God’s Calendar, Temple Worship and the Books of Enoch and Jubilees (No. 156D)

The Church of God in the Temple period kept exactly the same days and times as the Temple itself. From the days of Noah the calendar had been kept according to the lunar system based on the equinox that determined the year in Abib. The system in Babylon changed the beginning of the year to the seventh month, but the months were kept as they had been with Noah. The Babylonians changed the intercalations ca 630 BCE and consequently when the Jews under Hillel II adopted them and issued the Hillel Calendar in 358 CE they issued the wrong intercalations which placed the calendar in the wrong months seven times every 19 Years.

The book of Genesis records that the flood was determined according to the years of the system before the flood and since Adam. The term we find in Genesis for month is chodesh (SHD 2320), which is the New Moon. It means hidden and the event as the conjunction, which measured the days for the flood, which began in the second month (chodesh) in the seventeenth day of the month (chodesh). The months were numbered and remained numbered for the entire period of the Patriarchs and the Temple. The Church has numbered the months and so have the Samaritans. The practice of using the Hebrew names for the months based on the Babylonian became widespread, and the names of the months entered the biblical record although the Bible does not record them all. That in itself implies they were not universal and did not replace the Temple calendar system of numbers while the Canon was being compiled. All texts of the Hebrew Canon were finished and compiled from the death of Ezra in 323 BCE, which coincided with Alexander the Great, who is recorded to have died in the same year as Ezra, being in, or by, 323 BCE and hence compiled by 321 BCE.

There is an aberrant idea being circulated among the racists, that the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees are somehow inspired, but the Canon is not. They do this to introduce a variant of the Qumran Calendar based on the solar system of Enoch. To achieve this they circulate the fiction that Enoch is the ancient book of the Patriarchs, written by the patriarch Enoch who was righteous. The book makes mention of the angel Uriel and so they claim that Uriel gave the text to Enoch and hence it precedes Noah and the Pentateuch and is inspired. They then use Esther as an example of a late book that is not inspired in order to attack what they describe as Judaism. That view is the most fanciful nonsense and it is difficult to understand how grown adults are taken in by such ideas.

Esther was entered into the Canon along with the other texts at the death of Ezra in 323 BCE and translated into the Septuagint in the third century BCE. It is a story of the activities during the Babylonian captivity, but also represents a much greater truth regarding Messiah and the Church. That symbolism is given in the paper Commentary on Esther (No. 63).

It is utter nonsense to say Esther was written ca 150 BCE or that anything else in the Canon was written that late. The Apocrypha is another matter. We know it was written later, but its uninspired nature is evident from its contradictions with the Canon. I listened to professors of Religious Studies from South Africa, and those of their ideas, present such concepts to me at a seminar. Daniel, Ezra and Nehemiah etc. were all asserted to be late writings. The incidence of prophecy in them is not taken as their inspired nature, but rather as evidence that they were written after the event. I drew their attention to the archaeological findings at Elephantine, which were translated by Ginsberg. These findings are published in one of the most basic text books in the English speaking world, and that is James B. Pritchard’s, The Ancient Near East An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, Vol. 1, Princeton University Press and Oxford University Press 1958. Now on page 279 of that text we find a copy of the original Passover Papyrus, which was an order sent by King Darius to Arsames the satrap of Egypt in what is identified as the year 419 BCE. This is an order to keep the Passover we see identified in the texts in Ezra. The people in the Temple at Elephantine are seen, from the letters there, to have been in contact with the priests in Jerusalem and they provided funds for the refurbishment of the Temple after its construction. This is exactly in accordance with the text in Ezra and they refer to the priests by name as found in the texts in Scripture. They prove the Bible texts were written exactly when the Bible says they were written. Now if a student had written an essay and not taken those texts into account, then he/she would have been severely penalised. Yet we see university lecturers writing nonsense to the contrary out of ignorance.

The books of Enoch and Jubilees were written at the beginning of the second century BCE and have no Canonical authority and never have had any authority. They contradict the law and the testimony. They are pseudepigraphic writings. That was a practice in use from the second century BCE to the fourth century CE that attributed writings as being from people often in the Bible and long dead. There are books by Adam and Enoch, and Abraham and Eldad and Modad. There is the Apocalypse of Adam, of Elijah, and the Testament of Moses, the Apocryphon of Ezekiel, and the Questions of, the Vision of, and the Revelation of, Ezra. There are works on, and concerning Jacob, Job, Johannes, Jambres, Joseph and Asenath; there is a prayer of Manasseh and even a treatise allegedly written by Shem. No one with any serious training gets taken in by these writings.

The Book of Enoch was written after that and shows by its Greek names of the months, using the names of Hellenised gods and goddesses, a Hellenised influence that cannot have been earlier than the Ptolemies. It was the visit of Alexander and Ptolemy to Jerusalem that placed the Jews in good stead with the Greeks. The Septuagint was ordered translated after Ptolemy took over Egypt by his successors, because the Greeks developed good relations with the Jews at Alexandria and Ptolemy decided to use them. The best way to get them on his side was to translate the existing Cannon of the Scriptures, hence the LXX came into being.

The Greeks did not have this influence prior to Alexander the Great and it was only entrenched in Egypt from 323 BCE. The Seleucids did not enter Judea and take over their system until well after that, towards the middle of the second century BCE under Antiochus Epiphanes. That is why Onias IV built the temple at Heliopolis in Egypt ca. 160 BCE in accordance with the prophecy by God through Isaiah in Isaiah 19:19. Next they will tell us that Isaiah was written after 160 CE because the Temple was built there at that time in accordance with the prophecy, therefore it must have been after the event.

The Book of Enoch displays in the calendar a Greek influence adopting an Egyptian calendar system, and indicates the probable influence of early Alexandrian Gnosticism. An early sectarian proto-Pharisee is acknowledged as writing Jubilees in the first half of the second century BCE. They sought to corrupt the Temple calendar with it to introduce their traditions. The Enochian calendar is a solar calendar, and is based on an ancient Egyptian calendar that had twelve months of the year with thirty days per month. It was intercalated by adding five days each year as no days. Four of these days were on the equinoxes and solstices and all were named for one of the gods. It was never accepted by the Temple system and was introduced into a small group of aberrant theology with a group in Alexandria and later at Qumran. The variations of two weeks, or fortnightly periods, follows a fourteen day and fifteen day variation in some calendars. The newer variations are directly anti-Sabbath and anti-Fourth Commandment. Their adherents rely on a fiction that says the word chodesh in the Bible actually refers to the equinoxes, of which there are two a year. They seem oblivious to the fact that as early as Noah the months were named First, Second, Third and Fourth etc. Chodesh. The Tenth Chodesh is mentioned in Genesis 8:5. The later or current adherents are racist. They worship on Sundays and are usually anti-Semitic.

The value of the Book of Enoch lies solely in its explanation of the text in Genesis 6:4 showing the proper understanding of the text against the silly interpretations advanced by modern Trinitarians. That is why it is claimed that Jude quotes Enoch, usually by those seeking to denigrate or reorient the Scriptures to denigrate their inspiration. We saw this ploy used by the WCG when it sought to destabilise the law and introduce Trinitarianism. Jude is not quoting Enoch. It is explaining Genesis 6:4 in its correct understanding.

Enoch is an embellishment on the correct understanding of what happened in Genesis 6:4, as understood at the time of Christ.

The complete sequence of the temple worship is explained in the paper Psalms from the Temple Worship No. 087). We include some of the preamble to deal with the timing, services and divisions.

“The Church worships every day by prayer and by fasting on some days. In accordance with the Temple system there were sacrifices every day. The daily sacrifices were divided into the morning and evening sacrifices.

The Church followed and still follows the Temple system of worship and its calendar based on the twelve months with the second twelfth month intercalated seven times every nineteen years (see the paper God’s Calendar (No. 156)). It operates according to the conjunction and numbers the days from the conjunction. There are approximately 59 days every two months. The Sabbath is every seventh day, which is and always has been, the day we now call Saturday in the English paganised or heathenised system, being named after the God Saturn.

The Church also worships on New Moons and on Holy Days of the feasts and meets on the feasts, for their entirety, three times a year as commanded by God through the prophets (see also Seven Days of the Feasts (No. 49)). On these three feast periods the entirety of the Twenty-four Divisions of the priesthood officiated together (Schurer, History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, Vol. II, p. 292). The Daily Sacrifice occurred in the morning and the evening. The divisions of the priesthood mounted duty on a weekly basis and the priests changed over on the Sabbath. The retiring course offered the morning sacrifice and the incoming course offered the evening sacrifice (Schurer, ibid).

The priesthood was divided into Twenty-Four Divisions as were the Levites also, and the nation or Congregation of Israel was also divided into twenty-four divisions, “each of which was to serve in weekly rotation as the peoples’ representative before God when the daily sacrifice was offered” (Schurer, ibid, pp. 292-293). Unlike the priests and Levites, the congregation however was not obliged to go up to Jerusalem for the week, but assembled in their synagogues for prayer and Bible reading, and probably only a delegation went up to Jerusalem (ibid, p. 293).

The timing of the sacrifices was at 9 AM or the Third hour for the morning sacrifice and 3 PM or the Ninth hour of the day for the evening sacrifice. It was on this evening sacrifice at the Ninth hour or 3 PM that they began killing the Passover lambs. That is why we celebrate each year on the 14^th of Abib, the First month, the Death of the Lamb at that service, having commemorated the Lord’s Supper the evening before. The lambs were killed from the Ninth hour to the Eleventh hour i.e. 3 PM to 5 PM on 14 Abib (cf. Josephus, Wars of the Jews, VI, IX, 3). This timing was in accord with the standard daily sacrifice at the evening sacrifice.”

Do not be taken in by these Enochian and Jubilees errors of the Solar calendar being now propagated by witchcraft particularly in and from the US.

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