Troublesome Topic: God Changed Their Calendar

This birthing process called the exodus was so crucial to what God wanted for His people that He changed their calendar to reflect its importance. Exodus 12:2 records these words of God to Moses and Aaron,

Exodus 12:2

Translation

This month shall be your chief

of months, it will be to you the first

month of the year.

Paraphrase

From now on this month shall rule over and be the leader of all the other months; because of its importance it will be first in your order of months.

This was the month in which God “passed over” the Israelites without killing their firstborn sons because they had the blood of a lamb on their doorposts. They were to celebrate the Passover feast, along with that of Unleavened Bread, every year during this month, which God now called the first month of the year. Everything started here. It was a new beginning.

God wanted everything about their lives to revolve around what He was doing in and through them. They were to be different from other nations in many ways and this was one more to add to that list. While other peoples designed their calendars to be focused on issues relating to planting and harvesting, or sheering and birthing of sheep, God’s people were to focus on the divine activity in their midst. Their orientation and view of life were to revolve around God’s plan, not man’s needs.

From that point on, the Children of Israel utilized two calendars side by side, one was the religious calendar and the other was the civil or social calendar.

It appears that God allowed them to use both calendars without condemning them for doing so. There are two instances (Ex 23:16

and Ex 34:22)

in which God used terminology from the civil calendar to refer to a feast that was connected to the harvest of grains or the gathering of olives or grapes, but other things were described using the religious calendar. The historical books are consistent in their use of the religious calendar, even the book of Esther, in which the Israelites found themselves in a foreign land.

But God had made his point; by giving them an additional calendar to keep track of alongside the normal one, He had impressed on them the true importance of Passover which was followed by their exodus from Egypt. They dare not forget that the Passover was their starting point.

The next lesson in the Full Series on Covenants is: Why Did God Give the Law?

Footnotes

1

The word used here means “head, chief, leader, top, highest, beginning or first.” It denoted importance, priority and authority.

2

This word is derived from the one above, but it was more often used of something that came first in time or order.

3

Both of their calendars were lunar calendars which usually alternated between 30 day months and 29 day months because it takes the moon 29.5 days to rotate around the earth. This made it a 354 day year. To make up the difference with the solar calendar that most other nations used they would add a 29 day month 7 times every 19 years. On their leap year the 12^th month had 30 days not 29, and the 8^th and 9^th months were flexible, sometimes 29 days and sometimes 30 days. This allowed them to add three more days every 19 years and thus be equal to a solar calendar. With a lunar calendar, to know that a new month has begun does not require having the calendar written down, it only requires looking up into the sky (the adjustments did require someone to keep track of them). The religious calendar started in March/April and the Civil calendar started in September/October.

4

and the feast of the harvest of the firstfruits of your labors which you have sown in the field, and the feast of ingathering at the end of the year, when you gather in [the fruit of] your labors from the field (part of a larger sentence)

5

You shall observe the Feast of Weeks (also called Pentecost) [at the time of] the firstfruits of wheat harvest, and the Feast of Ingathering (also called the Feast of Booths or the Feast of Tabernacles) at the end of the year.