All creation sings …in the Hebrew calendar

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard. Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. – King David, Psalms 19:1-4

People often look at these verses in Psalms 19 and say “Hey! Check out God’s handiwork in nature: Rabbits reproducing according to the Fibonacci sequence; pineapple rinds and daisies petals following mathematical patterns. See! Nature is showing us God’s glorious handiwork, just like Ps 19 says”. While that’s all fine and good, I’d like to propose that “the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows His handiworks” can be reasonably taken to an all new level. And I’m not alone in this aspiration: If I’m reading him right, when Paul quotes this passage in Romans 10:18, he’s using it to say that the heavens declare the Gospel – not just general revelation of Himself – to the whole world. Start in Romans 10:9 and read through to v18 and you’ll see what I mean. It’s one thing to use Psalms 19 to argue for General Revelation or Intelligent Design; it’s quite another to use it to argue for the Gospel! So what on earth could Paul mean, and how does he come to quote Psalms 19 in ?

Some Loopy Background Information

I have a theory about how one uses Psalms 19 to get to the Gospel, but to get there, some background information is necessary. Take a look at the following diagram of the earth, sun, and moon, and let’s discuss the following items.

(if your eyes glaze over, just jump to the last paragraph of this blog):

• The Moon’s orbit (synodic) around the earth is 29.5 days. This cycle is called a “lunar month”, and 12 lunar months make one “lunar year” (approximately 354 days).
• The earth’s orbit around the sun is 365.25 days, and we call that a “solar year”. The fact that our planet is 22 degrees off-axis gives us 4 different seasons as the earth orbits the sun. 
• Each solar year (365.25 days) is slightly longer than 12 lunar months (12 months x 29.5 days = 354 days), so the lunar year is 11-ish days shy of a solar year.
• Most countries in the world follow the Gregorian Calendar, first introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. It’s a collection of 12 months of arbitrary lengths (usually around 30 days each), arranged so that 12 months equals one solar year. Every 4 years, an extra day is added to the year to keep the calendar fixed to the seasons. As with all solar calendars, the Gregorian Calendar doesn’t pay any attention to the lunar month, so the day of any given month has no correlation to the cycle of the moon. The average man doesn’t know or care when the New Moon or full moon takes place. Geeks, astronomers and astrologers (the only ones who do care) can look up such things on a chart or on a smartphone app if they want to know about lunar cycles.
• In ancient cultures, lunar calendars were more common than solar calendars. With a lunar calendar system, each New Moon starts a New Month, and the seasons are not fixed to the calendar. By way of example, the modern Islamic religious calendar is a lunar calendar, and the month of Ramadan slides across the seasons from year to year. In the year 2010, the month of Ramadan was Aug 10 – Sep 9. In 2020, Ramadan was April 23-May 23. In 2030, it’ll be Jan 5-Feb 3.
• Around 450 BC, the Greek philosopher Meton of Athens observed that the lunar calendar and solar calendar could be harmonized by adding an extra 13th month every 2-3 years. This harmonization resulted in a 19 year luni-solar calendar cycle of twelve years of 12 lunar months and seven years of 13 lunar months.

Now that we’ve got some calendar basics squared away, we can turn our attention to the one culture whose calendar stands apart from all the rest: the Hebrew calendar.

The Hebrew Calendar

The Hebrew calendar is a luni-solar calendar with a very peculiar history. It’s present form can be traced as far back as the 4th century AD when a rabbi named Hillel II modified the existing Hebrew agricultural calendar in order to maintain unity and consistent observance of festivals for Jews scattered across the diaspora. The exact origins of the Hebrew calendar prior to Hillel II unknown, but there is strong evidence in rabbinical writings that it was in use as far back as Moses in Exodus 12:1. Using an Early-Date Biblical chronology, that places the Hebrew luni-solar calendar as far back as 1446BC, one thousand years before the Greeks discovered it.

The peculiar thing about the original Hebrew calendar is that instead of using math to synchronize their calendars like Meton did, the Israelites used their Spring Feasts to know when to insert their intercalary month into their year to form their leap year. You  can read all about their feasts in Leviticus 23 (and their related passages in the Pentateuch), but you’d never realize that the implementation of these feasts automatically reconciled the solar and lunar calendars unless you put 2 and 2 together using a bit of extra-Biblical information from ancient rabbinical writings. To get that data under our belt, we need a brief primer on the Spring Feasts in the Bible.

The Feasts of the Lord (Spring Feasts) 

In Leviticus 23, God commanded the Israelites to celebrate seven annual “Feasts of the Lord”. The first four were in the Spring and focused on spring planting and harvests. The last three feasts were for the fall harvests. Here’s a quick list of the Spring Feasts and when they were celebrated:

• Feast of Passover: Celebrated on Abib 14 (the 14th day of the first month). Symbolizes the death of the Lamb of God, dying to take away the sin of the world. (John 1:29)
• Feast of Unleavened Bread: Celebrated from Abib 15-21. Symbolizes the sanctifying work of Jesus Christ who cleans us of our sins. (1 Cor 5:7-8)
• Feast of First Fruits: Celebrated on the first Sunday after Passover. Symbolizes the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the promise that we, too, will one day be resurrected, just as He was.
• Feast of Weeks: Celebrated 50 days after First Fruits. Symbolizes the readiness of the full harvest when the whole crop is resurrected and ready for Him. (1 Cor 15:20-24)

Here’s how it worked:  The Feast of First Fruits required a fresh, ripe bushel of barley to be presented to the priest on the first Sunday after Passover in the first month of the year. That month was named “Abib”, which in Hebrew means “first ear”. It refers to the stage of barley where kernels have formed in the “ear” of the stalk, but are still soft. This only occurs in early spring (March/April).

So on or around Passover day, the farmer would walk out into his field looking for a fist-full of barley that would serve as the first fruit for the next Sunday’s Feast of First Fruits festival. If the barley harvest wasn’t ripe enough by Passover, then instead of calling that month the 1st month of a new year, it was called the 13th month (Adair I) of the previous year, thereby postponing the new year and its required feasts for another month. This reset would force the Spring Feasts to always begin in the first month of the year and thereby keep the seasons in sync with their calendar.

An Extra-Biblical Metaphor

If the reconciliation of these calendars based on a first fruits sacrifice doesn’t seem amazing to you, consider this possible metaphor:

• The sun is the source and giver of energy, light and life. Without exception, all life on earth is directly or indirectly sustained by the sun.
• The moon is apart from the sun, spinning on its own particular orbit, indifferent to the sun. It is dead, has no life, gives no light, gives no energy. The only light it does give is merely a reflection of the living sun. (Granted, the Bible does not get into symbolism of the sun and moon representing God or Man, but as a metaphor, it is is not an unreasonable metaphor.)
• The required feasts (Lev 23) which reconciles the (dead) moon calendar to the (living) sun calendar is the combination of the Passover Feast, the Unleavened Bread Feast and the Feast of First Fruits. These 3 feasts happened in the first month of the year (Abib), in the middle of the month. These 3 feasts, in combination, when performed as prescribed by God, forced the Jewish lunar calendar to be reconciled with the solar calendar.

Imagine that: death (moon) reconciled to life (sun) because of Christ’s resurrection! And it’s choreographed in the heavens! 

Music To My Ears

Let’s take this calendar fun to a whole new level.

• In our solar calendar, we use a 4 year pattern of 3 regular years (365 days) and one leap year (366 days) to keep the four seasons in sync with the 365.25 day solar calendar.
• As pointed out above, the Hebrew lunisolar calendar features a 19-year pattern of regular years and leap years, where every 2nd or 3rd year was a leap year.  This specific 19-year arrangement of 12 regular years and 7 leap years is called a “Metonic cycle”. Let’s change tracks for a sec and talk about music theory.
• In Western music, we an octave is subdivided into 12 notes. Within these 12 notes are 7 notes of a major scale and 5 sharp/flat notes. For example, on a piano, when using the key of C, the 7 notes of the major scale are the white keys, whereas the five black keys are sharps and flats.
• However, music doesn’t have to have 12 notes to an octave. There are alternate tunings whereby an octave can be subdivided into more than 12 notes. 
• Of the variety of alternate tunings, one particularly excellent tuning is one with 19 notes per octave. Commonly referred to as “19-Equal Temperament”, it’s used in some Asian cultures and is capable of reproducing many (if not all) of the tones of the 12-note octave, and more. In fact, some 19-ET pianos have been made in the 16th and 17th centuries, featuring two rows of black keys (sharps and flats) as depicted on the above diagram.
  . . .
• Here’s the amazing thing: It “just so happens” that if we superimpose a 19-note octave on a 19-year Metonic cycle, the 7 notes of a major scale directly correspond to the 7 leap years in the 19-year Metonic Cycle!!

 

Putting the Ducks in a Row

Imagine for a minute that you’re a shepherd boy lounging out in the fields tending your flocks. To pass the time, you’ve got a harp in hand, and you possess such a mastery of the instrument that you’re in demand to play before kings. You like to write songs and have a growing collection of them. You also like to speculate about creation, heavens, music and God’s glory. So let’s say you decided to write down a song that took into consideration the glory of God, the 19-year celestial dance of the metonic calendar, and the 19-et scale and how the whole thing clicks together in one big joyful harmony. Just thinking out loud.. what number would you assign to the song?

Psalm 19? Maybe?

To sum it all up… This is the only calendar that has a specific tie in to the sun, the moon and music, all brought into harmonious unity in the symbolism of what the death, burial and resurrection of Christ does for believers!

So let’s revisit this song by David, a skilled musician, and ask ourselves what he might have been thinking.

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard. Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.
In them he has set a tent for the sun, which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber, and, like a strong man, runs its course with joy. Its rising is from the end of the heavens, and its circuit to the end of them, and there is nothing hidden from its heat. – King David, Psalms 19:1-6

Now consider this: Read Romans 10, and you’ll see that when Paul quotes this psalm, he’s using it to talk about the Gospel, not just the idea of ‘Intelligent Design’, going out to all the world. Now why on earth would Paul choose this passage to explain how/why the Gospel goes out to the whole world? (The ‘Gospel’ is essentially this: Christ’s death, burial and resurrection atoning for the sins of those who believe in Him).

Kinda makes ya wanna say “Hmmmmmmmmm”.

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Here are some links to some 19-et music:

http://www.parnasse.com/jh/blog/microtonal-index.html
http://www.io.com/~hmiller/music/index.htm

Here are some links on music theory:

http://www.skytopia.com/project/scale.html