Sabbath 19/2/34/120                                                                                                     

Dear Friends,

Last week we received a letter from a woman in the UCG stating that she was given a sermon by her minister in UCG stating that the UCG calendar, which is the Modern Jewish Calendar introduced by Rabbi Hillel II in 358 CE and modified thereafter, was actually in use in the Temple period and was the original Temple Calendar. The UCG minister allegedly making these claims was a Mr. Roemer.

We have drawn attention previously to these false statements emanating from the WCG offshoots. They are complete fabrications and demonstrably false. They are admitted to be false by Judaism itself whose scholars openly admit that the basis of the modern Jewish calendar was brought from Babylon in 344 CE by two rabbis and given to Chief R. Hillel II who had the system revamped to cater for the postponements and issued the system in 358 CE, which came to be named for him. It continued to be revamped until the 12th century when the later adjustments were made under Maimonides. These facts are readily available from the Jewish encyclopaedias such as Judaica in the relevant articles. It is quite clear that the pseudo academics of the WCG trained system have no shame in what they say and claim to be true to justify their false systems.

The Hillel Calendar was rejected in its entirety by the Churches of God and the entire Christian system operating from the fourth century because it was a false system based on the Babylonian intercalations which do not accord with the celestial system and were invented in the seventh century BCE. It is the reason the Calendar dating of the Jewish system does not accord with the Bible Timetable. The Hillel system has nothing to do with the astronomical system or the lunar calendar kept during the Temple period either at the Temple or as kept by the Samaritans. It is a Babylonian based fraud using the postponements to enable the traditions of the rabbinical system to be incorporated into the post-Temple Jewish Calendar which is hopelessly out of sync with the creation. The Jewish rabbis themselves draw attention to it as seen in the article Why is Passover so late in 1997? (No. 239). It is simply not good enough for the ministry of the Armstrong offshoots to make false claims and adopt a post-Temple heresy and attempt to claim that Christ and the early church kept that heresy during the Temple period when it is known to be a false claim. The claim is a fraud and is a simple attempt at deceiving a congregation that relies on them for truth and they knowingly pass off the false claim as truth and hold the truth in unrighteousness (Rom. 1:18).

We dealt with this topic in the introduction to the paper God’s Calendar (No. 156).

God’s Calendar

Introduction to the Jewish Calendar

“The calendar of the Jewish system is a later derived system and was not the one used in the Temple period over the time of Christ and the Church. Schürer says in Appendix 3 of The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (Vol. 1, p. 587 ff.), “the Jewish names are of Assyro-Babylonian origin; their Akkadian equivalents are: ni-sa-an-nu, a-a-ru, sf-ma-nu, du-u-zu etc.”, and he refers to Landsburger’s work on the subject (Materialen zum Sumerischen Lexikon V (1957), pp. 25-26 etc.). Schürer further states:

Within the sphere of Judaism, the earliest document listing all the months in succession is Megillath Ta’anith. It was compiled in the first or early second century A. D., since it is already quoted in the Mishnah [The Mishnah was compiled around about the second century]. Of later authorities, it is necessary only to mention the little-known Christian, Josephus who in his Hypomnesticum (PG cvi, col. 33) has [Nesan, Eiar, Eiouan, Thamouz, “Ab, ‘Eloul, ‘Osri (read Thisri), Marsaban, Chaseleu, Tebeth, Eabath, ‘Adar].

After listing the evidence for the names of the Jewish months (see Appendix) he then says:

The Jewish months have continued always to be what the months of all civilised nations were by origin; namely, genuine lunar months. As the astronomical duration of a month is 29 days, 12 hours, 44’, 3”, months of 29 days must alternate fairly regularly with months of 30 days. But twelve lunar months amount to only 354 days, 8 hours, 48’ 38”, whereas the solar year comprises of 365 days, 5 hours, 48’ 48”.  The difference between a lunar year of twelve months and a solar year amounts, therefore, to 10 days 21 hours. To compensate for this difference, at least once in every third year, and sometimes in the second, one month must be intercalated. It was observed in very early times that a sufficiently accurate compensation was attained by intercalating a month three times in every eight years (during which period, the difference amounts to 87 days). The quadrennial Greek games already depended on a recognition of this 8-year cycle (‘octaeteris’), the four year cycle being arrived at simply by halving it.

Hence the Olympiad is based upon the lunar calendar.

Schürer continues:

As early as the fifth century B.C., the astronomer Meton of Athens had drawn up a still more exact system of compensation in the form of a 19 year cycle, in which a month was to be intercalated seven times. This considerably excelled the 8-year cycle in accuracy, because in nineteen years there remained a difference of a little over two hours, whereas in eight years it was one of one and a half days. Of later astronomers who provided even more accurate computations, Hipparchus of Nicaea (c. 180-120 B.C.) deserves especial mention. The fact that after every nineteen years, the course of the sun and moon coincide again almost exactly, was also well known to the Babylonians. In fact, cuneiform inscriptions have been thought to show that they regularly employed a 19 year intercalary cycle as far back as the time of Nabonnassar, long before Meton therefore. Even if this is not yet proved, the use of a nineteen year intercalary period in the Persian and Seleucid eras may nevertheless be accepted as verified, though it is still not absolutely certain whether priority belongs to the Greeks or (as is probable) the Babylonians.

So, the Babylonians possessed the knowledge of the 19-year cycle lunar calendar. They understood it long before the philosopher Meton. Even if it is not yet proved for Babylon, the nineteen-year intercalary period in the Persian and Seleucid eras may nevertheless be accepted as verified. Schürer is absolutely not certain whether the priority of understanding belongs to the Greeks, or as is probable, the Babylonians. It will be found to long precede even the Babylonians.

Schürer notes:

…that the nineteen-year cycle was used in the kingdom of the Arsacids in the first century B.C. and A.D., and has been shown by Th. Reinach from coins on which the years 287, 317, and 390 of the Seleucid era appear as intercalary years. How far had the Jews of the inter-Testamental era advanced in these matters? They had some general knowledge of them of course, but unless we are altogether deceived, at the time of Jesus, they still had no fixed calendar, but on the basis of purely empirical observation, began each new month with the appearance of the new moon, and similarly on the basis of observation intercalated one month in the spring of the third or second year in accordance with the rule that in all circumstances, Passover must fall after the vernal equinox.

The quotes begin the paper with that inter-Testamental period and Schürer’s comments on the calendar. God’s Calendar goes back to creation. It is not dependent on what the Jews were doing at the time of Jesus Christ and, indeed, we will see why Schürer is not, in fact, correct or exhaustive in this matter. We know that the observation system was introduced at a later period and used in concert with the calculations of the conjunction seemingly to justify the traditions. Scholars are in fair agreement that the Samaritans and the Sadducees both had the same system, which was based on the conjunction and calculated and announced at least eight months in advance – certainly in the case of the Samaritans. We will examine this aspect further. Schürer does not make the logical step in his argument to show why the Jews came to be operating by observation, when they knew better, or why they introduced the argument for observation at all at the end of the Temple period. Indeed, we will see that the Pharisees did not have the power to introduce it during the Temple period, through their own deviousness.

It may be safely accepted that the Samaritans had the same calendar for 2500 years at least, and that the calendar and Sabbaths and system they use today, based on the conjunction, are the same calendar and Sabbaths they used during the period of the Temple and beyond. The comments of Ibrahim ibn Ya’kub, the Samaritan Bible commentator, show the Samaritan practices were according to the conjunction. They started the day at evening or twilight. They kept the two-day festival of the 14th and the 15th of Nisan or Abib, as the Sabbath-keeping Church has done for two thousand years (cf. The Role of the Fourth Commandment in the Historical Sabbath-keeping Churches of God (No. 170) , 1998 edition). They kept the sacrifice on 14 Nisan in the evening at the end of the day of the 14th and commenced the meal on the evening of 15 Nisan, all determined according to the conjunction. Moreover, they, like the Sadducees in the Temple period, kept Pentecost on the Sunday fifty days after the Wave-Sheaf Sunday in Unleavened Bread (cf. John Bowman (ed. and tr.), Samaritan Documents Relating to Their History, Religion and Life, Pittsburgh Original texts and Translation Series Number 2, pp. 223-237).

There is no evidence to support any case that the Samaritans changed the system, or that they and the other nations mentioned above did not have the capacity to calculate the conjunction precisely, long in advance, over the entire period of the Second Temple. If the Jews “lost” this knowledge at the end of the Second Temple period then they did it deliberately to introduce their traditions. The Church has never followed them in the determination of the calendar and the New Moons except in its more ignorant period of Judaising in the post-Reformation period. Rabbinical Judaism also introduced pagan festivals and systems into their calendar from Babylon in the period of the third century. R. Samuel Kohn, Chief Rabbi of Budapest and a writer on Samaritan practices, writing at Budapest in 1894, records the practices of the Sabbatarian Church over the period of the Reformation. He notes that the Sabbatarian Church there determined the calendar according to the conjunction (with one variation to the Samaritan practices). He also considers the fact that the later Judaisers (post-Simon Pechi) in Transylvania followed Rosh HaShanah or the New Year being celebrated in Tishri, was proof of the Jewish influence. He states that Rosh HaShanah was not introduced into Judaism until the post Temple period in the third century. Dr. Kohn makes mention of this important fact in the work The Sabbatarians in Transylvania, stating it entered at a third century and “post-biblical” period (referring to Talmud Rosh haShanah 8a, at n. 18 to ch. 7) (Ed. W. Cox, trs. T. McElwain and B. Rook, CCG Publishing, USA, 1998, pp. v, 58, 106 ff., et. seq. and nn.). Biblically the New Year is in Abib/Nisan, which is the First month.

The progression from the original pure biblical calendar to the rabbinical calendar introduced from Babylon, firstly under Rabbi Hillel II in 358 CE, was rather long-winded as the traditions had to be entrenched to justify the gradual changes. The Mishnah, which was compiled around 200 CE and on which the Talmud was later written as commentary, more or less records this process by the comments and the authorities it cites.

We will see below that the Calendar at the time of the Temple period followed the Sadducean reckoning, and the Pharisaic reckoning or system only came into effect after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. The Mishnah notes many practices which the modern Jewish calendar is designed to prevent. This calendar was not really perfected – even under Hillel II from ca. 358 – and suffered modification until the eleventh century. Details of the changes and conflicts are recorded in the paper The Calendar and the Moon: Postponements or Festivals? (No. 195) .

The Mishnah shows that the Holy Days fell before and after the Sabbath on repeated occasions, which means that the traditions and the system that the Pharisees had invented to protect the traditions were not in place even as late as the compilation of the Mishnah (cf. Soncino Talmud: Shabbat 114b; Menachoth 100b; and Mishnah Besah 2:1; Shabbat 15:3; Sukkah 5:7; Arakhin 2:2; Hagigah 2:4). Back-to-back Sabbaths were common. The text in Hagigah 2:4 shows the conflict developing at that time (200 CE) between the pro- and anti-Sunday Pentecost advocates (cf. ibid. (No. 195) and see below).

It is impossible for the postponement system and the current or modern Jewish calendar to have been in place at the time of Christ.

The Mishnah also states that there are four new years and that the First day of Nisan is the New Year for kings and festivals. This is also examined in the paper The Night to be Much Observed (No. 101) which looks at the Samaritan practices for the Passover. We can also see from these timings in the Mishnah that the datings regarding Ezra and Nehemiah were according to 1 Nisan and not 1 Tishri (cf. Reading the Law with Ezra and Nehemiah (No. 250) ).Tishri was used at that time for the reckoning of years, for Sabbatical years and for Jubilees (Rosh Hashanah 1.1 E (3)). We see that the notion of Tishri, which came in from Babylon, was first recorded in the Mishnah as being put forward by R. Eliazar and R. Simeon (ibid. 1.1 D). It was not observed as New Year in the Temple period. The Mishnah also makes an attempt to divorce the beginning of the tithing of cattle to 1 Elul (ibid. 1.1 C). The House of Shammai held the New Year for trees was 1 Shebat, whereas the House of Hillel held it was the fifteenth day of that month. The New Year on the Full Moon is a directly pagan practice, also introduced from Babylon and no doubt associated with the plantings by moon charts. All of this determination is in post-Temple period rabbinical Judaism. Only in the third century do we see Tishri being established by the rabbis. It and the postponement system now hold sway over Judaism, contrary to the word of God. Trumpets is often not on the molad (the conjunction), and the Holy Days of God are postponed by disobedience to other days that God has not ordained.

The Encyclopedia Judaica admits this fact in its article on Fixing Rosh HaShanah (New Year’s Day).

Fixing Rosh HaShanah (New Year’s Day). The year begins on Tishri 1, which is rarely the day of the molad, as there are four obstacles or considerations, called dehiyyah, in fixing the first day of the month (rosh hodesh). Each dehiyyot may cause a postponement of two days: (1) mainly in order to prevent the Day of Atonement (Tishri 10) from falling on Friday or Sunday, and Hoshana Rabba (the seventh day of Sukkot; Tishri 21) from falling on Saturday, but in part also serving an astronomical purpose... (2) entirely for an astronomical reason, if the molad is at noon or later Rosh HaShanah is delayed by one day (ibid., p. 44).

The third and fourth dehiyyah are more complex rules involving specific times of the molad and the consequent postponement of 1 Tishri. These moladot are tabulated with specific postponements, as outlined in the Encyclopedia Judaica article. This rule of postponement was not known at the time of Christ and at the time of the compilation of the Talmud. The Mishnah, and the Talmud as commentary, clearly show that the Day of Atonement fell on a Friday or a Sunday up to the time of the compilation of the Mishnah and, hence, at the time of Christ two centuries before that.

We also see that the occurrence of months was different from what it is under the Jewish calendar.

(Arakhin 2:2): They do not count less than four full months in the year, and [to sages] never have appeared more than eight.

It is thus impossible for the postponements to have been in place at the time of Christ. We continue:

... the present system was expected to be replaced [emphasis added] again by a system based on true values [as opposed to mean values] more akin to the earlier Jewish calendar in which New Moons (days of the phasis [i.e., the length of the interval from the true conjunction to the first sighting of the new crescent]) and intercalations were proclaimed on the basis of both observation and calculation (ibid., p. 47).

Note the comments here show that the calculations were according to the true conjunction according to the phases (which is not visible) and the observations were introduced to confirm what was already known for months and years in advance. The term phases of the moon came from the term phasis and have always applied to the New Moon as full dark, the Full Moon and the first and second quarters. The crescent has never been considered a true phase of the moon in the sense that it is used for the New Moon.

Historical. According to a tradition quoted in the name of Hai Gaon (d. 1038), the present Jewish calendar was introduced by the patriarch Hillel II ... in 358/59 AD ... While it is not unreasonable to attribute to Hillel II the fixing of the regular order of intercalations, his full share in the present fixed calendar is doubtful (ibid., p. 48).

Note here that the modern Jewish calendar did not really even become fixed until the eleventh century, as Judaica admits. The Judaica then introduces the concept of irregularity in intercalation saying they were irregular.

…intercalation being in part due to the prevailing state of various agricultural products and to social conditions. ... the state of crops is ultimately determined by the sun’s position in its annual path (ibid., p. 49).

However, we know that the Sadducees and the Samaritans had no such problem with irregularity and the New Moon was announced by fires lit from the Mt. of Olives, east of the Temple over Kidron (cf. the paper Messiah and the Red Heifer (No. 216) ). It was only later that the Samaritans were accused of lighting misleading beacons when the Pharisees took charge after the destruction of the Temple and introduced the postponements by observations.

No such problem existed during the Temple period. John Hyrcanus had destroyed the Samaritan tabernacle on Mt Gerizim during the time of the Maccabees but their religion was left intact. Hyrcanus suppressed the Pharisees and only for nine years under Alexandra did they have sway. Herod suppressed them also for their intrigues. The Sadducees and their system had control of the Temple more or less continually until its seizure in the final period and destruction in 70 CE (cf. ibid., (No. 101)). The Pharisees accused Christ himself of being a Samaritan (Jn. 8:48). This was, as we see from the text, because he denied the truth of their teachings and traditions, as we see from the text. He kept the Temple festivals, which were based on the Sadducean and Samaritan system determined by the conjunction, which was the original Temple system (see below). In John Bowman’s work: The Samaritan Problem: Studies in the Relationships of Samaritanism, Judaism, and Early Christianity (tr. by Alfred M. Johnson Jr., Pittsburgh Theological Monograph Series Number 4, The Pickwick Press, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1974, ch. 1, pp. 1 ff.) we see that the Samaritans were in the Northern Kingdom even after the dispersion of 721 BCE and a Samaritan diaspora existed in Egypt and Syria from antiquity until the 18th century. Bowman says:

Since many Samaritan manuscripts are available in European libraries, it has always remained a mystery to me why Christian scholars, who have known since the time of Joseph Scalinger (1540-1609) about the survival of the Samaritans, still repeat the same assertions about the Samaritans which were made by the Jews of post-Babylonian, Mishnaic and Talmudic times and which have come through the Church Fathers into the Christian scholarly tradition.
...The discoveries of Qumran have now induced some scholars to question the frequently used and all too easily accepted idea of “Normative Judaism” and the rabbinic sources as reliable criteria for the essence of Judaism in the 1st century, Consequently it appears to be appropriate once again to examine precisely whether or not the Samaritans, as the first Jewish sect who have no independent traditions and customs, have preserved customs and views which are older than those which the Rabbis of the 2nd century AD (and later) tried to make sacrosanct by passing them off as oral traditions from the time of Moses that had been handed down to them as the trustees of the only and true Israel.

The reason the Samaritan position is not openly studied is as much a fault of the Samaritan priests themselves as it is of the Jews.”

It is a complete falsehood to claim that either:

1. The Hillel system was in operation before 358 CE; or,
2. There was no Temple Calendar in operation during the Temple Period; or
3. The Samaritan and Temple Calendars were not run according to the conjunctions and were not calculated in advance.

To make these claims is simple barefaced lies easily demonstrable from history. The ministry and people who make these claims appear to have no shame.

Wade Cox