By Bob Barney
I often mention that God’s calendar is NOT like any other calendar on earth today. It is not the Roman calendar that we follow, nor is it the equally pagan Jewish calendar that many churches believe is the calendar of God. To read more about God’s Calendar click here . There is a mistake made by those that follow a Jewish calendar and that refers to the word for ‘new moon’. That is a definite mistranslation as the proper rendering should be NEW MONTH, as I did express in The Plain Truth’s Red Letter Bible.
The Hebrew word ‘chodesh‘, which is in Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance, simply means “new” or to “rebuild.” Chodesh does not mean “new moon”. It means ‘new’ with an implication that a month is about to begin again.
Originally, when the earth had a perfect 360 day rotation around the sun and the moon’s journey around the earth was exactly 30 days (today it is 29.5 days), new moons where on the new months. The calendar was in balance. However, probably after the flood, the weight of water slowed the earth rotational spin (this is NOT mentioned in the Bible) to 365.25 days a year and the moon’s rotation to the present one of 29.5 days.
The ancients noticed that the months were no longer 30 days, and the years were not totaling 360 days anymore, but were over 365. A calendar needed to be made to reflect this. Egypt made the first perfect calendar, one Moses was very familiar with, which had 12, 30-day months and then an additional 5 days at the end of the year that did not count. This is also seen in Enoch’s calendar (see illustration above). God’s calendar was like the Egyptian one except that year no longer started on the first day of summer but on the first day of spring. Springtime is the birth of the new year in nature, as morning is the start of the day as well. The term for new moon became “new month” as the new moons and new months no longer matched up. This is not hard to conceive as the English word for month comes from moon, yet our months have nothing to do with new moons! The same applies to God’s calendar.
Happy NEW MONTH!