did he know which day of the week it was? The only answer must be that the Hebrew calendar was kept and well known, made constant reference to, and judicially guarded by certain members of the community. Perhaps the custodians of the Calendar were the sons of Issachar, as quoted in the introduction, that "they had the wisdom of understanding to know the times." (1 Chronicles 12:32)

    The second Biblical text is from 1 Samuel 20:5, where David said to Jonathan, "Tomorrow is the New Moon, and I should not fail to sit at the table with the King." Now if, as many assert, the New Moon cannot begin without the testimony of at least two Rabbis actually seeing the thin crescent, then there is a great contradiction. But in ancient days, from David’s own words, he knew that the next day would be the New Moon. How? Simply because they kept a Calendar! Let us not rub the noses of the ancients in the dirt. They possessed great wisdom and knowledge, whether it was the Hebrews, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, or the Chinese. The degree of accuracy with which ancient eclipses and other astronomical events were recorded shows us that they even knew about the Precession of the Equinoxes. Surely then, they must have had accurate calendars by which to know and to calibrate the heavenly cycles?

    Two other examples may be adduced, from the works of Josephus, each exemplifying the point I am making. The first comes from Ant.XIV.16.4, "The destruction befell the city of Jerusalem - - on the 3rd month, on the solemnity of the fast, as if a periodical revolution of calamities had returned since that which befell the Jews under Pompey, for the Jews were taken by him [i.e. Sossius] on the same day, and this was after 27 years time." Not only to Josephus, but presumably also to the Jewish nation as a whole, the events of the past were carefully kept in diary form, whereby the above statement could be extracted from extant records.

    The second quotation comes from B.J.VI.5.5. and relates to the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. "And now that fatal day was come, according to the revolution of the ages; it was the 10th day of the month Lous [Ab] upon which it was formerly burnt by the King of Babylon."

    Solomon declared (in Wisdom 7:17-19) that, "He [God] gave me unerring knowledge of what exists, to know the structure of the world and the activity of the elements, the beginning and the end and the middle of times, the alternations of the solstices and the changes of the seasons." There was great knowledge and understanding amongst the sages of ancient days, and no doubt Solomon, with the gift of wisdom received from the Lord’s hand, was one of the wisest.

    To illustrate the point about setting the New Moon day, I should like to quote from C. H. Turner’s articles on "The Chronology of the New Testament", in Volume 1 of Hastings’s Bible Dictionary. On page 411 we read, "How was the beginning of a Jewish month fixed? Theoretically, no doubt, by observation - - But what was to happen when observation was impossible? Was the new month to be put off as long as every night happened to be cloudy? Were the Jews of the dispersion, from Babylon to Rome, to be left ignorant on what day the new month was commencing in Jerusalem? Empirical methods must have been qualified by the permanent rules of some sort of calendar. - - - But as with the month, so also for the commencement of each year, a systematic calendar must soon have replaced simple observation, for strangers from the Dispersion could not visit Jerusalem for the Passover unless they knew beforehand whether a 13th month was to be intercalated or not."

    To repeat therefore what I said earlier, the Calendar set out by Rabbi Hillel II was not a new calendar just calculated at that season, but the declaration in writing of what had been known for centuries, even millennia, and we may therefore have a certain boldness in using it for past events. To this end, I have worked assiduously to compose a computer programme to print out the calendar for any stated 19-year cycle. It was not an easy task, but worth the effort, and it has been used in the evaluation of dates in this book.