This is the fourth of six articles where we are discussing various aspects of the Hebrew calendar. If you’ve not read the previous articles yet, here is a very brief overview. Part 1 explained the importance of this topic and it 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 (that is, when the moon is dark), not the sighting of the crescent moon. In this article we will attempt to determine when a new year should begin.

We know that the Hebrew year begins with the month in which the children of Israel were brought out of Egypt (Exodus 12:12), that this occurs in the springtime, and that the feasts that occur six months later are associated with the time of harvest (Exodus 23:16). Therefore the calendar is synchronised with the solar year. A calendar that is based only on the moon would have 354 days each year, which is about 11 days shorter than a solar year. This is why the Jewish calendar adds an extra month on some years, otherwise it would not be many years before the first month was occurring in the middle of winter and the seventh month in the middle of summer, well before the harvest was ready. So, although the Bible doesn’t mention the addition of a thirteenth month in order to keep the calendar synchronised with the solar year, we know this must have been the practice.

We are going to show that the main determining factor in deciding whether an additional month should be added or not is the vernal (spring) equinox, which occurs when the sun appears to be directly above the earth’s equator. This occurs approximately halfway between mid-winter and mid-summer. But before we discuss the equinox, let’s look at some things that we shouldn’t be using to determine the beginning of the year.

There is a Jewish tradition that the ripening of the barley harvest should be used when determining the new year. This has no scriptural support and is contrary to Genesis 1:14 where it says the sun and moon are to be used for determining “days and years”, not barley. The ripening barley would also make the calendar impossible to use for people who were not in a barley growing area, or if there was a problem with the harvest that year due to drought, disease, flood, captivity, and so on. Whereas a calendar based solely on the position of the sun and the moon can be used by all people everywhere. As the barley ripening is based on the sun anyway, it is at best a secondary measurement, and therefore inferior. A properly calibrated calendar will naturally have the barley ripening at the correct time.

Using the location of certain stars, such as Spica in the constellation of Virgo, as some suggest doing, is also not a reliable indicator as to when the year begins. All stars suffer from what is known as the precession of the equinoxes, whereby over the course of thousands of years the location of stars in the sky in relation to the time of the equinox changes quite significantly. The location of Spica at the time of the equinox now is very different from where it was when the equinox occurred at the time of Christ, and that too is very different from where it was at the time Moses was making the determination as to when a year began.

Another problem occurs when people suggest using the equilux instead of the equinox. The equilux refers to when there are exactly 12 hours of sunlight in a day. This generally occurs near the equinox, but it varies considerably based on latitude. For example, the equilux is about 4 days before the equinox in Jerusalem and about four days after it in Sydney. Using the equilux would result in a calendar that differs depending on the location of the observer, which is also contrary to Genesis 1:14, as one’s location on the earth is not part of God’s timekeeping. It’s even worse for some locations—the equilux in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia is about six weeks before the equinox, and Quito, Ecuador, being right on the equator, doesn’t even have an equilux! For these reasons, a determination using the equilux must be rejected.

Philo, a Greek/Jewish philosopher of the 1st century CE, confirms the use of the vernal (spring) equinox for the determining of the year (link):

Though we don’t know which of Moses’ writing he was using to determine this! Also here, in his book, “The Special Laws, I”:

Philo places the first month in relation to the vernal equinox and the seventh month in relation to the autumnal equinox. Now this raises a slight problem. The number of days from the vernal equinox to the autumnal equinox is just over 186, which is a little more than half a year due to the slightly elliptical orbit of the earth. On the other hand, 6 lunar months is only 177 days, 9 days less. For the autumnal equinox to fall within the seventh month, the first month must begin no more than 9 days after the vernal equinox, and less than 20 days before it. Any earlier and the autumnal equinox would be after the seventh month; any later and it would occur before it.

Some claim that the new year should begin with the first new moon after the vernal equinox. This is how the Babylonians reckoned the beginning of their year. In some cases, when the previous new moon occurs just before the vernal equinox, the first month would not begin until another 29 days later and the seventh month would not begin until 206 days after the vernal equinox, a full three weeks after the autumnal equinox. The Feast of Tabernacles, which is a harvest festival, would not occur until another two weeks after that. According to Moses that would place it far too late in the year:

The word “end” is tequphah, and it doesn’t necessarily mean end as in this translation but a coming around, circuit, or turning. The autumnal equinox is one of the four points of the year that mark the circuit, or turning, of the sun, and must be what Moses was referring to here. This is the most Biblically conclusive statement available regarding the timing of the year, and it is saying that the Feast of Ingathering (or Feast of Tabernacles) is at (or near to) the autumnal equinox. For that reason, the reckoning of the year beginning up to 19 days before the spring equinox through to as many as nine days afterwards is considered to be the most accurate one as it is the reckoning that in all cases places the autumnal equinox closest to the middle of the seventh month and the Feast of Tabernacles.

One potential problem with this reckoning is based on the testimony of Eusebius (around 300 CE), who quotes earlier historians and Hebrew scholars when he states (link):

Although Eusebius does confirm our existing understanding of the use of the vernal equinox, the problem he introduces is that he states the Passover, which is in the middle of the first month, should be after the equinox. Based on that, the new year could not begin more than 14 days before the equinox. If the new moon was from 15 to 19 days before the equinox, the new year would have to be delayed by one month (otherwise the Passover would fall before the equinox), but doing that would then cause the autumnal equinox to fall in the sixth month, not the seventh.

On the other hand, we also need to be careful about starting the year too early. Leviticus also states:

As the harvest is generally not finished until September (the autumnal equinox being around September 23rd); if we start the year too early the seventh month can begin in late August and the feast of Tabernacles could potentially begin before all of the harvest had been gathered in. But by delaying the start of the year to ensure Passover falls after the vernal equinox we also ensure the earliest start date of the seventh month is August 31st, with the Feast of Tabernacles beginning not earlier than the middle of September and finishing around the time of the autumnal equinox, which seems reasonable.

We must keep in mind that the “rule” about celebrating the Passover after the equinox that Eusebius mentioned appears to be one of Jewish tradition and not based on scriptural authority; however, the “rule” that the autumnal equinox should fall within the seventh month is also not definitively stated in the Bible (though it is implied), so either method of measuring the new year in relation to the equinox could be valid, as could the method of starting the new year after the equinox; although that latter method is considered less likely to be the correct one as it would, in many years, place the Feast of Ingathering long after the equinox it is supposed to be near.

To conclude, the only instruction given by the Bible for reckoning a year is that the Feast of Tabernacles should be near the turning of the year. This is most probably a reference to the autumnal equinox, but that on its own doesn’t give us sufficient information to determine definitively when to begin the year. For this reason Delivered From Delusion contains calculations for the beginning of the year based on all three possible methods listed in this article. This prevents us from being as precise as we could be if we were certain of the correct method, but even so we have been able to narrow down the potential dates for the beginning of Daniel’s 70th week to just four possible dates spanning four consecutive years in the next decade. But to understand how we can do that we still have one more aspect of the Hebrew calendar to cover, and that is the Jubilee year and the Jubilee cycle, which is the topic of part five.