In this fifth part of our six part series on the Hebrew calendar we are going to examine the agricultural year and its relationship to the Sabbath and Jubilee cycles and Daniel’s 70th week.

If you’ve not yet read the previous articles, here is a very brief overview. Part 1 explained the importance of this topic and defined the terms evening and morning. In part 2 we concluded that the correct Biblical reckoning of a day was from morning to morning, not evening to evening, and in part 3 we determined that the correct reckoning of a month was from the new moon, not the sighting of the crescent moon. Part 4 was less conclusive in that we showed the beginning of the new year to be near the spring equinox, but we couldn’t resolve which of three competing methods was the correct one (though two of the three were preferred).

The current Jewish calendar counts months starting around the time of the spring equinox with the first month, but it uses the beginning of the seventh month for counting years. This is why the first day of the seventh month is known as Rosh Hashanah, which literally means head of the year. This is contrary to God’s instructions:

The month being spoken of was the month during which Passover occurred, and it is from this month that God instructed Moses and Aaron to base their months and their years. Counting years from the seventh month is not scriptural.

However, there is another year reckoning in the scriptures that does start in the seventh month, but in order to distinguish it from the incorrect Jewish calendar year we will refer to it as an agricultural year. It’s the year reckoning used to determine the Sabbath and Jubilee years:

The calendar year has three harvest feasts that start in the spring with the Feast of First Fruits, which is the first of the early harvest; then the Feast of Weeks in the summer, which in Exodus 23:16 is described as “the Feast of Harvest”; and finally the Feast of Tabernacles, which in the same verse is described as the “Feast of Ingathering at the end of the year, when you have gathered in the fruit of your labors from the field.” In other words, the middle of the first month until the middle of the seventh month are marked by harvest feasts. Whereas the period of sowing occurs in the later autumn and winter months, after the previous year’s harvest has been brought in.

In order to observe a sabbath year in which there is neither sowing nor reaping, the sabbath year must span two calendar years; the last half of one calendar year for the sowing, followed by the first half of the following calendar year for the harvesting. This is precisely how we see Moses describe it later in the chapter:

Moses is here illustrating how they will sow their fields in the last half of the sixth year; the harvest of that crop would be in the first half of the seventh year; the seventh year sabbath would then begin in the middle of the seventh year and continue until the middle of the eighth year; they would then sow again in the latter half of the eighth year and harvest that in the first half of the ninth year. Moses’ description makes it evident that the sabbath year follows the agricultural year rather than the calendar year by spanning two calendar years, similarly to how the sabbath on the Day of Atonement spans two calendar days (refer back to part 2).

This same alternative year reckoning also applies to the Jubilee year, for that year is also based on the sabbath year cycle. The book of Jubilees makes it apparent that a Jubilee cycle consists of 49 years, not 50, and that the 50th, or Jubilee, year is also the first year of the next Jubilee cycle. This is important because Daniel’s 70 weeks, or 490 years, appear to be 10 Jubilee cycles of 49 years each. That this is so is apparent from his use of the term “weeks” (from shabua in Hebrew), a word that is used throughout the book of Jubilees to refer to the seven groupings of seven years in a Jubilee. This association is strengthened by the separating of the first seven weeks (one full Jubilee cycle) from the rest of the weeks in Daniel’s prophecy.

Moses describes the Jubilee year as follows:

Again we see the Jubilee year is characterized by neither sowing nor reaping, which shows it must not be synchronized with the calendar year but with the agricultural year. We also see the trumpet being blown to consecrate the Jubilee on the tenth day of the seventh month which further supports this reckoning, for it makes no sense to consecrate the year six months before it actually begins!

But when exactly does the Jubilee year commence? The trumpet on the Day of Atonement was to consecrate the year, which means to set it apart, but that doesn’t mean the year necessarily started on that actual day. As the Feast of Tabernacles that follows the Day of Atonement was the “Feast of Ingathering at the end of the year” (Exodus 23:16) it seems more likely that the trumpet was announcing the soon to come Jubilee which was going to commence as soon as the Feast of Tabernacles was over. As the agricultural year starts with sowing and finishes with reaping, it would not make sense for it to begin before the final feast of ingathering for the previous year’s harvest had been completed.

The Feast of Tabernacles is described like so:

As the Feast of Tabernacles was seven days long the day after the feast is the eighth day, which was also a set apart day, suggesting it was of equal importance, yet it was not part of the preceding seven-day feast. It is this eighth day, on the twenty-second day of the seventh month, that possibly marked the beginning of the agricultural year, and would therefore have been the date that the sabbath and Jubilee years were reckoned from. The importance of this date is confirmed in Delivered From Delusion where we make actual calculations based on these dates.

If the seventy weeks of Daniel are seventy groups of seven agricultural years, then it holds that each group began and ended immediately after the Feast of Tabernacles. The 70th week, then, as it is also based on the agricultural year, can be expected to begin on the equivalent day of the month—the twenty-second day of the seventh month—the day after the Feast of Tabernacles ends—in some future year.

That fact alone allows us to narrow down the possible start dates of the 70th week to just one day per year, but it doesn’t help us narrow down the list of potential years. For that, we can perform calculations based on these dates in order to see which ones match up with the day counts given in Daniel and Revelation. We won’t spoil the surprise here though. To see the calculations and how we did them, and what the potential years are in which the 70th week can begin, get Delivered From Delusion today!

Although we’ve covered all the critical calendrical criteria in this series, there are two feasts that aren’t given a specific date and those are the Feast of First Fruits and the Feast of Weeks. In the last article in this series we will discuss Counting the Omer—which is used to calculate the date of the Feast of Weeks—and show how the key to knowing which is the correct method to use is actually encoded into the number of days we’re instructed to count.