The issues of whether Christ ate the Passover in 31 A.D. on the early part of the 14^th of Abib or after the lambs had been slain at the Temple (on the evening of the 15^th) is an important one, for a number of reasons: 

1. Yeshua is the perfect example, and we are to follow in his footsteps.  If he observed the Passover with his disciples on the early 14^th, then we should do as he did. 
2. It is important whether or not his example in keeping the Passover confirms or contradicts the timing stipulations in the Law of Moses.   If he kept it correctly, then we need fear no contradiction between the Old Testament ordinance and the New Covenant ordinance of communion, which many take only on Passover night. 
3. If, as I discuss in my paper Passover and the Second Coming, Yeshua’s Return occurs on a Passover, then we want to be sure we are keeping this anniversary correctly.
4. Without a correct understanding of the timing of the final events leading up to his crucifixion, we cannot understand how Yeshua fulfilled Jonah’s sign of being three days and three nights in the heart of the earth (Matt. 12:40). 

Whether the Passover is on the 14^th or the 15^th of Abib largely depends on what one believes about the phrase bin ha’rebaim.  I will lay out the choices one has to make in making one’s decision about what to do with this phrase. 

Bin means “between”.  Ha is the Hebrew definite article. ‘rebaim is the dual plural of erev, and the lexicographers consistently render the phrase “between the two evenings.”  The question is not so much about the latter of these two evenings, which, almost everyone acknowledges, is nightfall. The definition of the first evening varies depending on whether or not you are a follower of rabbinic Judaism.  There have been inconsistent views among the rabbinic sages down through the centuries, with some saying it meant dusk, but the majority opinion being that it meant afternoon.  The Encyclopedia Judaica correctly defines bin ha‘reviym as twilight[1], whereas the majority of Judaism’s most respected sages falsely claim the first evening can be anytime after high noon.  Which is it?  

Erev Cannot Mean Anytime After Noon

Virually all the lexicons agree with Encyclopedia Judaica and the Biblical definition of bin ha’rebaim (as we shall see), which is dusk.  This is because it can be demonstrated that ba erev—sunset—is the first of the two evenings, not noon.  The word arav meant mixing.  The mixed multitudes that came out of Egypt with Israel (Exod. 12:38), were likely a mixture of ethnic groups, because later on the word Arab was understood to mean a race whose ancestry combined Hamitic (dark-skinned) with Semitic (light-skinned) bloodlines.  Therefore it was understood that erev has to do with the time of day when the light of the sun mixes with the dark of evening, or night.  It is difficult to reconcile such an understanding with the idea of mid-afternoon, when no such mixing occurs.

 Exodus 16—Proof Text for Defining Both Ba-erev and Bin ha’rebaim  

For those wishing to establish the meaning of bin ha’rebaim by strictly Biblical means, Exodus 16 is the proof text.  The encampment in verse 1 was no doubt on a Saturday, because Yahweh’s dealings with Moses that day concerned whether Israel would obey Yahweh’s Sabbath.commandment or not. This is evident from the fact that the following morning had to be a Sunday, the first of six days that Yahweh rained manna on the ground.  Yahweh’s statement that he intended to test the congregation’s obedience came on the heels of their complaint about the lack of meat and bread in their diet (16:2-3).  So Yahweh spoke to Moses in v. 12 and said “At twilight (bin ha’rebaim) you shall eat meat…” referring to the quail he was about to provide for the upcoming evening meal following the Sabbath.  The quail were sent at ba-erev (v. 13). The question I want to pose to you is this: Why would Yahweh tempt them to gather sticks [a capital offense, according to Numb 15:32], build a fire, and roast the quail by sending them at 3 p.m., well before the Sabbath was over?  Ex. 16:23 shows that it was not Yahweh’s desire that they bake or seethe the manna on the Sabbath, but on Friday, the preparation day.  Yahweh would have had the same concern about roasting the quail had he chosen to sent the quail at mid-afternoon, well before the Sabbath was over. Therefore, ba-erev—the time the quail were sent– cannot mean a time prior to sunset, otherwise the Israelites would have been tempted to take the quail and do work preparing and cooking them prior to the Sabbath being over.   

Furthermore, the fact that the quail were not sent until a well-defined point in time called ba-erev shows that bin ha’rebaim cannot be prior to ba-erev. One cannot cook or eat quail until they are sent. Vs. 13 says the quail came up at ba-erev, translated “at even” by KJV and “in the evening”–NKJV.  They ate the quail at dusk, during the approximate 90 minutes that comprise bin ha’rebaim. 

Since the opinion of the minority of rabbis who felt that bin ha’rebaim meant twilight did not carry the day, we do not find a discussion of their proof-text (Exod 16:12-13) anywhere in the Talmud, as one might have expected. That is because the majority opinion is wrong, and has no answer for the details in Exodus 16!   

 How Does One Count to the Fourteenth Day of Nisan?

 Having amply demonstrated that the start of Hebrew months was from the crescent of the moon, how does one count from that first crescent day to arrive at the 14^th of Aviv. At first glance, the timing of the original Passover looks straightforward enough:

“Your lamb shall be an unblemished male a year old; you may take it from the sheep or from the goats. You shall keep it until the fourteenth day of the same month, then the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel is to kill it at twilight (Hebrew בֶין הָערְבַיִם). “(Exod 12:5-6, NAS)

 The Hebrew preposition ‘until’ (Heb עַד־) means as far as, and would be the improper choice had Moses intended them to keep it through most of the 14^th. Note the Hebrew expression עַד־אָנָה to denote ‘until when’ in Exod 16:28: “Until when do you refuse to obey my commandments?” Strange as it may seem, the rabbis would have us believe that the phrase translated ‘twilight’ here, בֵין הָערְבַיִם, bin ha’rebaim, belongs to the end of the day instead of the beginning. The majority opinion in the Talmud is basically that בֵין הָערְבַיִם can mean anytime during the afternoon of a day, not just dusk.

The definition of a day has changed over the Millennia in Judaism. We are only concerned with how a day was delimited in the time of Moses in the Torah, since that is the original faith once delivered, at least as far as Passover timing is concerned. It is apparent that the sun was widely used to define the day throughout the ANE, as in Scripture, although Egyptian and African cultures used sunrise to start the day, contrary to everywhere else, where sunset began the day. However, rabbinic Judaism came to base its definition of a day based on the appearance of three stars:

Actual night begins only with the appearance of three stars in the sky…The twilight at the end of the Sabbath is calculated as still belonging to the Sabbath day which concludes with the appearance of three stars in the sky.[2]

This definition hardly meets biblical muster. The basis of the biblical day from antiquity is evident from the following passage (2 Sam 3:35, CJV):

All the people came to David and tried to make him eat some bread while it was still daytime; but David swore, “May God bring terrible curses on me … if I taste bread or anything else until the sun goes down (הַשֶׁמֶשׁ בוֹא)

The phrase הַשֶׁמֶשׁ וּכְבוֹא is synonymous with the onset of evening, as is clear from its appositional use with  עַד־עֵת הָעָרֶב(ad-ōt erev) in Josh 8:29: “[Joshua] hanged the king of Ai on the tree until the time of evening (עַד־עֵת הָעָרֶב (ad-ōt erev), even when the sun went down (הַשֶׁמֶשׁ וּכְבוֹא). Joshua commanded, and took the body down.” (Josh 8:29)[3]  Few are aware, however, that traditional Judaism defines the going down of the sun as any time after high noon. There is no use of the phrase  הַשֶׁמֶש בוֹא in the OT that would allow for this meaning, except by circuitous or a priori reasoning. This Hebrew construct הַשֶׁמֶשׁ בוֹא, the entering of the sun, connotes the entrance of the sun into another realm (as the ancients saw it) when it went over the horizon. The sun makes no such entrance during the afternoon. Since hangings were prohibited from being carried into the next day, it make no sense for Moses to use a vague phrase that meant anytime from noon to dark.        Notice Deut 21:22-23:

If someone has committed a capital crime and is …hung on a tree, his body is not to remain all night on the tree, but you must bury him the same day, because a person who has been hanged has been cursed by God- so that you will not defile your land, which Yahweh your God is giving you to inherit.

A day begins with evening (Hebrew ‘rev) in the Bible (see Gen 1:5, 8, 13, 19, 23; Lev 23:32; Neh 13:19; Mark 1:32; and Acts 27:27, 33). Mark 1:32 and Lev 23:32 both clearly show that evening begins at sundown; sundown constitutes the start of the day. The fast of the Day of Atonement, though designated as the 10^th of Tishri, is kept at “the 9^th day of the month at sunset (ba’rev, בָעֶרֶב), from evening until evening (מֵעָרֶב עד־עֶרֶב)” of the 10^th day. In this context, the preposition ba, meaning “at, in or on,” makes the time specific to sundown. The Hebrew verb ‘areb (Assyr. erēbu), from which evening is derived, means “enter, go under” (the earth). It was a primitive Semitic root word familiar to many other cultures throughout the Fertile Crescent—Akkadia, Sumeria, Canaanite, Ugaritic, Assyrian, etc. Everywhere ‘areb and its cognates meant “the going down and the going in.”[4] The sun goes down, entering the earth.[5] It came to signify the time of day when the sun’s setting forced laborers to go into their houses: “Man goes out to work and labors till evening (erev) falls.” (Ps 104:23) Hebrew economizes on this concept for its depiction of the direction west(ward), combining the preposition ma, מַ in front of erev. The resulting word מעְרָב is used 14 times in the OT to denote the place on the compass where the sun sets at even. The most common word for ‘west(ward)’ is יָמ, sea, i.e. the Mediterranean Sea, where the sun sets at evening. The later extension of the meaning of erev in Judaism allowing for the term to apply to any time during the afternoon, fails to give full weight to these Biblical passages. “Wolves of the evening” זְאֵבֵי עֶרֶב do not howl in the afternoon (Hab 1: 8; Zep 3:3). Aaron did not light the menorah in the tabernacle at 3 pm in the afternoon (Exod 30:8), but at bin ha’rebaim  (בֵין הָערְבַיִם) at twilight. Nearly all translations render it ‘dusk’ or ‘twilight.’ (The KJV’s ‘at even’ is somewhat less clear.) However, at some indefinite time during the intertestimental period, in a development paralleling the redefinition of “the going down of the sun” (הַשֶׁמֶשׁ בוֹא), Judaism came to also teach that erev (עֶרֶב) and its correlative bin ha’rebaim (בֵין הָערְבַיִם) meant anytime after high noon. Since our study only needs to establish practices and definitions extant at the time of Moses and Joshua, it does not concern us here when this change occurred. Later rabbinic reinterpretations of critical Biblical phrases sought to justify the oxymoronic practice of afternoon “evening sacrifices” as well as the afternoon killing of Paschal lambs. This late development was at variance with the original Paschal institution, a domestic affair carried out at dusk, bin ha’rebaim. Num 9:1-5 proves that all stipulations regarding the original Passover a year earlier continued unchanged in the wilderness. But when the House of Judah later forsook the Passover and fell into rank idolatry in the days of Hezekiah’s father, Ahaz, the common folk could no longer be entrusted with sacrificing the Passover lambs locally. When Hezekiah restored the temple and invited all Israel to his Passover celebration, it is likely that special regulations were put in place to ensure that only qualified personnel, the Levites and priests, performed this crucial sacrifice. This centralization of the Passover sacrifices to the temple necessitated (due to the sheer number) a change of time from the previous evening of the 14^th to the following afternoon of the same day. So long as Passover remained an individual household event, the limited time of dusk was sufficient for carrying out the slaughter of the Paschal lamb. The necessity of centralizing tens of thousands of Paschal sacrifices at one location, the temple, led to a redefinition of terminology.

Sunset brings the onset of dusk or ‘twilight’, which is defined by Encyclopedia Judaica (Vol. 15, 1971):

“The transition period between day and night, called in the Bible , bin ha’rebaim  (בֶין הָערְבַיִם, Ex. 12:6[6]), and in rabbinic literature bein ha-shemashot (בֵין הַשְמָשוֹת, Ber. 2b; Avot 5:9)”

The phrase bin ha’rebaim occurs eleven times, only in the Penteteuch. Five of them specify the time of day for offering the Paschal lamb, four for when the evening sacrifice was to be killed (Exod 29:39, 41; Num 28:4, 8), and the remaining two (Exod 16:12; 30:8) settle forever the matter of exactly what time of day is intended. Judaica’s statement above that the English word ‘twilight’ defines bin ha’rebaim (בֶין הָערְבַיִם) is clearly correct, as almost all translations concur, notably David Stern’s Complete Jewish Bible.

While many of the rabbis may have used bin ha’rebaim  and bein ha-shemashot synonymously, the expression bein ha-shemashot,בֵין הַשְמָשוֹת  (between the wests or between the suns), is unparalleled in Scripture, where שֶמֶשׁ always occurs in the singular, and never with בֵין, between. So the rabbinic expression is novel. For them it signified the period between high noon and dark, i.e. when the sun left the eastern part of the sky and sank in the west. But no expression containing erev could have signified the afternoon, for reasons already given. Furthermore, the word erev seems to have the connotation of the mixture of light and dark (i.e. dusk), as its homonym arav (עֵרֶב) is used for the mixed multitude which accompanied Israel out of Egypt, no doubt a mixed race of darker (Hamitic) and lighter-skinned (Semitic) people. The use of the phrase , bin ha’rebaim in Exod 16:12-13 is most instructive, as it is juxtaposed nicely with ba erev:

“At twilight (bin ha’rebaim= dusk) you shall eat meat [i.e. quailmeat], and in the morning [of Sunday] you will be filled with bread [manna];…at evening (ba erev, i.e. at sunset) quail came and covered the camp.”

The Israelites could not eat the quail until they dropped from the sky. Therefore, the arrival time of the quail, ba erev, must precede the time spoken of when they were to eat the quail, bin ha’rebaim. Furthermore, the context provides mutual definition for both terms, as this episode occurred on a Sabbath.[7] Yahweh had no intention of tempting the Israelites to break Sabbath with food preparation (see Exod 16:23) by sending the quail prior to the end of the Sabbath at sundown. Therefore, Moses is using the prepositional ba-erev to refer to sundown. The quail were sent at sundown, ba erev, and the Israelites killed, prepared and roasted quail in order to eat them during the dusk which followed, which period is called bin ha’rebaim. In arid desert climates like Sinai and Egypt, the period of twilight lasts anywhere from 70-90 minutes.

The situation in Exod 12:6 is exactly analogous to Exod 16:12-13. Israel was instructed to keep specially selected, perfect lambs (selected on the 10^th of Nisan) up until bin ha’rebaim of the 14^th of Nisan, at which time they were to be slain:

“Take special care of this chosen animal until [Heb עַד] the evening of the fourteenth day of this first month. Then the whole assembly of the community of Israel must slaughter their lamb or young goat at twilight.” (Exod 12:6, NLT)

The use of the preposition עַד told them to guard the lambs until the arrival of the 14^th, since the word means as far as, up to, until the beginning of something. Since the first part of any Hebrew day is evening, this means these lambs were kept until the end of Nisan 13, the arrival of the 14^th. As stated earlier, עַד is the wrong preposition to use if, according to the majority opinion in the Talmud, one were to keep it through the 14^th. If the Passover was on the 14^th, as per Exod 12:6, Lev 23:5; Num 28:16, then this sacrifice had to be done after sunset (ba erev) of the 13^th, not 21 hours later as became the custom.  

Leviticus 23:32 and Exodus 12:18 Prove Ba Erev Meant Sundown 

While Ex. 16 certainly looks as though ba-‘rev is being used to indicate the sending of quail at sunset, it is only one witness. However, at least two other passages in the law of Moses use ba-‘rev to refer to sunset. These passages, with a little bit of thoughtfulness, also show that ba-‘rev is the first of the two evenings.  The first passage is Ex. 12:18:

 ”In the first month, on the 14^th day of the month at even (ba-‘rev), ye shall eat unleavened bread, until the 21^st day of the month at even (ba-‘rev).” 

 The total number of days to the Feast of Unleavened Bread is seven.  Hence, ba erev is being used here as a demarcation point marking off the beginning and ending of days.  Sunset ba-‘rev of the 14^th to sunset ba-‘rev of the 21^st is seven whole days, each belonging to the Days of Unleavened Bread. Note that it is being used to refer to the end of the each day, in contradistinction to bin ha’rebaim in Exod 12:6 and 16:12, where the start of the new day is intended. Ba-’rev is used in a similar fashion to define carefully how to keep the all-important fast of the Day of Atonement in Lev. 23: 27, 32: 

“Also on the 10^th day of this seventh month there shall be a day of atonement…and ye shall afflict your souls (fast): in the 9^th day of the month at even (ba-‘erev), from evening unto evening, shall you celebrate your sabbath. ”

Hence, the expression ba-‘erev is seen to be the dividing line separating days, and is used when referring to the end of a particular day–to sunset.

The Original Meaning of the Ancient Root Word ‘rev 

In the learned Hebrew lexicons, which in the case of the Baumgartner Lexicon compares the primitive root ‘rev with all the other cognate, Semitic languages of the fertile crescent in ancient times.  ‘r’v in Akkadian, Sumerian, Arabic, Ugaritic, Egyptian and various stages of the development of Hebrew always referred to two things: the going down (of the sun), and the going in (to one’s house) at dusk, due to lack of light with which to work out in the fields.  This meaning is actually confirmed in Ps. 104:23: “Man goes forth unto his work and to his labor until the evening.”  This comports with every other passage we have discussed so far. 

Psalm 104 contains a number of precious clues that elucidate Yahweh’s timing:

He appointed the moon for seasons (Heb. moedim= appointed times), and the sun that knows its setting.  You make darkness, and it is night. 

Notice that scripture here associates the setting of the sun with the onset of darkness and night.  But in rabbinic Judaism, the going down of the sun is wrongly connected to anytime after high noon.  For the rabbis, erev, or evening, can be anytime in the afternoon.  But in Hab. 1:8, evening is intimately connected to wolves, which howl at night: “[the Chaldeans] horses are swifter than leopards, and sharper than evening wolves.”  Likewise, in Zeph. 3:3, Jerusalem’s judges are likened to evening wolves, which “pick clean the carcass, leaving nothing for the morning.”  The rest of Ps. 104:20, quoted above, says that night is the time “wherein all the beasts of the forest [including the wolf] do creep forth.”[8]    ‘rev, as seen in this context, is not a word associated with afternoon.  If both the rabbis and scripture are correct, then ‘rev would be a word that refers to any part of the day except morning time.  This is ridiculous. 

Anyone wishing to understand the dictionary definition of ‘rev and all its forms must study the lexicons, which have made it their business to accurately define the meaning of words at various stages of history.  If one does this[9], one will be in a position to defend the early 14^th Passover kept by Yeshua and his disciples, as well as the early 14^th Passover observed by Moses in Exod. 12.  

How Did the Priests and Temple Service Manage to Get Bin Ha’Rebaim Wrong? 

Both the evening sacrifice and the Passover (Ex. 12:6) were to be slain at bin ha’rebaim. Reliable historical sources tell us the priests at the Temple performed both of these operations during the first century between 1 and 3 pm. Hence, modern Judaism claims that the first evening is when the sun declines from its zenith at noon. But there is ample reason to believe that the priests were in error.

Just because the Levitical priests got accustomed to performing their evening sacrifices mid-afternoon during the period of the Second Temple does not prove that they were doing so at the time originally designated by Torah terminology. When the Passover eventually became more Temple-centered under Hezekiah and Josiah, when tens of thousands of lambs had to be slaughtered in a limited amount of time, no doubt changes had to be made in interpretations.  It is abundantly apparent to those who believe and know the truth that the Jewish authorities refrained from entering Pilate’s praetorium on the morning before the High Day so that they would not be ceremonially defiled and still be able to eat the Passover the coming evening (see John 18:28). This was clearly a night later than the Passover Yeshua and his disciples ate the early 14^th.  Eusebius of Caesarea, the father of Church history, argued, against the prevalent false opinion of his day, that the Jews were “acting contrary the Mosaic Law in the year of Jesus’s death.  They ought to have celebrated Passover on Thursday (Nisan 14), but observed it instead on Nisan 15”[10] Notwithstanding Eusebius’ false understanding of three days and three nights, at least he understood that Passover had to fall on the 14^th of the month, not the 15^th.

On this point the passages in the synoptic gospels are abundantly clear. In fact, in Appendix I of Alfred Edersheim’s book The Temple: Its Ministry and Services in the Time of Jesus the Messiah Edersheim says the plain, simple, common sense meaning of the synoptic passages (Matt. 26, Mark 14, and Luke 22) is that Yeshua did keep The Passover.  And since he thinks there were no individual domestic killings of lambs[11], he forces Yeshua’s Last Supper onto the evening of the 15^th [after lambs would have been available from the Temple Passover lamb sacrifices], and thus has Christ being crucified on the afternoon of the 15^th, instead of the 14^th.  This is clearly fallacious due to the fact that they rushed to get him down off the cross prior to the High Day (John 19:31). But Edersheim, as well as German scholar Joachim Jeremias, is absolutely correct about the preponderance of evidence that The Last Supper was The Passover.  And for all his erudition and extensive knowledge of Jewish customs and Talmudic writings, he does not even hint at there being such a thing as a “rehearsal” Passover as so many in Messianic Judaism have suggested. 

Yeshua and his disciples clearly ate the Paschal meal on the eve of the 14^th (Matt 26:17-19; Mark 14:12, 14, 16; Luke 22:16), the same night as Exod 12, but 24 hours before the Pharisees and other Sanhedrin members. John 18:28: says:

Then the Jews led Jesus from house of Caiaphas to the governor’s headquarters.  By now it was early morning [the morning after Christ and his disciples ate a proper Passover]. They themselves did not enter the governor’s headquarters, so that they would not be defiled, but could eat the Passover.

We are amazed at the large number of students of crucifixion chronology who make the mistake of assuming that the Jewish leaders were keeping a time-apropos Passover. Yeshua and his disciples ate the Passover after sunset of the 13^th of Nisan, just as it was done in the time of the Exodus, right along with thousands of other Jews.[12] The temple could not begin to accommodate the slaughter of lambs needed for two million pilgrims who came each year. But as to whether the temple authorities or the common people were killing the Passover lambs at the correct time, it seems evident that, based upon Luke 22:8, the lamb was correctly killed and prepared by Peter and John, “when the Paschal lamb had to be sacrificed” (edei yuesyai το πασχα),”[13] in other words, it was compulsory, based on the law of the Passover itself. BDAG is surely correct in placing this use of dei in the category of law. Thus Luke’s choice of words here is most emphatic, specifying that the lawful time for offering Passover had arrived at the end of the 13^th. And since Luke reckons narrative days from morning to morning (as opposed to calendar days),[14] the day he is specifying ran from the morning of the 13^th, until dawn of the 14^th. This day came to be known as ‘the first day of the unleaveneds’ because it was the first day for deleavening one’s house and property, according to the Jewish custom of the day.

Mark 14:12 may be used to prove the same truth, that very late on ‘the first day of the unleaveneds,’ Nisan 13, Yeshua’s disciples came to him and asked him where he wished to eat the Passover. Mark 14:12 uses the imperfect tense to describe the time when the disciples asked Christ this question –οτε το πασχα εθυον–it was when they were [already] killing the Passover. This could not possibly be construed as the late 14^th, since the next day is still called the παρασκευη, “preparation day” (Mark 15:42; Luke 23:54; John 19:31, 42)—a day which precedes Sabbaths or High Days–in this case the day preceding the 15^th of Nisan, this latter being known as “the First Day of Unleavened Bread.” There are more than a dozen references (nine of them with the definite article) in the Synoptic Gospels to Yeshua and his disciples eating to pascha, the night before he was crucified.[15] The Synoptic accounts of the Passover can be reconciled with John 18:28 by the realization that many Jews in the first century killed the Paschal lamb at their homes at the end of the 13^th of Nisan, and not at the Temple on the next day. (At the end of this study we cite several passages in Philo and Josephus that bear this point out.)

Several scriptures besides Exod 12:6 state that Passover is on the 14^th of the month (Lev 23:5; Nu 28:16-17; Josh 5:10). It is a separate and distinct appointed time from the 15^th of the month, which is the High Day of Unleavened Bread. Passover commemorates yearly what we could not do for ourselves, that is, atone for our sin. It is hence a memorial of our Savior’s Last Supper, his torture and the shedding of his precious blood during the crucifixion. The Last Day of Unleavened Bread, also a Christian institution (1 Cor 5:7-8), stands for the effort required to exercise our will and overcome sin. It would have done the Israelites no good whatsoever had they failed, after being spared the plagues, to march out of Egypt. Likewise, it does the modern Christian little eternal good to “accept Jesus” and then fail to choose obedience over a life of iniquity. The 15^th – 21^st of Nisan commemorate the departure of the children of Israel from Egypt, and remind the Christian of his need to use his spiritual endowments, including the power of both the human spirit (the candle of Yahweh—Prov 20:27) and the Holy Spirit, to “work out one’s own salvation with fear and trembling.” (Phil 2:12) The first High Day is explicitly said to be on the morrow after the Passover (Num 33:3). The night upon which the death angel passed over the land of Egypt was the night of the 14^th, one night prior to the Exodus. The Passover is therefore to be eaten on the evening portion of the 14^th (at the end of the 13^th of Nisan) not the 15^th as is the “Passover” practice of Judaism. Scholarly debate and confusion on this matter are as old as the Talmud. Several statements of various rabbis in the Talmud show that they believed the Exodus took place on the same night as the ‘passing over’ of the death angel and the Passover meal. But this is impossible, as the Israelites were strictly commanded: “None of you shall go outside the door of his house until morning.” (Exod 12:22) The light of dawn was, in fact, the signal to all Israel in Goshen that it was now safe to leave their homes and begin the business of getting out of Egypt. Some have supposed that because Pharaoh summoned Moses by night, that they went out on the same night. Notice: “And he called for Moses and Aaron by night, and said, Rise up, get out from among my people, both you and the children of Israel; and go, serve Yahweh, as ye have said.” (Exodus 12:31) But Pharaoh’s mid-night summons would have had no bearing on the earlier prohibition distributed throughout Goshen for the Israelites to stay in their houses that night.

Not only did the Israelites not leave Egypt the same night as the Passover meal, they did not leave the next day! This idea comes from those believing in a 15^th Passover who are forced into this argument because unless, under their scenario, the Israelites left on the day portion of the 15^th, then the Exodus could not take place until 16 Nisan, which is patently ridiculous. A number of matters weigh heavily against the notion that the Israelites left Egypt the following day after eating the Paschal meal. This time would naturally have been consumed by two exigencies. The first involved Israel requesting and collecting valuables of gold, silver and jewels from the Egyptians (Exod 12:35), who were all too willing to give in order to hasten Israel’s departure. This ‘plundering’ could not have taken place prior to the death of the Firstborn, otherwise verse 35 is out of place. It is the motivation provided by the death of the Firstborn that precipitates the expeditious collection of the next day. It fulfilled the promise made to Abraham four hundred years earlier that his descendants would leave Egypt with great wealth. (Gen 15:14) The second necessity was logistical in nature; the Israelites could not leave Egypt until they had assembled their nearly three million people at a staging location, Rameses:

These are the stages in the journey of the people of Israel as they left the land of Egypt divided into groups under the leadership of Moses and Aaron. Moses recorded each of the stages of their journey by order of Yahweh; here are the starting-points of each stage: They began their journey from Rameses in the first month, on the 15th day of the first month…(Num 33:1-2, Complete Jewish Bible, with sacra nomina name restored.)

As mentioned elsewhere in this book, Rameses is a later name given the most important city in NE Egypt, called Avaris by the Hyksos, and Penuphre (meaning “happy journey in hieroglyphics) at the time of the Exodus. This was an ideal location for storage warehouses (KJV ‘treasure cities’ is translated ‘store cities’ by CJB, NET, NAS, NIV, NJB. ‘Supply centers’ of NLT is the best rendition.), due to the fact that Penuphre was the best location for supplying Egypt’s military outposts along the Levant. Since it was the main port city, warehouses were also required there for transshipment of goods being traded between Crete, Cyprus, Tyre, etc. and Egypt.

We marvel at those who skip over the time and logistical necessity of the Israelites rendevousing at Rameses. Obviously to assemble by ranks an entire city with a population approaching that of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area and a geographical sprawl no less than that of the Phoenix, AZ, would have taken considerable organization, discipline, and urgency. Therefore when Scripture tells us they went out of Egypt ‘by night,’ (Deut 16:1) that night had to be the succeeding night after the Passover night. The staging area for the Exodus is clearly the city of Rameses, according to Num 33:2. Those who try to truncate this scenario into one night are divorcing Scripture from sound reason and logic. Clearly if the Paschal meal had been eaten on the eve of the 15^th, the Exodus could not have occurred until the night of 16 Nisan, contradicting Num 33:2 above.

            Mark 14:12 Demolishes the Theory of a 15^th Passover of the Pharisees 

The Greek verb tense in Mark 14:12a shows that when John and Peter were sent by Yeshua to make preparations for the eating of the Passover, the Passover lambs were being killed [already]. Word Biblical Commentary by Craig A. Evans (Thomas Nelson Pub.) p. 368 translates Mark 14:12:               

“And on the first day of the “Unleaveneds”, when they were slaughtering (Gr. =thuo, to sacrifice) the Passover Lamb, his disciples say to him, ‘Where do you wish that we go to prepare, that you may eat the Passover?’” 

Since the Jews did not kill lambs at the Temple until the following day, this verse is evidence that domestic observance (ie. lamb slaying at individual households ala Exod 12) was underway when the disciples posed their urgent question, and confirms what Philo said about this being the only time of the liturgical year when the head of household had the right to do the work of a priest sacrificially.

Philo was a Jewish scholar, philosopher and descendant of Aaron, born just a few years before Yahshua of Nazareth in Alexandria, Egypt. He died right before the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.   He was a contemporary of Josephus, but much more highly educated, seeing that Josephus had spent most of his life as a warrior and as a general.  Philo left us a large body of writings. And he recorded how the Passover was kept by his own people in the first Century. What he had to say was very interesting!  In his book The Decalog, page 159: 

“The day called by the Hebrews in their own tongue Pashe (Passover), in which the whole people sacrifice, every member of them, without waiting for the priest; because the LAW HAS GRANTED TO THE WHOLE NATION, FOR ONE SPECIAL DAY IN EVERY YEAR, the right of the priesthood and of performing the sacrifices themselves.” 

The great bulk of the common people were killing the Passover at their homes just as the Law stipulated.  In his book Despeck (page 45), Philo says this: 

“After the New Moon comes the 4^th Feast, called the Crossing Feast, which the Hebrews in their native tongue call Pasha.   In this festival many myriads of victims are offered by the whole people, old and young alike, RAISED FOR THAT PARTICULAR DAY TO THE DIGNITY OF THE PRIESTHOOD.  For at other times, the priests, according to the ordinance of the Law, carry out both the public sacrifices and those offered by private individuals.  But on this occasion, the whole nation performs the sacred rites and acts as priests.” 

  Furthermore, a reading of Edersheim and an extensive knowledge of the rabbinic writings show that the 13^th was indeed considered ‘the first of the unleaveneds”, as the Marcan passage would suggest.  Jews were instructed to begin to get leaven out of their houses on the 13^th day, Exod. 12:15 notwithstanding, where it appears that the 15^th was the day for de-leavening.

To summarize our findings:

1. The Jews were not performing the Passover sacrifice or the evening sacrifice according to the time specified in the Torah.
2. Yeshua and his disciples were keeping Passover correctly, on the early 14^th. 

Many in the sabbatarian movement have gone backwards and have decided to side with the Jews instead of with Yahshua and His disciples. Some in these last day are so heady and high-minded (see 2 Tim 3:1-4), that they can twist and pervert the plain sense of the Gospel accounts and imagine that somehow Yeshua did not even eat the Passover at all the night he was seized by the Jewish authorities, which was less than an hour after he ate the meal with his disciples. No common-sense farmer, or blue-collar, no-nonsense, hard-working man worth his salt could ever read Matt. 26 and Luke 22 and Mark 14 and come away with any other conclusion but that Yeshua ate the Passover that John and Peter had prepared.

Some insist that Yeshua could not be our Passover unless he was killed at the same time as the Exodus 12 lamb. This is elevating the importance of type over antitype. It is making the antitype slave to the type. Yeshua was killed when he was killed because of sin, mistakes, confusion, and that is the type that is being met, i.e. sin, including that of the priests and their timing, which is actually referred to in Dan 8:12! Yahweh wanted his Paschal Lamb’s death to line up with their practice, even though it was different from the original stipulations for the type. It worked out perfectly for Yeshua to be able to expound on the real meaning of the Passover in John 13-17, which we would not have had had he been arrest and killed on the eve of the 14^th, interrupting the Last Supper/Passover meal. It is miracle enough that Yeshua ends up being crucified on a Passover day. To say that the Jews had to kill him according to Torah or he can’t be the Messiah, is blasphemous, and ignores the fact that Yeshua said “none of you [Jews] keeps the Law.”  If the Jews had been doing everything according to the Book, they would never have needed the Passover Lamb from Yahweh in the first place. 

“The scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses seat, therefore whatever they tell you to observe, that observe and do. But do not according to their works; for they say and do not.” 

Matt. 23:3 has had more doctoral dissertations written about it than any other passage in the gospels. Why? Because the way the Textus Receptus reads, it appears to make Yeshua contradict everything else he said about the Pharisees’ teaching. So many have scratched their heads trying to reconcile Matt. 23:2-3 with the plain statements of Yeshua in Mark 7 and Matt. 15, and many others places. Yeshua did not endorse the teaching of the Pharisees, but warned his disciples to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which was their doctrine (Mk. 8:15). 

The problem is solved when one looks at other ancient texts of Matthew, such as the 13^th C. Shem Tov Hebrew version. There the pronoun “they” in the phrase “whatsoever they bid you do,” is clearly singular, even though Shem Tov mistakenly translates it “they.”  So he had no axe to grind.  But the singular “he” solves a multitude of problems by making the passage refer to Moses, ie therefore whatsoever he [Moses] bids you do, that do, but do not according to their [the scribes and Pharisees’] works.[16]  Pappias, Eusebius, Jerome and others actually verify that a Hebrew version of Matthew existed way back in their day, the 4^th and 5^th Century, respectively.  

Some commentators have suggested that Eliyah’s encounter with the prophets of Ba’al in 1 Kgs 18:29, 36 indicates that bin ha’rebaim  was mid-afternoon, despite the absence of this phrase in the passage, which admittedly depicts a time well before sunset. Unfortunately, the phrase is different from all the other places in the Bible that refer to the evening sacrifice. In fact, the word “evening”, ’rev, is not even in the expression, nor are the words “at the time of,” though certainly this latter phrase is implied. But Green’s Interlinear says “they prophesied until the offering up of the offering” (18:29). The same phrase occurs in verse 36, and undoubtedly refers to the same thing. But it is evident that the sacrifice being referred to is the bull that Eliyah cut in pieces and laid on the altar. Verses 31-35 tells us that much time and preparation went into digging the trench around this altar, and in filling their waterpots and transporting much water to the altar so that the wood, the burnt sacrifice, and the trenches around the altar were all filled with water. Verse 29 is simply telling us that all the while this prodigious effort was underway, that the prophets of Baal were prophesying and crying out to Baal at their altar, etc., and that this went on concurrent with Eliyah’s preparation of the altar that he was building for the name of Yahweh.

One thing is fairly certain: if the prophesying and ranting of the false prophets was not coincidental with Eliyah’s work on the altar to Yahweh, but prior to the building of the trenches, then the phrases “until the offering up of the sacrifice” in vss. 29 and 36 must have been at different times, with the latter being hours later than the other, since Eliyah’s preparations were rather involved and arduous.  Verse 36 says: “It came to pass at the offering up of [Eliyah’s] sacrifice, that Eliyah the prophet came near and invoked Yahweh’s confirmation that he alone was God in Israel. Since the setting was not the Temple, there is no reason to think it was referring to the time of the evening sacrifice. This was a unique event, and it took place at Mt. Carmel, not Jerusalem. Find another place in scripture where this phrase occurs.  You cannot.  The absence of ’rev in this passage, as well as the standard language used to refer to the evening sacrifice, makes this argument ex silencio.

Additional weighty arguments may be adduced to show that Eliyah’s sacrifice was NOT an evening sacrifice. He offered a bull, whereas the evening sacrifice was a lamb (Exod 29:38-39, 41) The foregoing analysis makes this passage unusable as a proof text for the argument that bein ha-‘rebayim means mid-afternoon, unless one is a Talmudic apologist with an axe to grind. The JPS’ (Jewish Publication Society translation and commentary) suggestion that 1 Kgs 18:29-36 constituted a “meal offering” is ludicrous.

How many fundamental things do the Jews get right that are fundamental to our faith?  Let me count the ways.

1. They tell us a day begins when two stars appears an hour or two after sunset.
2. They tell us a month begins at the conjunction, unless that would cause the Day of Atonement to fall on a Wednesday, Friday, or Sunday, in which case they delay the start of Tishri by one or two days.  Where did these rules of delay come from?  The Jewish scholars all tell us the present fixed Jewish calendar was not in place until the 11^th Century, and that the fixing of the years of intercalation (13^th month) was the only thing accomplished by Hillel II in the 4^th Century.
3. They tell us that the sacred year begins in the 7^th month instead of Abib.  See Exod. 12:2.  Anyone who argues this point is simply uninformed. The term rosh hashanah (head of the year), came about after the fall of the Temple, as the Jewish writings of the 2^nd Century make clear. 
4. They tell us to pass over the Passover night and celebrate only the Exodus on the night of the 15^th of Abib.  Go to a synagogue service on their Passover and see for yourself how little talk there is of the death angel passing over at midnight.  The whole emphasis is on the Exodus, which was not a Passover event.  These occurred on separate nights, since no one was to leave their houses until morning after the Passover meal.  If the Jews are correct that Passover was eaten on the 15th, and this order was strictly complied with, it forces the Exodus to be on the 16^th, which is patently unscriptural.
5. They keep Pentecost on Sivan 6 every year, which obviates the need to count in order to arrive at the date.  The Sadducees did have this correct, and always counted from the morrow after the weekly Sabbath when the omer of barley was first cut.  

There is so much more that must be said on this subject.[17] One thing is certain, our righteousness is not exceeding that of the scribes and Pharisees (cf. Matt 5:20), without which we shall in no wise enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. Whatever the truth on this subject, it shouldn’t take a Rhodes scholar to figure out. And one thing is for sure, the rules of delay and the fixed calendar of the Jews is one complicated, confusing, impossible-to-square-with-scripture conundrum capable of crossing the eyes of PhD astronomers and mathematicians. The rabbis argued for many years over 3761 B.C. or other years surrounding it as the first year of creation (and hence the year for starting the 19 year time cycle).  Yet we know that Adam and Eve go back at least two hundreds before that time, and that Rosh Hoshana—the first day of creation, according to these same rabbinic sages—fell on Monday in 3761, not the first day of the week.

If it is important to keep the Holy Days on the correct days of the month, and if one must become like a little child in order to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, then I submit this subject is capable of being simplified and explicable to children and teenagers.  Only adults with axes to grind and people to please, instead of knives sharpened by the Holy Spirit and the Word, have made this a subject for elitists. The major feast-keeping Christian groups defer to the Jews in determining the correct timing of the feasts, and relinquish judgment and discernment to them. They assume that the Jews were given custody of the calendar, hence, we must simply close our eyes to their obvious errors of making Tishri the head of the year, of delaying the beginning of months to accommodate rules that can be found nowhere in the Bible, and failing to use the light of the moon in an empirical manner. They have created an orthodoxy that is no more acceptable to a Torah-observer than Roman Catholicism is to a conscientious Christian.

 The strict construction of bin ha’rebaim shows that Yeshua and His disciples kept the Passover at the beginning of the 14^th of Abib, fourteen days after a visible crescent.  Thus, the Temple authorities were killing the Passover and the evening sacrifice at the wrong time in the afternoon (3 PM) during the afternoon portion of Aviv 14. This was part and parcel of the transgression concerning the continual daily sacrifice (the tamiyd) that Daniel referred to in Dan. 8:12, which caused “the sanctuary and the host to be trodden under foot” by Antiochus Epiphanes in 167 B.C. This error continued with the practices under the Second Temple authorities during the time of the Herods. And because of the Jews’ erroneous understanding, they will build a third Temple in the near future (prophesy requires it) where they will commit the same transgressions in the daily sacrifice that they committed in Roman times.  So this is hardly a moot issue. The fate of the Third Temple may be tied directly to the issue of when (and where) the Passover Lamb was designated to be sacrificed, strange as it may seem to those who have not thought about it. The highly strange phenomena (detailed in the Talmud) which occurred at the Temple–its lamps, its gates, the casting of lots for the Day of Atonement goat, angelic appearances and voices, etc.—between 31 and 70 A.D. all point to Yahweh not accepting their Temple rituals after the death of Yeshua in 31 A.D.[18] To say that there was ample warning that Judgment was about to come is an understatement. 

So the Truth about the evening sacrifice affected matters at the time of the Maccabbees and at the time of the fall of the Second Temple. To be sure, there were more serious moral deficiencies such as Hellenism, immorality, unjustified divorces, pre-occupation with sports, adding laws that were not written in the Torah, and a priesthood that was neglecting their duty to teach the people scripture. Yet Daniel 8:12 says it was the transgression in the continual (Heb. tamiyd) evening (‘rev) and morning sacrifices that caused the host of the Jews to be taken captive and their sanctuary trodden under foot. It is not a coincidence then that all during the time when Hellenism was gaining ground among the Jews during the Ptolemaic period (302-198 B.C.), the people were disinterested in religion and no major teacher of Judaism arose during that period. 

Now that we understand bin ha ereviym and the proper timing of the Passover sacrifice (and the evening sacrifice), one more puzzle piece fits properly into place to help us complete the picture of how Yeshua fulfilled the three days and three nights in 31 A.D.

Keeping the Passover at the right time and in the right manner was critical to the salvation of ancient Israel (not just at the time of the Exodus), and for some of us at the end of the Age it may be equally crucial to our salvation.  Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free from the errors of men.

Todd Derstine © 2008

[2] Article “Twilight,” Encyclopedia Judaica, Vol. 15, 1474.

[3] It would appear that the waw (וּ) here is being used epexegetically, together with the temporal use of כְ.

[4]  The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, Vol. II (New York: Brill: 1995) 877.

[5] Charles C. Torrey, “Studies in the Aramaic of the First Century A.D.,” ZAW 65 (1953), 240.

[6] The Complete Jewish Bible, transl. David Stern, uses ‘dusk’ here; at Lev 23:5 he translates bein ha-arbayim “between sundown and complete darkness.”

[7] Manna fell the next morning, a Sunday morning, the first of six successive days of manna.

[8] Yet messianic rabbis have argued with me that wolves howl in the afternoon.  That is how far they are willing to go to maintain Passover on the 15^th of Aviv.

[9] It is apparent to me that failure to consult and believe the lexicons on bin ha ereviym and erev has not stopped most of the Worldwide Church of God and Messianic leaders and pastors from pontificating erroneously against these words referring to the beginning of the 14^th.   Thankfully, the largest offshoot (United Church of God) of the Armstrong Holyday-keeping movement still teaches the truth about this subject.

[10] See ref. to Eusebius’ On the Easter Festival in Georges Declercq, Anno Domini,(Brepols, 2000), p. 16.

[11] Philo and Josephus’ statements bearing on this subject prove that Paschal lambs were still killed and eaten at people’s home in the first century.)

[12] The appendix “Were Passover lambs killed at people’s houses during the time of Christ?” may be studied to show the unique nature of the Passover sacrifice.

[13] Bauer, Danker, Arndt, Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the NT (University of Chicago Press, 1979), 172.

[14] Morgenstern, Crozer Quarterly 26 (1949) 232-240. Acts 27:27, 29, 33 demonstrate, however, that Luke understands calendar days in the traditional way as running from evening thru the day portion of the next day.

[15] The reader may contemplate the following twelve Gospel verses to satisfy himself that the Savior and His disciples actually ate The Passover the night following Nisan 13.  Each verse has the definite article before Passover, ta pasca– Matt. 26:2, 17, 18, 19; Mark 14:12 (2x), 14, 16; Luke 22:7, 11, 13, 15.

[16] For a concise explanation of Matt. 23:2, consult “The Greek Jesus”

[17] We have an excellent paper—The Two Ditches–on the influence of Judaism on the Messianic movement.

[18]  And the research of Dr. Ernest Martin indicates strongly that the site they choose for this next Temple will be unholy.  The Haram esh Sharif where the Dome of the Rock is today was not the location of the Temples.

Todd Derstine

www.americaspropheticdestiny.com 

            In the forward to the KJV we see King James’s instructions in so many words: “In your translating, see that you uphold the institutions of the Anglican Church.” Don’t get me wrong, I actually admire the KJV and its penchant for literal, pungent translation coupled with its poetic dignity where needed. But there is at least one word, however (occurring almost solely in the book of Acts), which the KJV committee has pleased one man more than God in so translating that word, and that word is dialegomai, to dialogue, conduct a discussion (BDAG). “Preached” of the KJV in Acts 20:7 simply won’t do, especially when the same word is translated “reasoned” in 17:2 and 18:4, and “disputed” in 17:17. It is apparent from Jude 9 that Michael did not “preach” to Satan about whether he was going to have the body of Moses or not, this must have more in the nature of a dispute or argument, as in Acts 17:17. So four of its five occurrences, the KJV got the word right. The important aspect of this word is that of interaction with another, a reasoning through the mind of one’s hearer(s), which always requires an open format where questions and comments are entertained.

            In the instance of 20:7, the KJV translators, –which appeared to them to be a precedent-setting Sunday church meeting (Calvin, however, arguing with John Chrysostom, thought it was on “one of the Sabbaths”)–go out of their way to prop up a sermon format which has its roots in Greek and Roman oratory[1](cf. Tertullus, Acts 24:1), not Hebrew or biblical custom. The sermon format was an offshoot of the pagan homily, which Augustine and other prominent Church theologians (Tertullian the lawyer, John Chrysostom, Lactantius, Cyprian, Arnobius, etc.) were instrumental in bringing into the church. These men were trained in pagan oratory and philosophy, both highly-valued fields of endeavor in classical Greece and Rome. While this skill may have been suited to winning political debates, lucrative tutoring, and/or putting one over on a Roman magistrate, its adoption into the homily format of speaking in the church was probably not what God had in mind for his Church, given Paul’s comments on church teaching format in I Corinthians chapter 14. There, Paul, starting in verse 29, instructs the others in the church how to judge those speaking for God (called ‘prophets’). The prophet who has the floor is to yield to another to whom something is revealed (v. 30). For all to learn and be comforted, all must be permitted to exercise their gift (v. 31). The soliloquizing sermon format of the Church seems out of place in Paul’s discussion of proper order. Where did Paul get his sense of proper order? Probably from the synagogues of the first century. Had the synagogue not had a somewhat open format for educated individuals like the Apostle Paul, one wonders how much less successful Paul would have been in planting churches. Likewise, Yeshua in the synoptic Gospels taught in many a synagogue, despite the fact that he had not been tutored in any particular rabbinic academy. In the book of Acts, conversion of Greek proselytes and prominent Jewish women, as well as some of the Jewish men, would never have come about had Paul tried to bowl them over with oratory. Maybe the Greeks and Romans were addicted to wired that way, but not the kind of hellenistic thinkers who had already forsaken the wickedness of Greek paganism for Jewish monotheism. And certainly the Jewish mindset was intolerant toward demagogues incapable of reasoning prudently and clearly from the scriptures.

            It seems strange that we should finally realize the value in going out and doing community surveys to find out the local unmet needs, people’s personal opinions about churches, pastors, and perceptions about Christians by non-Church attenders, what they would like to see changed the most in church—engage in all this dialogue to show how much we value their opinions and feelings, and then drop this approach once we snag the new member. In other words, what works evangelistically should be valued as a method of discipling people also.

            As rulers under Christ in his earthly rule, the responsibilities of many will entail the ability to speak before large groups of people, not just for teaching purposes, but in order to find out what needs improving in the governance of land and city. Unfortunately the homily/sermon format was developed by a church who saw herself as already having inherited her kingdom from Caesar and tried as she did to squelch talk of when this 6000 year period of human mismanagement would be over. She was not much interested in training leaders for the world tomorrow, oddly enough. One measure by which we might begin to judge churches by is the number of true speaking and leadership opportunities they afford their adult membership. I for one believe the end-time church will be judged partly on how she has prepared believers in this age for rulership in the kingdom. It seems me that one way to do this would be to use churches today for the same kind of purposes they were used during the colonial days and during the formation of this nation in the 18^th century…for town hall meetings where matters of relevance to the community and the nationare discussed regularly, and where biblical law and prophetic perspectives are not despised (1 Thes 5:20). In a day when pragmatic, hard-nosed, thinking Americans are desperate for answers or a genuine Divine perspective on our suicidal body politic, this approach could be a crucial part of restoring a sense of relevance to the Church of Jesus Christ. A side benefit of these town meetings could be an increase in church attendance depending on the level of discussion achieved and the sense of understanding and wisdom people walk away with.

            We agree with Frank Viola and George Barna’s negative assessment of the conventional sermon on the church over the past 500 years of Protestantism:           

   ” The sermon makes the preacher the virtuoso performer of the regular church gathering. As a result, congregational participation is hampered at best and precluded at worst…The congregation degenerates into a group of spectators who watch a performance. There is no room for interrupting or questioning the preacher while he is delivering his discourse. The sermon freezes and imprisons the functioning of the body of Christ. It fosters a docile priesthood by allowing pulpiteers to dominate the church gathering week after week.”[2] 

            The words of Christ certainly are apropos at this point: “That which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God.” (Luke 16:16)       

            A final thought on why this kind of approach may not be in favor with “the woman”, the Church. We see that the word dialegomaiis translated correctly, depending on the context, as to dispute or to argue. The reader will note that the modern attitude towards heated, respectful discussion, especially in the church, is decidedly unfavorable. Until pusillanimous women and men get over such unbiblical, unChristlike petulance, we should begin to address this issue from the pulpit. It certainly was not the attitude in the manly town meetings of yesteryear, let alone in the early colonies. To “quit yourselves like men” certainly involves the freedom to fight for the truth like a man. 1 Cor 15:13 almost sounds like the instructions of an army captain to his squadron: “Watch ye, stand fast in the truth, quit yourselves like men, be strong.”

            We are a church drunk on all the soft (feminine, if you will) concepts of Christianity, such as grace, misapplied and misunderstood. Perhaps that is why God has chosen to picture her prophetically as a woman. It is this soft side that has caused the moral majority Christian community in this country to fail to identify evil as Yahweh defines it, or to tolerate it in the name of “loving the sinner and hating the sin.” Yahweh says, “Tolerate neither, I will resurrect and bring them to understanding conversion in a better world later.” How will we be judged if we sit by and watch a nation die for lack of answers and a paucity of men with wisdom who are content to say, “Well, we never talked about politics or public policy in my church, but at least we had peace.” The dead also have peace.

[2]Viola and Barna, Pagan Christianity, 97.

1 Corinthians 14:34-35

Were These Verses Part of Paul’s Original Letter to the Corinthians?

“Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also the Law says. And if they desire to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is improper for a woman to speak in church.”

Do these two verses belong in Paul’s epistle? For those of a fundamentalist persuasion, the answer is a facile Yes, based on the idea that God has preserved his Word to us intact. However, the apostle John, when putting his priestly seal upon the book of Revelation, pronounced a curse on anyone adding to or taking away from the words of the prophecy of that book (Rev 22:18-19). This was the accepted way of sealing the Canon of any book or Covenant, but the very mention of such a thing shows that John understood there were those in his day as well as their spiritual children who would have no qualms about altering or speaking falsely in the name of the early apostles. In their desire to play upon the credulity of various adherents of Christianity, various writers in the second half of the second century wrote pseudonymous gospels and epistles—The Epistle of Barnabas, The Gospel of Thomas, The Apocalypse of Peter, The Last Gospel of Peter, Nicodemus, The Gospel of the Birth of Mary—to name just a few. A study of the variant readings of the school of copyist based in Alexandria, Egypt (the Alexandrine school)—Codices Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, and Alexandrinus—indicates how bold these men were in eliminating or adding entire verses, words or letters to suit their theological biases against the New Testament’s favorable treatment of the Law of God, OT holy days, women, Jews, or sexual relations in the sanctity of marriage. While the codices mentioned are among the oldest complete NT MSS. available to us, yet we often have witnesses from various second century versions–Tatian’s Diatessarron, old Latin versions, early apostolic and Church fathers, and the Peshitta—which indicate variant readings that must have predated those in Alexandria, and that their professional methods of reproducing the NT did not carry over into a reverential fear of altering what lay before them. Most importantly for the subject of this paper, when we get down into the “nitty gritty” of textual evidence—sigla for variant readings—we shall find evidence within Codex Vaticanus (B) itself that indicates the above-quoted verses in 1 Cor 14:34-35 were interpolated into the epistle. And so the truth-seeker must exercise due diligence to ascertain which variant readings represent the mind of Yahweh and the apostles.

Considering that our earliest MSS date only to the mid-4^th century (Sinaiticus) and early 5^th century Vaticanus (B), the MS which casts the greatest aspersion on the integrity of 1 Cor 14:34-35, Codex Fuldensis (546 A.D.), is considered by textual critics to be a rather early witness. P. B. Payne, the text-critical scholar upon whom I am indebted for my understanding of the matters at hand, makes this statement about Codex Fuldensis (CF) and its editor, Bishop Victor:[1]

[CF] is the earliest dated ms. of the NT and the only early NT ms. that, so far as we know, was personally edited by one of the eminent scholars of the early church. Daniell notes that ‘the whole MS. was carefully revised and corrected by Victor, in whose hand are three notes, one at the end of Acts, and two at the end of the Apocalypse, respectively recording that he had finished reading the MS. on 2 May, AD 546, and a second time on 12 April AD 547….As a result of Victor’s oversight and corrections, [Bruce] Metzger judges its text to be ‘very good’.[2] Nestle calls it ‘one of the oldest and most valuable manuscripts of the Vulgate.’[3]

Those familiar with the fact that the phrase “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit”  in 1 John 5:7-8 was a very late interpolation,[4] will be interested in knowing that Victor was astute enough to omit this interpolation in CF, even though CF’s preface, written by Jerome, alleges that the early Latin translators deliberately omitted it. Payne goes on to state:

His astute judgments, combined with his keen interest in ancient mss., and his privileged access as a bishop to ancient mss., give the revisions he oversaw in the production of Fuldensis a unique value.

All of the various Vulgate texts have vv. 34-35 in the traditional position after vs. 33, except codex Reginensis two centuries after Victor. This accounts for his following the Vulgate text which was before him, which placed vv. 34-35 after vs. 33. Thus CF is essentially a revision of Jerome’s Vulgate which notes preferable textual variants which Victor had to choose from. Victor chose the Vulgate text as the base text for his manuscript. His main interest was to publish a recently-discovered copy of the long-suppressed Diatessaron of Tatian, a harmonistic version of the Four Gospels ca. A.D. 150-160. But he probably had an individual copy[5] of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, also from the second century. Victor commissioned a scribe to write CF for the express purpose of incorporating what Victor’s eminent scholarship suggested were preferable variant readings from ancient mss., which he placed in the margins.

Here then is what Bishop Victor instructed his scribe to do when he came to the end of 1 Cor 14:33. He put an ‘hd’ siglum[6] mark in the margin immediately after the end of v. 33. This ‘hd’ points to the variant reading verses (vv. 36-40 omitting vv. 34-35) reproduced in the bottom margin. (This siglum was used eight other places throughout the codex to do the same.) At the end of vs. 40 was another identical siglum marking the end of the seven-verse block being marked for replacement by the marginal reading of vv. 36-40. The only difference between the two sigla marking the beginning and end of vv. 34-40 of the main text is the Roman numerals which follow them, Lxiv and Lxv, respectively. The former (xiv) indicated that the marginal gloss was part of chapter xiv, while the latter (Lxv) indicated that chapter 15 of Corinthians was to follow the last verse of text (v. 35) being replaced by the marginal reading. The Umlaut next to the last line of 14:33 in C. Vaticanus parallels the ‘hd’ sigla in the margin of CF, because, as Payne has shown, “when other mss. omit text at the point where Vaticanus includes it, an Umlaut marks the line that ends exactly where other mss. cease to follow the Vaticanus text.”[7] Payne makes the following important points:

The most natural reading of the ‘hd’ mark in Fuldensis and of the Umlaut in Vaticanus by the last line of 14.33 is to identify a different text, presumably known to their scribes, that omitted 1 Cor. 14.34-35. In the case of Fuldensis we can be confident that its editor, Bishop Victor of Capua, had another text that provided the alternate reading in the margin since in every other case where he introduces an alternate reading in the margin with ‘hd’, we today possess manuscripts with that alternate reading.

At the bottom margin were five verses (vv. 36-40), referred to as a gloss, which features the same handwriting peculiarities as the main text, and must be attributed, therefore, to the same scribe. They are the Christian scribal equivalent of a massorah parva, which the Massoretes used, often to indicate in the margin variant readings which they preferred over the sacred text itself, but were reluctant to change. To conform with the standard Vulgate text that formed the basis for his copy, Victor’s scribe put vv. 34-40 in the main body of the text; however, Metzger rightly stated that for Victor’s scribe to have rewritten five entire verses (36-40) in the bottom margin, he had had to have authorization (from none other than Bishop Victor the scholar, who would have supplied the reasons).

In Rom 9:25 and 2 Tim 2:20, CF places a siglum next to the text being replaced, and this seems to be the indication elsewhere of what we would naturally expect to find: that there should be a symbol for replacement text right before the text which is being replaced, as well as another siglum at the end of the section being replaced.

It is important to keep in mind when evaluating the commentaries that almost all contemporary evaluations of the textual integrity of our two verses are based upon the erroneous evaluation of CF I Cor 14:33-40 given by Metzger,[8] which he later corrected.

If the marginal vv. 36-40 were meant to be relocated before v. 34, as some scholars have suggested, then we are left to wonder where to resume reading after v. 35, since there is no siglum after v. 35 to direct us. Furthermore, as Payne points out,

Scribes in that period simply did not take the liberty to rearrange the argument of Scripture in this manner. We do not have even a single parallel example of a scribe rearranging the sequence of an original text of any of the NT letters to make it more logical. Furthermore, even if Bishop Victor felt he had the authority to rearrange the sequence of the text, there is no reason why the text would make more sense reinserted at the end of the chapter.[9]

One other telling fact must be brought to the reader’s attention that would seem to indicate how loathe Bishop Victor was to the unimpeded inclusion of vv. 34-35. In every other case where ‘hd’ sigla introduces corrections, they bring the CF text into greater conformity with the standard Vulgate reading. This being his overall purpose, we are led to ponder the nature of his departure from the Vulgate at the end of 1 Cor 14:33, the only place where the ‘hd’ signals a marginal reading in nonconformity with the standard Vulgate reading.[10] It indicates to any thinking text-critical mind the seriousness with which Victor took both his commitment to the inerrancy of the text and the apparent corruption of the standard reading which he was highlighting by his margin. We are surely compelled to naturally assume that he had manuscript evidence that led him to change his text to that which deviated from the Vulgate.

Notice also that there is no Umlaut after v. 40, the locus for the inclusion of vv. 34-35 in the Western text. This indicates that CF’s scribe had no intention of indicating a variant reading which inserts vv. 34-35 at the end of the chapter.

The fact that 1 Cor 14:34-35 appeared in some of those MSS at the end of chapter 14, but in others after verse 33, was likely a tell-tale sign to Victor (as they should be to us) that these verses were spurious. Another tell-tale signs of bogus origin is the fact that one may read the Tenach from Genesis to Malachi a hundred times and never get the impression that Yahweh expected Israel’s women to remain silent during worship, as prophetesses, as judges, as bosses of servants for their own or their husbands enterprises, etc.—so whoever penned verse 34 obviously was blowing smoke and did not know his OT very well, and could count on the weak literacy in the OT of his Gentile audience to put one over on them. Furthermore, when Paul elsewhere uses the OT to back up his point, he usually cites the text itself, as in 1 Cor 9:8 and 14:21. Gordon Fee, an expert in patristic literature and a highly respected text-critical scholar, suggests that the glossator of these verses was a Jewish Christian who didn’t know the difference between the Law of Moses and some dictum of R. Akiva’s disciples in the second century, known to be extremely disparaging towards women in general. These rabbis were known to thank God regularly that they were not born a woman. Josephus, himself a Pharisee, stated “The woman, says the Law, is in all things inferior to the man. Let her accordingly be submissive.”[11] The Apostle Paul hardly fits the description of someone who did not know the OT or who misrepresented the OT. Like his Master, he was the champion of the oppressed, and would have never singled out an entire social class for such abuse.

The hypothesis that that these verses were not in Paul’s original letter helps to explain why none of the Apostolic Fathers—Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp, Polycrates—or Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Athenagoras, Shepherd of Hermas, the Gnostic Gospels or second century pseudepigraphae, Tatian, or Clement of Alexandria or Hippolytus ever make reference to them. Clement of Alexandria has it in his head that both men and women should “embrace silence” at church, but extols Miriam as Moses’ associate in commanding the host of Israel as a prophetess, which together implies his text of I Cor 14 did not have vv. 34-35. Tertullian (Bap. 15.17), then, is our first Christian writer to clearly show his awareness, not to mention wholeheartedly acceptance of, this pseudo-Pauline policy of feminine silence.

Bar-Umlauts in Codex Vaticanus

Payne was among the first to show that the scribe who wrote the NT of Vaticanus (B) used little bar-umlaut lines to indicate textual differences with other manuscripts. They occur most frequently in instances where there are omissions of text either on the part of another manuscript or on the part of B itself. Payne states: “It is safe to conclude that the writer of the Vaticanus NT intended the bar-umlauts as text-critical sigla indicating variant readings in other manuscripts. Since omissions of text are the most obvious textual variations, they are the ones most frequently noted.

The bar-umlauts usually occur next to the line immediately preceding the text in question. Thus, at the end of John 7.52 there is a separated bar-umlaut indicating that the block of text which follows (7.53—8.11, the pericope concerning the adulterous woman) is omitted by other texts. It shares with 1 Cor 14.34-35 the distinction of being the only block of verses located differently by different mss. This section is almost universally recognized as a later interpolation.

 The variant reading introduced at the end of 14.33 is by far the most significant in CF. Victor. It is clear from the evidence that he instructed his scribe to rewrite the concluding verses of chapter 14 with instructions to read vv. 36-40 in sequence with verse 33. He did so to correct what the scribe had already transcribed. Payne concludes with the following statement:

Thus, although the words of I Cor 14.34-35 do occur on this vellum, since Bishop Victor of Capua had the text rewritten in the bottom margin without vv. 34-35, this manuscript does present a text that seems to omit the passage altogether. Similarly, ms. 88 was written with I Cor. 14.33 immediately followed by v. 36…the vellum preserves evidence for an earlier text that omits vv. 34-35.[12]

On the basis of Bengal’s first principle of text critical analysis–that the text which best explains the derivation of all the other variant texts is probably the original text–Gordon Fee and many other textual critics were able to argue cogently that 1 Cor.34-35 is an interpolation, even before Payne adduced the foregoing understanding of manuscript sigla/Umlauts. In the following section we shall consider internal contraindications adduced by Fee and others that give the lie to I Cor 14:34-35.

1 Corinthians 11-14—Paul’s Instruction on Public Worship

In order to establish the internal contradictions inherent in the supposed Pauline authorship of 14:34-35, we must first investigate the nature of the foundation which the apostle lays in chapter 11, where Paul begins to discuss guidelines for prayer and worship within the congregations of God. We note first that Paul has passed on to them traditions (Greek paradoseis) which almost certainly pertain to Old Testament law. The Church is not old enough at this point to have generated its own traditions. The Corinthians are not praised anywhere else in his epistles, but here (verse 1) Paul commends them for “holding fast” (compare 1 Cor 15:2) to the words Paul had given them. After his instruction on decency and order for ecclesial worship is completed at the end of chapter 14, Paul admonishes them to not believe in vain and forfeit their salvation by ignoring his instruction (15:2).

In 11:3-16 Paul begins to speak of headship in a most unauthoritarian way, emphasizing that both man and woman came from God, and that neither are independent of the other. However, he is concerned that some of the Corinthian women are trying to eliminate the distinctions between male and female which even nature dictates (v. 14: “Does not the very nature of things teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him, but that if a woman has long hair, it is her glory?”) Since only homosexual men wore effeminate-looking long and braided hair styles in those days, the man having long hair is known in this passage to be a foil for that which Paul is really driving at: that since nature itself has given females long hair, it should be evident that God intended the woman’s head to be covered, as verse five states: “Every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered (akatakupto), dishonors her head (i.e. her husband, as per v. 3)—it is just as though her head were shaved.” Gordon Fee states:

The explanatory elaboration in vv. 5b-6, which by way of analogy pursues the question of the woman’s shame and concludes with the imperative that she is to be covered, makes it clear that this is where the problem lies.[13]

In verse 6 Paul goes on to say: “If a woman does not cover her head, she should have her hair cut off; but since it is a disgrace for a woman to have her hair cut or shaved, she should cover her head.” A man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of Yahweh, whose objective is not to veil or cover his glory, but to reveal it to mankind, as is evident from the multitudinous wonders of creation and revelation at every level. The point we wish to emphasize here is that Paul clearly states that a woman may pray or prophesy in his assemblies, the churches of God, provided the woman has some symbol of authority down upon her head. The suspect verses in chapter 14 undeniably contradict this by categorically banning female speech in the assembly. Fee states:

Despite protests to the contrary, the “rule” itself is expressed absolutely. That is, it is given without any form of qualification. Given the unqualified nature of the further prohibition that “the women” are not permitted to speak, it is very difficult to interpret this as meaning anything else than all forms of speaking out in public. Someone apparently was concerned to note by way of a gloss that all the previous directions given by the apostle, including the inclusive “each one” of v. 26 and the “all” of v. 31, were not to be understood as including women.[14]

There are other issues arising from our “problem” verses. All of sudden they shift the discussion from Paul’s correction of local problems in Corinthian worship to a universal rule that is to be understood as applying in all the churches, which would seem to be a non sequitur. The interpolator’s use of the plural and the definite article in the phrase “in the assemblies (churches)” indicates that this rule was intended for all Christian churches, not just Corinth’s assemblies. Some authors have argued that “in the churches” means “in all the congregational meetings of the Corinthian church,” but that is not true. As Fee states: “Paul invariably says ‘in assembly’” when that is what he means.”[15]

It would appear that whoever interpolated vv. 34-35 went out of their way to appropriate words and phrases from the context in a manner that is foreign to the context. V. 33 ends with the phrase εν πασαις ταις εκκλησιαις των αγιων (as in all the churches of the saints), and if v. 34 is to be accepted, picks right up in the next verse with the awkward repetition of the same phrase εν ταις εκλησιαις. The verb that v. 34 uses to command silence, σιγατωσαν, is used earlier in vv. 28 and 30; however, there in a limited context so as to enhance learning and edification—“so that all may learn worship and be edified”—whereas the author of 14.34-35 wants the women to learn only at home and from their husbands. It is as if whoever invented these verses wanted the church of God to disqualify the role of women in the church and reinterpret the inclusiveness implied in 14.5, 14.18, 14.24, and 14.31. We are led to ask the question, “What part of all didn’t he understand?” If v. 34’s unqualified silencing of women were true, then the “all” and “every one of you” in vv. 5, 18, 24, and 31 force us to understand Paul’s letters as being only addressed to the men in the congregation, which is ludicrous in the extreme and contrary to the prominence given to women throughout his epistles and in the book of Acts written by Paul’s most faithful companion, Luke. Ironically, it reflects the same kind of thinking towards women reflected in Talmudic literature which had its inception during the second century, that women were somehow not endowed by their Creator with the same ability as men to appreciate the Torah or truth in general. And frankly, the church fathers, beginning with Tertullian and culminating with Jerome, display this very same kind of perverse marginalization of gender, sex, marriage, and women characteristic of all false religiosity.

The Structure of Paul’s Arguments Make Better Sense Without vv. 34-35

Once one realizes the probability of inauthenticity of 1 Cor 14.34-35, the flow of Paul’s argument makes infinitely better sense without these intrusions. His concluding arguments are predicated upon the character of Yahweh: He is a God, not of disorder, but of peace, in contrast to the unruliness of the Corinthians and their unregulated use of the tongues gift, etc. The spirits of the prophets is under the control of the prophets (14.32); thus orderly worship comports with Yahweh’s character, and is the rule that Paul has laid down or observed in all the many churches he has visited. At this point, at the end of v. 33, Paul launches an ad hominem attack upon those in the Corinthian church who have staked a claim on being “spiritual”, but who are turning the church service into a circus. In light of the practice of the other churches, Paul shames them with the adroit parry:

Or did the word of God originate with you? Or are you the only ones it has reached thus far? If anybody thinks he is a prophet or spiritually gifted, let him acknowledge that what I am writing to you is the Lord’s command. If he ignores this command, then let him be ignored. (1 Cor 14. 36-38

These rhetorical questions are followed by vv. 39-40, which conveniently summarize the importance of allowing the speaking gifts in the church to flourish without causing disorder. The focus is on intelligibility and edification to the community, which in turn disallows tongues where there is no interpreter. Vv. 34-35 deal not with the qualified use of these gifts in context with what has gone before, but instead abruptly turn their attention upon an entire social class comprising at least half the church. If Yahweh is “no respecter of persons,” and expects his people to do the same (Deut 1.17, 16.19; Prov 24.23, 28.21; Ro 2.11; Eph 6.9; Col 3.25; Jas 2.1-9), then these two verses are suspect. They place women in the same category as children, or something worse.[16]

While it may be true that certain women are too open-minded and open to the wiles of deception, as per Eve and the serpent, that fact alone is not sufficient to warrant punishing every potential prophetess of God. Granting this were true, how then are we to take the opening highlights of the Gospel of Luke, where no less than three women prophesy–Elizabeth, Mary, and Anna at the temple? The latter continues to do so publicly:

And coming up at that very hour she [Anna] was giving thanks to God, and continuing to speak (Greek ελαλει, imperfect active indicative) of him [the Christ-child] to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem. (Luke 2.36, 38)

While it may have been “shameful” to the interpolator of 1 Cor 14.34-35, whose ears were too holy to audit any female, such condescension and limiting of Yahweh played no part in Paul’s attitude toward women, as evidenced by his discussions elsewhere in the Pauline corpus.

While this paper is by no means a call for the reversal of women’s roles to the point of ordaining them into positions of pastoral authority, it is certainly a call to enlarge the borders of feminine spiritual influence in the end-time church. Yahweh will not allow himself to be forced into speaking and being heard, prophesying and accepting intercession in the church, only through men. Those who feel uncomfortable with this should examine themselves and the source of their attitude. How would you have received Anna’s testimony concerning the birth of Yeshua in 3 B.C.?

No chapter of Paul’s epistles has been more ignored and marginalized than I Cor 14. Those who hope to successfully negotiate the turbulent waters that lie between us and the Second Coming will need to give the Spirit free course in the assemblies–to all those who covet to prophesy (1 Cor 14.39).

Todd Derstine

derstinetodd@yahoo.com

www.americaspropheticdestiny.com

Please feel free to duplicate and share this paper.

[2] B. M. Metzger, The Text of the NT: Its Transmission, Corruption and Restoration (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964) 151.

[3] E. Nestle, Textual Crtiicism, 122.

[4] Even Erasmus did not wish to include I John 5:7 in his Greek edition of the NT due to lack of  pre-15^th century textual attestation.

[5] Individual copies of Pauline epistles from the second century would have antedated bundled mss. of the Pauline corpus which replaced the individual copies.

[6] The sigla is an h followed by an upside down e with a line over it.

[7] Payne, “The Text-Critical Function of the Umlauts in Vaticanus, with Special Attention to I Corinthians 14.34-35: A Response to J. Edward Miller,” JSNT 27 (2004) (105-112) 108.

[8] Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek NT (New York: UBS, 1971) 565. According to Payne, when a copy of the text was shown to Metzger, he freely admitted he had never seen the actual text before and that his statement in on page 565 was in error.

[9] Payne, “Fuldensis,” 244.

[10] Payne, “Response to Edward Miller,” 109.

[11] Contra Apion 2.200-201 (Loeb, 1, 373).

[12] Payne, “Response to Edward Miller,” 111.

[13] Gordon Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987) 495. Paul will go on to make the further argument that a woman ought to have authority over her own head because of the angels (v. 10), which I take to mean that wicked angels–who kept not their first estate but rebelled against God’s order of authority–will recognize as under Yahweh’s protection any woman so adorned, while the good angels will hasten to rescue and fight for the woman who gives evidence of being under godly authority.

[14] Ibid. 706.

[15] Ibid.

[16] I Cor 14:34-35 remind me of my stepmother’s axiomatic rejoinder that “children are to be seen and not heard.”

©2009

Almost all civilized cultures have maintained a calendar for at least four purposes 1) the purpose of dating religious festivals 2) the conducting of business, dating of contracts, etc. 3) for figuring regnal years of kings, and 4) to know when to sow seeds.  Most of the calendars of the Fertile Crescent (Babylonia to Palestine), Asia Minor, and Greece were lunar-solar calendars which began the months with the first appearing of the moon.  Since twelve lunar months are about eleven days shy of a solar year, they had to intercalate a 13^th month in 7 out of 19 years to keep their festivals in season and prevent them from migrating throughout the year.  The one culture that did not intercalate, Islam, used a strictly lunar calendar which caused its festival of Ramadan to move backward through the entire year in 33 years.

The determination of calendars was usually the province of priests.  After the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, the authority of the Sadducees disintegrated, leaving a power vacuum. Beginning in the second century, a fierce struggle ensued between the Babylonian and Palestinian factions of Judaism for recognition of authority to determine intercalary years.   The power to determine the calendar for any people has always carried a great deal of prestige with it.  Many Christian groups who observe the Biblical festivals[1] believe that Rom. 3:1 and Matt. 23:2-3 give the Jews the authority to determine Yahweh’s sacred calendar.  But the more studious among them have come to realize that the calendar the Jews began to adopt in the fourth century was so markedly different from the Second Temple and the Exodus calendar that, on the assumption that Yahweh never changes (Mal. 3:4), they have been forced to do some thinking for themselves.

After the Jerusalem Council of 49 AD, Paul and Silas took the decrees of the apostles to the Gentile churches founded during the first missionary journey.  These included laws in Leviticus concerning illicit fornication and abstention from blood and meats offered to idols (Acts 15:29).  The value of learning from Torah readings in the synagogue every Sabbath day was relayed to them by James, the presiding elder (Acts 15:21): “For Moses of old time has in every city them that preach him, being read in the synagogues every Sabbath day.”  Paul wrote to Roman Christians who had been converted to Christ in the synagogues there, saying:  “Know ye not, brethren, for I speak to them that know the Law, how that the Law (Torah) has dominion over a man as long as he lives.” (Rom. 7:1).  We see Paul’s respect for the Law displayed prominently in Rom. 2, 3:31; 7:12; 8:4; 15:18-20.

…those things which Christ has wrought in me, to make the Gentiles obedient, by word and deed, through mighty signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God; so that from Jerusalem…to Illyricum I have fully preached the gospel of Christ.

This last passage in Romans is highly instructive, for it implies that Christ wrought miracles through Paul for the purpose of making the Gentiles obedient!  Obedient to what, pray tell?   To the Law of Yahweh.  He instructed them concerning the feasts of Yahweh, as is evident from I Cor. 5:7: “for even Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep the feast…”  Col. 2:16 may be understood the same way, as encouraging the Gentile brethren in Colossae in their festival and Sabbath observance, i.e. to not let anyone–including their judgmental neighbors and relatives burdened with Greek asceticism, “taste not, touch not, handle not” (Col. 2:21)—judge them in their “eating and drinking” (i.e. feasting), or “in respect of an holydays, new moon, or of the Sabbath days.” (Col. 2:16)  These are practices the Gentile Colossians naturally would have acquired after Paul’s Gospel had reached them, not before.[2]

Paul must have instructed the local church leadership on the basics of the Hebrew calendar.  After Constantine, however, the Church endured a 1600-year hiatus from feast-keeping.  The hegemony of the Catholic Church and its anti-Jewish theology made Sabbath and festival observance very scarce indeed during the Middle Ages and beyond.  Hence, the Church was left with no one in the feast-keeping Christian world with the stature of Peter, Paul or John to cause the assemblies of Christ to be unified in the determination of the sacred calendar.

The purpose of this chapter is to promote a correct understanding of the little- understood principles governing the Hebrew calendar in both its astronomical and theological aspects.  We will provide evidence, using historical astronomy for 69-70 AD, that the Spring Passover Rule was understood and practiced by Second Temple priesthood.  Further, we will compare the Biblical account of the carrying away of King Jehoiachin and his family with the Babylonian account for the same event in 597 BC, and prove that the Spring Passover Rule was in place before the burning of Solomon’s Temple.

THE SPRING PASSOVER RULE: This rule essentially places the Passover, the 14^th of Nisan, on or just after the spring equinox.  In order to determine Passover, the first day of Nisan should be on the new moon closest to the equinox.  This rule is critical for determining the date of the crucifixion.  We intend to demonstrate that Nisan 1 fell before, not after, the equinox in 31 AD, therefore allowing Passover to fall on March 27 in the year of the crucifixion.[3] In fact, the Julian date of Nisan 1 in 31 AD is the same as in 69 AD, for which we have hard evidence (see charts on pp. 11-13).  When the correct guiding principles of the calendar are understood, they will reveal the perfect harmony between the Hebrew calendar, the Zodiac and Yahweh’s Master Plan of salvation (Ps. 19:1-6, Job 38:32).

Three Basic Issues Are Involved in Determining the Biblical Calendar

The first issue to determine is when a day begins and ends. The sun is given by Yahweh for settling this matter.  A day begins with evening in the Bible (see Gen. 1:5, 8, 13, 19, 23; Lev. 23:32; Mark 1:32; and Acts 27:27, 33).   Mark 1:32 and Lev. 23:32 both clearly show that evening begins at sundown; sundown constitutes the start of the day.  The fast of the Day of Atonement is kept from the 9^th day ba erev to the 10^th day ba erev.  The prepositional prefix ba = at, makes the time specific to sundown. A careful look at Ex. 16:12-13 would confirm this conclusion. Erev, the Hebrew word for evening, was a primitive Semitic root word familiar to many other cultures throughout the Fertile Crescent—Akkadia, Sumeria, Ugaritic, Egyptian, Assyrian, etc.  Everywhere erev meant “the going down and the going in.”[4] The sun goes down, and laborers go into their houses.  Erev is used this way in Joshua 8:29:

[Joshua] hanged the king of Ai on the tree until the time of evening (erev).  At the going down of the sun, Joshua commanded, and took the body down. 

Most Bible students are aware that the Hebrew day begins at sunset.  They may be unaware, however, that rabbinic Judaism, as expressed by the opinions in the Talmud, begins its days when three stars appear, effectively delaying the start of the next day for at least one hour beyond sunset.  Because of this, bin ha ereviym[5], ‘between the two evenings,’ an important phrase in the Pentateuch, is placed at the end of the day in Judaism instead of at the beginning, as it should be. Ex. 16:12-13 is critical to proving that bin ha ereviym is indeed at the beginning of a day:

At twilight (bin ha ereviym= dusk) you shall eat meat, and in the morning [of Sunday] you be filled with bread [manna];…at evening (ba erev) quail came and covered the camp.

The point we wish to make here is that the Israelites could not eat the quail until they were sent.  Therefore, the arrival time of the quail – ba erev – must precede the time spoken of when they were to eat the quail – bin ha ereviym.  In addition it is widely known in Judaism, as well by Christian commentators, that this episode occurred on a Sabbath.  Yahweh had no intention of tempting the Israelites to break Sabbath by sending the quail prior to the end of the Sabbath at sundown.  Therefore, Moses uses the phrase ba erev, sundown, for when the quail were sent.  The quail were sent at sundown, ba erev, and the Israelites killed, prepared and roasted in order to eat the quail during the dusk which followed, which is called bin ha ereviym. The OT consistently uses ba erev when speaking about the end of a particular day; but uses bin ha ereviym for the beginning of a day.

A correct understanding of the Hebrew concept bin ha ereviym is important because Passover, like the evening sacrifice, is to be killed at bin ha ereviym, “between the two evenings.” (Exod. 12:6)  The placement of bin ha ereviym determines whether Passover is eaten on Nisan 14 or 15.  Judaism’s misunderstanding of this phrase led to 3 PM[6] Nisan 14 killings of the Passover, instead of twilight of the previous evening.  This caused them to “pass over” entirely the correct night for observing Passover itself.  In practice they have conflated Nisan 14 and 15, and commemorate both Passover and the Exodus (which took place on the night of the 15^th) on the same night.  They were not on the same night.  Judaism is the only culture of the Fertile Crescent that changed the meaning of erev, declaring that a day did not end and another begin til three stars appeared.  This was part of the reason why the Jewish leaders in Yeshua’s day kept the wrong night for Passover, eating it on Nisan 15, instead of the 14^th.  John 18:28: says:

Then the Jews led Jesus from house of Caiaphas to the governor’s headquarters.  By now it was early morning.   They themselves did not enter the governor’s headquarters, so that they would not be defiled, but could eat the Passover.

Yeshua and His disciples ate the Passover after sunset of the 13^th of Nisan, during the night of Nisan 14, right along with thousands of other commoners.[7] The Temple could not begin to accommodate the slaughter of lambs needed for two or three million pilgrims who came each year.  But as to whether the Temple authorities or the common people were killing the Passover lambs at the correct time, it seems evident that, based upon Luke 22:8, the lamb was correctly killed and prepared by Peter and John, “when the Passover must be killed (edei yuesuai).” Luke’s choice of words here is most emphatic, using the verb “it was necessary, i.e. a requirement of law”, to kill them at that time.  Mark 14:12 may be used to prove the same truth, that on the first of the unleaveneds, Nisan 13, Yeshua’s disciples came to Him and asked Him where He wished to eat The Passover.  Mark 14:12 uses the imperfect tense to describe the time when the disciples asked Christ this question; it was when they were [already] killing the Passover.  This could not possibly be construed as the late 14^th.  There are more than a dozen references in the Synoptic Gospels to Yeshua and his disciples eating to pascha, the night before He was crucified.[8] Nine of them are complete with the definite article, meaning the Passover.  Eusebius of Caesarea, commenting on John 18:28, understood this point when he said the Jewish leaders were in violation of the Law of Moses, and ought to have celebrated the Passover on Nisan 14, instead of on Nisan 15.[9] The Synoptic accounts of the Passover can be reconciled with John 18:28 by the realization that many Jews in the first century killed the Paschal lamb at their homes at the end of the 13^th of Nisan, and not at the Temple on the next day (see footnote 7 below).

We have taken the time here to touch on this important matter, because it affects one’s understanding of the Passion Week and the chronology of the crucifixion.  Furthermore, there is no subject upon which there is more confusion among scholars and theologians alike.[10] This confusion is needless, because all four Gospels are very clear that the crucifixion took place on Passover day, which was also the day of preparation[11] for the 15^th High Day, Passover being the day before the First Day of Unleavened Bread.

When Do Hebrew Months Begin – The Conjunction or the Lunar Crescent?

Though the ancient Jews certainly had the ability to pre-calculate lunar conjunctions (the dark phase of the moon, the time when the moon is directly between the earth and the sun), the Talmud, Philo and other ancient historical sources prove that early Judaism used the sighting of the lunar crescent to start the month.  There is very little disagreement among scholars and historians on this point.[12] As part of our effort to establish credible and early witnesses for standard Judaism in Christ’s day, we introduce a man whose work is quoted often in this chapter, Philo. We quote from Alfred Edersheim (himself a 19^th C. Jewish Christian), a major authority on ancient Judaism:

[Philo] was a descendant of Aaron, and belonged to one of the wealthiest and most influential families among the Jewish merchants-princes of Egypt.  His brother was the political head of the community in Alexandria; he himself …represented his co-religionists (in a delegation sent to Rome in 40 AD)…for protection from the persecutions consequent on the Jewish resistance to placing statues of the Emperor in their synagogues.[13]

Here is what Philo had to say about the start of the month:

Philo–Spec. 4:234 — “Again, are not the periods of the moon, as she advances and retraces her course, from a crescent to a full circle, and again, from a complete orb to a crescent, also measured by an equality of distances?”  [Comment: for Philo the lunar conjunction did not figure in determining “the periods of the moon.”]

Philo–Spec. 2:41 — “The third [festival] is that which comes after the conjunction, which is according to the young moon new moon.” [The Greek here is redundant, meta sunadon, thn kata selhnhn nean noumhnίa.  The last five words of this sentence are appositional, i.e. they are a second expression clarifying what Philo meant by meta sunadon (“after the conjunction”).]  Does anyone seriously think that “young moon” is a reference to the dark moon conjunction?

From these Philonic quotes (40-50 AD), we can see that the lunar conjunction had no standing for determining when a month began. When we get to the second century Mishna, we find absolutely no indication that anything other than a lunar crescent was used to start a month up to that time.  In succeeding centuries, the Talmud records no disagreement on this subject!  The Talmudic statement “the moon begins to shine on the first of the month” is just one of any number of invariably consistent statements from this vast body of rabbinic commentary that could be cited.[14] History also indicates that the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Macedonians all used the visible crescent to start the month.[15] Beginning in the fourth century (358 AD) with Hillel II, all of this began to change with the institution of a 19-year time cycle pre-calculating the Jewish calendar in advance, which meant telling Jews everywhere to stop using the time-honored method of empirical observation.  Letters written between Orthodox and Karaite Jewish families of the Diaspora during the early Middle Ages show that the Orthodox Jews in Persia and Asia Minor were still using the same observational methods for starting their months as had been used back in Palestine.[16] Therefore, it took more than half a millennium for the Hillel II calendar to take effect among even the Orthodox, who continued sighting the new moon and setting their own local calendars. “When the Hillel II Calendar was first published…most of the Jewish and Christian communities ignored [it], and for at least the next 400 years…continued to use an observed calendar. Evidence demonstrates that the Hillel II Calendar did not become widely used in the West until after 800 AD.”[17] The Jewish Karaite reform movement of this time (8^th-12^th century) was a reaction against just this sort of extra-Biblical innovation; they taught the visible crescent, basing it on Ps. 104:19 and Gen. 1:14, which stipulate that the light of the moon, not the dark conjunction, be used for setting the festival months (moedim):

Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens…they shall serve as signs for the set times (Heb. moedim)—the days and the years; and they serve as lights in the expanse of the sky to shine upon the earth (Gen. 1:14-15, Jewish Study Bible[18], JPS).

A study of the use of the word sign (ōt, tוֹa), would convince anyone that it is something you see with your eyes.[19] It is used of the blood the Israelites sprinkled on their doorposts (Ex. 12:13), which when seen by the death angel, caused him to pass over their houses.  Prophets promise omens and signs as pledges of predicted events. (I Sam. 10:7). Signs are also used of a miracle confirming the divine presence. (In Ex. 4:8-9 tוֹa describes the stone each tribe placed at the Jordan as a memorial of Yahweh’s parting of the waters (Josh. 4:5-7).[20] We shall have occasion later to discuss the manner in which “the stars also” (1:16) serve as signs via the constellations playing a most important role in determining the moedim/set times.

Using the astronomical conjunction to start the month ignores the plain meaning of Gen. 1:14.  Yahweh made the light of the moon for the months, and for signs, and yet many proceed to ignore the visible crescent.  The Jewish calendar begun by Hillel II around 358 AD is not tied to the motions of the sun or the moon in any precise fashion.[21] The transformation of the traditional Hebrew calendar was not complete until the 11^th century, according to the Encyclopedia Judaica, when the Dehiyot were finalized.  These extra-Biblical ‘rules of delay’ postpone the first of Tishri 1-3 days so that the Day of Atonement does not fall on Wednesday, Friday or Sunday.  These rules were not in place from the third to the eighth century.  The impetus behind the anti-traditional, anti-rabbinic Karaite movement in Judaism which began in the early Middle Ages was a reaction against the dehiyyot rules and the abandonment of the new moon crescent for starting the month.  The Karaite leaders were able to demonstrate clearly that these rules were not followed by the rabbis of the second and third centuries by citing numerous examples in the Mishna, etc. during that period where holy days fell on Sunday Wednesday, and Friday.[22]

Those attempting to prove that the rabbinic fixed calendar was in use prior to the fall of the Temple have virtually no support for their ideas in the scholarly community.  If it is God’s calendar now, pray tell what was it before it was changed?  And how many times does God’s calendar need to be changed before it is really His?   The ultimate argument those supporting the rabbinic fixed calendar always fall back on is, “Who do you think you are to come up with a Biblical argument for a different calendar?  Fred Coulter even resorts to accusing calendar critics of “sowing discord among brethren” ala Prov. 6:19.  But if the calendar is solely the prerogative of the orthodox Jewish community, and we are bound to obey them, then we are also obliged to keep a 15^th Passover and a Sivan 6 Pentecost.

The second pillar of the true Biblical calendar has been and always will be that months began with the crescent of the moon, which to many is the most beautiful object in the evening sky.  The crescent moon pictures our renewal in Christ.  As the leaders of Judaism persisted century after century in rejecting their Messiah, the setting aside of the lunar crescent eventually reflected this rejection, i.e. the renewal and atonement available only through Him. The most respected Jewish sage of the Middle Ages, Maimonides, said the following:

Just as the astronomers who determine the positions and motions of the stars engage in calculation, so the Jewish court (Sanhedrin), too, used to study and investigate and perform mathematical operations in order to find out whether or not it would be possible for the crescent to be visible in its “proper time,” which is the night of the 30^th day.  If the members of the court found that the new moon might be visible, they would be obliged to be in attendance at the courthouse for the whole 30^th day and be on the watch for the arrival of witnesses.  If witnesses did arrive, they were duly examined and tested, and if the testimony appeared trustworthy, this day was selected as the new moon day.  If the crescent did not appear and no witnesses arrived, this day was counted as the 30^th day of the old month.[23]

Many find it useful to plan ahead at the new moon.  It is a good time to consecrate the coming month unto the Lord with prayer, fasting, and/or special study in the scriptures.

When Does One Insert an “Intercalary” Month (Adar 2) into the Biblical Calendar?

The third and most difficult matter in establishing the Biblical calendar is resolving what years an intercalary 13^th month is inserted.  The purpose for the 13^th month is two-fold: to keep the lunar year in sync with the solar year, and to keep the holy days in their season (see Ex. 13:10, Nu. 9:2, 3, 13; 28:2).  Since twelve lunar months span only 354 days, Passover would soon fall in winter if a 13^th month was not inserted periodically.

Ernest Martin correctly states that the season for the spring and fall feasts “involves the blending of astronomical and theological concepts…that are compatible with the teachings of the Bible.”[24] Contrary to what many intelligent calendar “experts” maintain, the Bible does provide the necessary information for deciding how and when to add a 13^th month.  You may hear or read statements such as, “The Bible does not address the issue of how to determine the calendar…The astronomy of the calendar is simply not written down in the Bible.”[25] But nothing could be further from the truth.  The Bible states explicitly when the Feast of Sukkot is to occur, and does so in astronomical terms!  Exodus 34:22 says the Feast of Ingathering (Sukkot or Tabernacles) is to be kept at the equinox:

You shall observe…the feast of ingathering at the turn (Heb.= tkufah) of the year.

The Astronomical Concept of Tkufot and “at the equinox.”

The word tkufot (turning point) occurs four times in the OT: Ex. 34:22, I Sa. 1:20, II Ch. 24:23, and Ps. 19:6. The Talmudic sages said there were four tkufot during the cycle of each year corresponding to our equinoxes and solstices.[26] The Essenes used the phrases “tkufah of the day” and “tkufah of the night” to refer to noon and midnight, respectively.[27] The term was understood astronomically by ancient Judaism.  Psalm 19:6 certainly uses it that way in describing the sun’s path along the ecliptic. Yahweh would not have moved Moses[28] to use the term tkufah in Ex. 34:22 if it was not already understood as a distinct time of the year.  It might also be said tkufot/equinoxes have been noted by almost all cultures down through history which maintained religious calendars and which engaged in agriculture.  It was the standard way to know the season one was entering.  Therefore, since the feasts are to be kept “in their seasons,” we should not surprised to see the Bible use the familiar term tkufah to describe when it should be held, nor to learn that the Jews/Talmud anciently understood tkufah to mean equinox–the most well-understood aspect of astronomy/calendar in history (see Philo’s quote on next page).

The word tkufot in Ex. 34:22 can be shown to be modifying when the feast of ingathering is to be observed.  But in order to do that we must first have a word about Hebrew syntax.  Hebrew syntax is very primitive and simple.  Hebrew sentences almost invariably begin with a verb, followed by the subject of the verb’s action; in the third position is the object of the verb’s action.  The fourth position is called the modifier, and always modifies the direct object.  In Ex. 34:22 just quoted, feast of ingathering is in the third position of the sentence, telling us what is to be observed.  Tkufah is in the “modifier” position of the sentence, and under the rules of Hebrew syntax, it does not need to have a preposition.  Since it is a time modifier, it automatically and logically signifies when the feast is to be kept, at the tkufah.[29] The preposition is implied through common sense.  Since “tkufot of the year” is a time modifier, it automatically modifies its object, feast of ingathering, with respect to time.   There can be no doubt that Philo, and hence normative Judaism of his day, understood Ex. 34:22 this way.  Philo repeatedly stated that the Passover and Sukkot occurred AT the equinoxes.  And so the main proof text we have in the Torah for how to intercalate 13^th months is disposed of carelessly by some, and ignored by the others in deference to man-made traditions.  Any calendar discussion which relegates Ex. 34:22 to a footnote on a page is setting aside a cornerstone of the Hebrew calendar.[30]

Philo Placed the Spring and Fall Feasts AT the equinoxes

Philo had this to say about the timing of the two great feasts of Judaism:

Decal. 1:1–the greatest festivals, those of the longest duration, at the periods of both the vernal and autumnal equinoxes in each year; appointing two festivals for these two epochs, each lasting seven days…seven days have very appropriately been appointed to the seventh month of each equinox…

Spec. 2:204–The last of all the annual festivals is that which is called the Feast of Tabernacles, having a time at the autumnal equinox.

Flacc. 1:116–This was the unexampled misfortune which befell Flaccus in the country of which he was governor, being taken prisoner…at the time of his [Flaccus’] arrest, it was the general festival of the Jews at the time of the autumnal equinox, during which it is the custom of the Jews to live in tents.

Philo goes on to mention that all men knew when the equinoxes occurred:

Spec. 4:233–Nature, therefore, has marked out those periods in every year, which are called the equinoxes, from the state of things which exists at that time, namely, the spring and the autumnal equinox, with such distinctness, that even the most illiterate persons are aware of the equality which then exists between the extent of the days and of the night.

Last but not least is Philo’s unambiguous statement that the equinoxes take place in the first and seventh months of the calendar:

Opif. 1:116–The sun, the ruler of the day, makes two equinoxes every year, both in spring and autumn. The spring equinox in the constellation Aries, and the autumnal one in Libra, gives the most evident demonstration possible of the divine dignity of the number seven.  For each of the equinoxes takes place in the seventh month [from Tishri and from Nisan], and during them [the equinoxes] men are expressly commanded by law to celebrate the greatest and most popular national festivals.

This is no approximation of equinoxes with the festivals, as some have tried to say, but rather a specification of time.  The two Greek words specifying seventh month are both in the dative case—being ‘datives of time.’  All versions of Philo translate them correctly as “at the/in the seventh month.”  In conclusion, Philo repeatedly tells us that the two major feasts of Israel occur AT their respective equinox, not a month or more afterwards.

Philo was not trying to start a new sect of Judaism.  He was a descendant of the Aaronic priesthood, who elsewhere showed great respect for the Temple and its services in Jerusalem.  He rails against radical allegorizers of the Law in his day who, “as though they were living alone by themselves in a wilderness…overlook all that the mass of men regard.”[31] Therefore, taking his writings as a whole, there is no reason to doubt that he is speaking for normative Judaism.   For those of Karaite persuasion who believe in the role of ripe barley for determining when to insert a 13^th month, Philo’s silence on the subject is deafening.  Philo knows nothing about barley determining the first month.

Babylonians Used a Different Method of Intercalation

In contrast to the Jews, the Babylonians never allowed Nisan 1 to fall before the equinox. Modern feast-keeping groups which do not allow Nisan/Aviv 1 to fall before the equinox must somehow claim the Babylonian calendar was right, but the Jewish calendar mentioned above was wrong.  We are asked to believe that the Babylonians had the correct method for intercalation, while the Jews who sometimes placed Nisan 1 before equinox, did not.  The correct Biblical criterion placed Passover and Sukkot in their proper seasons, which were understood to be at the equinoxes, not a month or more later.  The equinox occurred when the sun was in Aries (not Taurus), whose lamb sign in turn lent its meaning to the Passover.  For this reason the spring feast had to be “at the equinox.”  It would have been pointless for Philo, Josephus, Aristobulus, and other Jewish sources to mention the sign of Aries in connection with Passover if the only criterion was to place Nisan 1 after the equinox.  Josephus says “In Nisan, [which] is the beginning of our year, on the 14^th day of the lunar month [Passover], when the sun stands in the sign of the Ram [Aries], the Law ordained every year…”[32] Dr. Mike Molnar, an astronomer, historian, and author cites numismatic evidence along with a statement of Claudius Ptolemy in his Tetrabiblos to the effect that the sign of Aries “controlled” the Jewish nation.[33] Could it be that this association was due to the unique criteria used by the Jewish priests for intercalating which distinguished their calendar from all the others of that time?

The start of Nisanu in Babylon was one month later than the Jewish calendar, and caused Nisanu 14 to occur while the sun was in Taurus, not Aries, almost every other year.  According to the almost unanimous understanding of Jewish sources, the Jewish rule was simply that Nisan 14 could not fall before the equinox.  Notable English scholar Ormond Edwards says this in his book The Time of Christ:

The Jewish ecclesiastical year was parallel but by no means always coincidental with the Babylonian year.  Where the Babylonians intercalated (added 13^th month) to prevent their spring new year’s day Nisanu 1 from falling before the equinox, the Jews intercalated to prevent Passover (Nisan 14) from falling before the vernal equinox.  On average, therefore, the [original] Jewish month began 14 days before its Babylonian namesake (Nisanu); that is, a month earlier 9 times in 19 years.  A further difference between Babylonian and [the original] Jewish practice is be found in the method of intercalation.  In contrast to the Babylonian use of the regular [fixed] intercalation cycle, the Jews retained into the fourth Christian century the empirical method of repeating the last month of the year to prevent Passover from falling too early.

The above facts are confirmed by comparing the Biblical account of Jehoiachin (2^nd last king of Judah) with the same event as recorded on Babylonian cuneiform tablets.  Both nations changed regnal years for kings on Nisan(u) 1.  Both record that Nebuchad-nezzar carried Jehoiachin off to Babylon along with all the gold vessels of [Solomon’s] Temple.  But II Kg. 24:12 says it was in the 8^th year of Nebuchadnezzar, whereas the Babylonian record says it was in the 7^th year of his reign.  The following additional in-formation is quoted from Finegan to lay the groundwork for understanding the discrepancy between the two records:

New-moon dates can be calculated astronomically for ancient Babylonia, and since the system of intercalation has been reconstructed on the basis of intercalary months actually mentioned in cuneiform texts, it is possible to construct tables which represent the Babylonian calendar with a high degree of probable accuracy.[34]

It so happens that one of the intercalary months mentioned in cuneiform texts is the Ululu II (a second 6^th month, late summer) of the previous year, 598 BC.  The Mosaic calendar could never intercalate a 6^th month, because it would put a span of seven months between Nisan and Tishri, and force the Feast of Tabernacles to be in the 8^th month. But the Babylonians had no such scruples.   On Sept. 22, 598 BC, they intercalated a second 6^th month (Ululu II), thus pushing Nisanu 1 (the start of Nebuchadnezzar’s 8^th year) to April 13^th.   The Jews did not intercalate in the spring of 597 BC.  Thus the 29-day delay for the start of Nisanu, compared to the Jewish reckoning of Nisan 1, explains why the Babylonians considered the successful attack on King Jehoiachin as occurring in Nebuchadnezzar’s 7^th year, whereas the Biblical account (II Kg. 24:12) places it in his 8^th year:

The king of Babylon took him [Jehoiachin] prisoner in the 8^th year of his [Nebuchadnezzar’s[35]] reign. And carried off all the treasuries of the house of Yahweh, and the treasuries of the king’s house.

The discrepancy is easily explained.  The Babylonian record places this campaign at the end of Nebuchadnezzar’s 7^th year, on the second day of Addaru (March 16^th, 597 BC).   The fact that II Kg. 24:12 dates this carrying away of Jehoiachin, his servants and his family to the 8^th year of Nebuchadnezzar is proof the Jews did not intercalate that year.  Had they intercalated, the second day of Addaru (Mar. 16) would still have been in Nebuchadnezzar’s 7^th year, not his 8^th. Therefore March 15^th was Nisan 1, and according to Jewish reckoning, the start of Nebuchadnezzar’s 8^th year.  Thus we see that Ormond Edwards, Emil Schurer, and the rest of the scholarly community are correct in stating that the Jewish method of intercalation did allow Nisan 1 to fall before the equinox, whereas the Babylonian priests did not.  Babylon’s months were one month later than Jewish months nine times every nineteen years!

Evidence from 69-70 AD for Nisan 1 Falling Before the Equinox

As mentioned earlier, the calendar situation in 31 AD was essentially the same as in 69 AD.  Since it will now be demonstrated from history that Nisan 1 was more than a week before the equinox in 69, we are correct in placing Nisan 1 on the same date in 31 AD.  The following evidence is derived from the facts surrounding the destruction of the Temple on the 8, 9, and 10^th of Ab, August 4-6, 70 AD.[36] A very reliable second century rabbinic source said that the priestly “course of Jehoiarib was on duty on Ab 9” when the Temple burned.[37] Jehoiarib was the first of 24 courses.  Each priestly course served one week at a time, changing over at noon on the Sabbath.[38] Jehoiarib began to serve the day before Ab 9 on Ab 8, August 4, a weekly Sabbath.  From this we can determine when, in the preceding months, the other 23 courses were on duty.  The end result will be a confirmation of the fact that Tishri 1 was the beginning of the priestly year.  The Talmud states that the first course began on the Sabbath preceding Tishri 1.  Undoubtedly this practice originated during the time of Ezra and Nehemiah.  Then the priests began to offer sacrifices on the first day of the seventh month, even before the foundation of Zerubabbel’s Temple was laid (Ezra 3:6).  Starting from the premise that September 2, 69 AD was the first Sabbath of the priestly year, with Sept. 7 being on or about the first of Tishri, we will see that this premise accounts for Jehoiarib being on duty the following August 4, 70 AD. The scholarly world is indebted to Roger T. Beckwith for bringing forth the evidence that the priestly courses had a calendar year which began with Tishri 1.[39] However, Beckwith’s goal was to establish when Zechariah was serving at the Temple (Lk. 1:5); he was not looking for evidence confirming Second Temple intercalary methods. Thus, he did not extrapolate back to Nisan of 69 AD from September 7, 69 AD in order to locate a concrete example of Nisan 1 falling before the equinox.  This table will confirm the sequence of dates for the 24 courses, beginning with the first Sabbath before Tishri in 69, down to the fall of the Temple in 70 AD.  Later we will extrapolate the sacred calendar for 69 AD from Tishri back to Nisan in order to prove that Nisan 1 fell well before the equinox.

The foregoing would then account for the R. Jose’s statement in the Seder Olam that the first course was serving at the Second Temple “at the end of Sabbath, at the end of a Sabbatical year, when the priests of the family of Jehoiarib were officiating, on the 9^th of Ab,”[40] i.e. on August 4 of 70 AD.  Additional confirmation that the cycle of priestly courses began from Tishri is provided by documents discovered at Qumran and described by J. T. Milik.[41] Jehoiarib is found at the beginning of Tishri (and not at Nisan) at the start of their six-year cycle!  This explains why the Qumran communities retained the term Rosh-ha-Shanah for Tishri 1, even though Nisan 1 was their new year for virtually everything else.[42] Tishri was their new year for priestly courses.

Now let us go back to early September of 69 AD (at the top of the above chart) and work our way backward to the start of the sacred year.  Once we have done this, it will be apparent that the Second Temple priests did put Nisan 1 before the spring equinox:

7.      Sept. 7, 69 AD was the proximate crescent moon of Tishri, the 7^th month.

6.      Aug. 8, 69 AD was the proximate crescent moon of Elul, the 6^th month.

5.      July 9, 69 AD was the proximate crescent moon of Ab, the 5^th month.

4.      June 10, 69 AD was the approximate crescent moon of Tammuz, the 4^th month.

3.      May 11, 69 AD was the proximate crescent moon of Sivan, the 3^rd month.

2.      April 12, 69 AD was the proximate crescent moon of Iyyar, the 2^nd month.

1.      March 13, 69 AD was the proximate crescent moon of Nisan, the first month.

With Nisan 1 being so early in 69 AD, Passover would have fallen on March 26 or 27^th, the latter being the same date we establish in this Part II of The Heavens are Telling for the crucifixion Passover of 31 AD.  This would account for the incident of Peter warming himself by the fire at night in Caiaphas’ courtyard during the illegal midnight trial of Yeshua.  Also, the sun is sitting in Aries in late March, satisfying Josephus (Ant. III.x.5) and the Biblical symbolism of the Passover.  We hope to have lain to rest the Babylonian method of intercalation.  It simply was not the practice at the Second Temple.  The Babylonians exalted the equinox over the sign of Aries, and Nisan 1 over Nisan 14.

Other Astronomical Considerations in the Bible:

The Hebrew Concept of Teshuvah and Its Connection to the Beginning of the Year

We now quote Ex. 12:2 in full:

This month (Aviv or Nisan) shall be to you the beginning of months (rosh chodeshim): it is to be the first month of the year to you. (see KJV and NAS)

This is at variance with what the Talmud and Orthodox Judaism practice.  They use the term rosh ha-shana (i.e. head of the year) to refer to the first day of the 7^th month, i.e. Tishri 1.   In Judaism calendar dates for Nisan have become completely dependent on the fixing of dates for Tishri.  In effect, Nisan functions as the tail of the Jewish calendar and not as the head of the months!  Rabbinic authorities then do another very misleading thing, calling Elul (the 6^th month) the time of teshuvah, which gives the false impression that one is returning to the beginning of the year.  As we are about to see, the Bible calls early spring teshuvah, not late summer. The term teshuvah is used seven times in the OT and means return to the beginning point.  Because of general interest and familiarity with this term in Judaism in general, and Messianic Judaism in particular, we will examine the use of this word:

I Sam. 7:15-16—Samuel judged Israel all the days of his life. And he went from year to year in circuit (#5437= sawbab=bbo) to Bethel, Gilgal, and Mitspeh, and judged Israel in all those places.  [SH #5437 means “to revolve, surround or border.”]

v. 17—And [Samuel’s] return (teshuvah) was to Ramah.

II Sam. 11:1–It came to pass, ‘after the year was expired’ [KJV, marg. at the return of the year (teshuvah)], at the time when kings go forth to battle.”

I Kg 20:22–the prophet came to the king of Israel, and said, Go, strengthen yourself, for at the return of the year [teshuvah] the king of Syria will come up against thee…The servants of the king of Syria said YHWH was only the god of the hills—“therefore they were stronger than we; but let us fight against them in the plain, and surely we will be stronger than they.”

I Kg. 20:26– it came to pass at the return [teshuvah] of the year, that Ben-hadad and the Syrians went up to Aphek, to fight against Israel.

I Chron 20:1—it came to pass, that after the year was expired [marg. return (teshuvah) of the year], at the time that kings go out to battle, Joab led forth the power of the army, and wasted the country of the children of Ammon…

From the first occurrence of this word in I Sam. 7:17 it is apparent that teshuvah has to do with returning to a starting point, i.e. back to headquarters, in the case of Samuel.  When used in reference to the year, it means Adar, the 12^th month that returns us to Nisan, the head of the year. Kings did not go to war in the 6^th month of the year (Elul) or later, as they did not want to get into the middle of a campaign only to find themselves bogged down in cold, mud and rain.

Teshuvah holds meaning for both Christians and Jews–which is that of returning to the Covenant God Yahweh, the God of our fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, with all our heart, mind and soul.   Most of the New Testament instruction can be seen as necessary preparation for anyone wishing to qualify for the spiritual barley harvest.  It is only the firstfruits ‘barley’, the Elect of Yahweh, that are “picked” and gathered by the angels at the Second Coming.  Genuine teshuvah leading to the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth (I Cor. 5:8) is the key to preparedness for Yeshua’s return!

If teshuvah means the return of the year, its opposite is expressed by the term yâtsa (SH #5927), which means “to go out, go forth.” (Ex. 23:16)  It is used of “going up” to Jerusalem for the Feast of Sukkot, which Ex. 23:16 says occurs at the going forth of the year (yâtsa), in contrast to Passover, which is at the teshuvah of the year.  In the LXX (third century BC), the Greek word mesountos [mesountov] (Ex. 34:22), indicates that Sukkot was in the middle of the year.  Biblically speaking, the going out of the year and the middle of the year are synonymous terms. When the Spring Passover Rule is followed, Sukkot will fall in the middle of the Hebrew calendar year. The Illustrated Bible Dictionary[43] clarifies our terms and sums up what we have just learned:

The observation of the autumnal equinox, i.e. ‘the going out of the year’ (see Ex. 23:16), and of the spring equinox, called the ‘return of the year’ (I Kg. 20:26, II Ch. 36:10) was important for controlling the calendar and consequently the festivals.  Thus the year began with the new moon nearest the vernal equinox when the sun was in Aries,[44] and the Passover on the 14^th of Nisan coincided with the first full moon.

Let us hear no more about Scripture having nothing to say about the calendar.   When we combine the astronomical component of the equinox with the theological aspect of the calendar, we have a coherent, rationale for determining when to intercalate a 13^th month.

The Theological Aspects of the Hebrew Calendar

Having established the astronomical aspect of the original calendar of the Jews, i.e. they intercalated in order to keep the feasts AT the time of the equinoxes, we are now ready to show that Yahweh designed the Zodiac to coincide with the equinoxes in such a way that the Zodiac lent extremely relevant meaning to the feasts as they were occurring.   Yahweh wanted Passover to be kept near the spring equinox because it was by His design that the sun was in the sign of Aries during the equinox. Aries the Ram is drenched with Passover meaning.  These relationships were well-understood in Yeshua’s day.

The notable 19^th century Judaic scholar, Emil Schurer, said this about the calendar:

The Passover festival, to be celebrated at full moon in the month of Nisan (Nisan 14), should in any case fall after the vernal equinox when the Sun stood in the sign Aries.  This explanation is characterized by Anatolius, in a fragment of decided importance in relation to the history of the Jewish calendar… as the unanimous view of all the Jewish authorities…With this also agree the statements of Philo and Josephus.  If one therefore toward the close of the year noticed that the Passover would fall before the vernal equinox, the intercalation of a month before Nisan would have to be resorted to.[45] [Emphasis mine]

Anatolius (died ca. 282 AD), Bishop of Laodicea, is cited in Eusebius’ Church History 7.32.16-19, as follows:

We can learn…from the statements of Philo, Josephus, and Musaeus, and not them only, but still earlier writers, the two Agathobuli, famous as teachers of Aristobulus the Great…These authors, in explaining the problems of the Exodus state that the Passover ought invariably to be sacrificed after the spring equinox, at the middle of the first month; and that this occurs when the sun is passing through the first sign…of the Zodiacal cycle [i.e. Aries].  Aristobulus adds that it is necessary at the Passover festival that not only the sun but the moon as well should be passing through an equinoctial sign [a reference to Libra].  There are two of these signs, one in the spring, and one in the autumn, diametrically opposite each other.  On the day of the Passover–14^th of the month after sunset–the moon will occupy the position diametrically opposite the sun, as we can see when the moon is full; the sun will be in the sign of the spring equinox, the moon inevitably in that of the autumnal [Libra, which Philo calls the Scales].

Equinoxes, Aries and Libra Work Together to Fix the Seasons for the Festivals

There can be no doubt that the “first sign of the Zodiacal cycle,” referred to by Anatolius and Philo, was the sign of Aries the ram.  This lines up with the meaning of Passover, since Isaac’s life was spared in Genesis 22 when Yahweh provided a ram out of the thicket at the point when Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son.  The Jewish sages believed this story took place around Passover.  Fred Coulter in his book The Christian Passover presents strong evidence that the Abrahamic Covenant was ratified on Passover in Genesis 15.  In a very real sense, Genesis 22 is the original Passover story, which is the story of a sacrificial ram sparing the life of the promised seed, or should we say the Promised Seed giving His Life in order to spare everyone else’s.  Yahweh designed the heavens for signs and seasons in a marvelous fashion which not one of us fully comprehends, but two things are certain, 1) from Abraham to Yeshua the sun dwelt in Aries during the month of March and early April, and 2) Yahweh with forethought placed Aries there during that epoch to picture the great type and antitype that played themselves out from Mt. Moriah to Goshen and finally Golgotha.

The only way to link the season of the Paschal Lamb—which is by far the most important theological concept in the Bible–with any time scheme involving the heavenly bodies, must necessarily involve the sun in relation to the stars behind it, as viewed from the earth.  Many modern calendar experts are content to ignore the role of the stars, but notice what J. B. Segal has to say in this highly intriguing statement about the calendar:

[In] only one passage are the stars directly connected with the method of   calendar making.   In Gen. 1:14-16 we read:

“And God said, Let there be lights in firmament of heaven…for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years: and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth: and it was so.  And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: the stars also…”

Commentators have been puzzled by the brevity and awkwardness of this reference to the stars.[46] Has the text been amended to avoid discussion of the role of the stars in the system of calendar adjustment?[47]

If Gen. 1:16 was amended, one would have to venture it was after the time of Philo, Josephus, Musaeus, the two Agathobuli, and Aristobulus, due to the fact that all these Jewish authorities understood the role that the constellation Aries necessarily played in setting the time for Passover.

The sun represents Yahweh’s Messiah, His intermediary for bringing the light of truth to His chosen people all through history.  When the sun did not shine from noon until 3 PM during our Savior’s crucifixion, the constellation Aries became visible in the blackened sky behind the sun.[48] The sign of the Ram (Aries’ Hebrew name is taleh, the lamb), represents Christ’s role as the Father’s sacrificial Lamb, demonstrating Yahweh’s willingness to give His only-begotten Son for the sins of the world.  This overarching theme of the Scriptures dictated the start of the year.  It is even possible that the ancient Egyptians derived their practice of sacrificing a lamb at the spring equinox from this heavenly reality. The Arabic name for the constellation Aries is Al Hamal, the sheep, gentle and merciful.[49] The Aramaic-speaking eastern cultures referred to the sign of the Ram by amroo, the same word used in the Peshitta (the Aramaic NT) in John 1:29 by John the Baptist: “Behold the Lamb of God which takes away the sin of the world.”  Therefore, Aries is a picture of the Messiah’s first coming, whose atoning mission was capped on a torture stake on Passover day, March 27, 31 AD, when the sun was still in Aries. Many neglect or reject these kinds of typological and theological criteria for intercalation, despite the fact that both Philo and Josephus plainly state that Passover falls when the sun is in the sign of the Ram!

Make no mistake, Aries is a transcending cosmic theological reality placed there by Yahweh for the purpose of reminding us of the foremost theme of salvation.  By the time of Abraham’s birth, the precession of the equinoxes had gradually moved the sun from Taurus into Aries during the spring equinox.  By the time of the Crucifixion (some 2000 years later), the slow precession of the equinoxes had moved the sun through the Ram (it taking 2160 years for the sun to traverse 30 degrees, or one sign of the Zodiac). By the first half of the first Century, the sun was only a few degrees into the constellation Aries during Passover, and getting ready to transit into Pisces during the spring equinox over the next two generations.  Some would ascribe this to mere coincidence, but the truth is that Yahweh designed it that way, picturing as it does the Father’s means of transporting mankind and individuals from the realm of judgment (symbolized by Taurus[50]) into the dominion of grace (symbolized by the Ram).  The Ram/Lamb unites the most important story of the OT, the offering up of Isaac (Gen. 22) with its fulfillment by Yeshua in 31 AD.  In between (1490 BC) you have the Exodus of Israel out of Egypt, made possible only by the sprinkling of stereotypical lambs’ blood on their doorposts.  Yeshua’s sacrifice may be viewed as a renewing of the Covenant made with Abraham and his seed (Gal. 3:16, 29). We choose here to use this same 2000-year stretch (Abraham to Christ) as the classical benchmark epoch or template for understanding how to apply Yahweh’s intercalary rules in modern times.  Any calendar rule or fixed calendar which would have placed the sun in Taurus during the 14^th of Nisan back then cannot be correct.  Those who always placed Nisan 1 after the equinox (Babylonians, Persians, Egyptian Jews at Elephantine,[51] Egypt, among others) were using a rule that often placed Passover in the constellation Taurus the Bull and the Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot) too far into the eighth month of October.[52]

Making certain that Passover always fell when the sun–symbol of the Messiah (Mal. 4:2, Ps. 84:11)–was in the sign of the Ram, is spiritually compelling, for two reasons:

1.      We thereby allow the sun to work with one of the signs of Gen 1:14—Aries, the Ram–to determine the moedim, instead of some earthly criteria like spring or winter, the state of the barley crop, the condition of the roads (too muddy), or ovens not being dry enough.  The Talmud multiplied reasons for delaying Nisan. The less simple things were the better, since this gave the rabbis more control over the people.  This trend toward increased legalism/control can be seen from the second century onward, especially with reference to Sabbath legislation.

2.      We can now understand references to “the sun in Aries” during Passover mentioned by Philo and Josephus.[53] This was the well-understood criterion for dictating when intercalation took place.  Had the ancient Jews always placed Nisan 1 after the equinox, Passover would have often fallen when the sun had moved into Taurus, the sign of judgment.  This is wrong for two reasons:

a)      Taurus is…a Bull rushing forward with mighty energy and fierce wrath, his horns set so as to push his enemies, and pierce them through and destroy them.[54] It does not picture the suffering Messiah of Isa. 53; nor does it represent the nature of an innocent lamb.

b)      The Passover sacrifice was always taken from one’s flock (sheep and goats, Ex. 12:5), not the herd; so a bullock was never an acceptable offering at Passover.

The contrast between the gentle lamb of Aries and Taurus could not be more striking.  For this reason, the new moon nearest the equinox was used to ensure that the sun was in the appropriate sign of Aries during the Passover season.  Nothing could be plainer, both historically and theologically.

In 2005 the Jewish calendar date for Passover was April 25^th, which is five weeks removed from the equinox, a month late!   In 2007, those using the Babylonian rule for Nisan 1 held their Sukkot from Oct. 25^th thru Nov. 2, well into Jeroboam’s 8^th month!  I take this phenomenon as being reflective of the fact that we are all becoming more or less steeped in this culture of sin around us, and thus failing to take the emblems of Passover worthily.  Obviously, incorrect timing is more a symptom of our carelessness, rather than its cause.  Num. 28:1 and Isa. 29:1 (NASB) command Israel to be punctilious about when they kept feasts unto Yahweh.    Passover and communion are an important part of our worship of Yahweh; so it behooves us to all to study to show ourselves approved, workmen that need not be ashamed, rightly dividing this word of truth, so that the body of Messiah will not be divided.

Early Church Reckoning of Easter Was Tied Inextricably to the Jewish Calendar

One of the keys to understanding the history of intercalation lies in understanding the Computus- the Christian criteria for calculating the date of Easter.  Bede’s seventh century work, The Reckoning of Time, and various paschal chronicles from Hippolytus to Dionysius confirm that the reckoning of Easter Sunday was “joined at the hip” to the Jewish reckoning of Passover.  This dependence of the one upon the other goes back to the second century, when Easter Sunday mysteriously crept into the observance of apostate Gentile Christianity.

We may derive some clues for the origin of Easter from I Clement, written around 110 AD.  In this epistle, we learn of the Corinthians ousting their lawful elders who had been appointed by the Apostle Paul and Timothy, and selecting illegitimate replacements.  Though we are not told exactly why the Corinthians did this, I have little doubt that one of the issues was Passover, which in Paul’s day the Corinthians were observing.[55] Only a generation after Clement this same Church failed[56] to send letters of support with Polycarp (155 AD) and Polycrates (185 AD) when these bishops went to Rome to defend the practice, retained by all the Churches in Asia Minor, of keeping the Lord’s Supper/Passover on Nisan 14.  Two Roman bishops, Anicetus and Victor, put undue pressure on the bishops of Asia Minor to give up Passover observance on the 14^th.  These Johannine churches were labeled ‘Quartodecimans,’ i.e. fourteeners, simply for their loyalty to the apostolic custom of keeping Passover on Nisan 14.   History tells us there were substantial Jewish communities throughout Asia Minor, so that knowledge of Nisan and the date of Passover would have flowed from the one to the other.

Up until the Council of Nicea in 325 AD, Jews lent their calendar expertise to the Church.  The Jews chided the Church for being dependent on them for reckoning Passover, so they could in turn determine Easter.  When one examines the Paschal Chronicle, and Anatolius’ 19-year cycle for calculating paschal events, and later on Dionysius’ list of Paschal dates (sixth century), one realizes that they were using 19-year time cycles that placed Nisan 1 prior to the equinox on no less than eight years out of the nineteen.  It is evident they learned this from the Jews.  After the Jews fixed their years of intercalation sometime between the late fourth to the seventh century, the Eastern Orthodox Church changed their method of calculating Easter based on the new Jewish calendar, while the Catholic Church did not!  Our investigation leads us to the conclusion that the early Christian scholars and historians understood quite well that the Jews allowed Nisan 1 to fall before the equinox.

Debunking the Aviv Barley Myth

Why does the Talmud suggest that Aviv could not start until ripe barley was sighted around Jerusalem?  On the mistaken notion that 1) the omer had to be sacrificed during Unleavened Bread, which Lev. 23 and Deut. 16 nowhere require, and 2) that the first-ripe barley for the omer could only be gathered from the environs of Jerusalem. Don’t forget, the Talmud represents Pharisaic opinion, not necessarily earlier practices at the Temple, where Sadducean opinion prevailed. The truth of the matter is that after mentioning the Last Day of Unleavened Bread, there is a large paragraph break or space in the Torah Scroll of Leviticus before mention of the Wave Sheaf ritual in vv. 10-11.  Hence, even though the climate of southern Judea virtually guaranteed suitable barley for offering the Wave Sheaf during Unleavened Bread (UB), even when it fell in late March, the Torah implies strongly that it could be cut and offered after UB, which was the Essene custom.  The climate of 1) the Jericho valley (referred to as a depression), as well as 2) Idumea and 3) the Judaean desert, was subtropical (as evidenced by the proliferation of palm trees), thus guaranteeing ripe barley for the Wave Sheaf by the end of March.  The Talmud says that all three of these were part of the holy land, eretz Israel.  If witnesses for the new moon could be received from the four corners of the land, why not ripe barley from any part of the holy land for the Wave Sheaf?  All that matters is what the Sadducees running the Temple would have done.  They frowned upon legislation which was “overmuch righteous.”  But none of their writings have survived.  On this crucial matter we have some very good insights from one of the most influential Christian astronomers of the past Century, J. K. Fotheringham:

It should be observed that the offering of the firstfruits of barley…did not need to contain more than one sheaf, which could be obtained from the part of the country where the barley ripened earliest, perhaps from the Jordan valley, and might be ready long before a whole field was ripe.  Although the command in Lev. 23:14 does not go further than to prohibit the eating of fresh ears or of bread or corn made from them till after the offering of the firstfruits, Josephus…states in the passage cited above, that the Hebrews were not permitted to reap for themselves till after the offering of the firstfruits…This could be a strong incentive to celebrate the Passover at the earliest date at which the sheaf of barley could be obtained.[57] [This is another strong case for the Spring Passover Rule]

There are important reasons why the starting of the month of Aviv or Nisan should not be determined by the barley harvest.

• There is not one word about barley being used for intercalation in the book of Exodus, or any other book of the Bible.  This is why the Karaites could not agree among themselves.
• If there was drought and famine in the land, any “religious” postponement of the month of Aviv would have postponed the time of people’s access to their barley crop, because the new produce of the land could not be eaten until after the Wave Sheaf ceremony (Josh. 5:10-12, Lev. 23:10-14).
• The word Aviv depicts barley in various different stages of ripening.  Some Karaites, in one of the great ironies of theological history, appealed to the Talmud for the use of ripe barley and could not agree among themselves on which stage of ripeness to use, or whether other herbage could be used.  Other Karaites correctly used the equinox to intercalate.[58]
• If any spring rains or moisture (evening and morning dews and damps) dampened the heads of ripened barley repeatedly, that crop could be lost to mildew and rot.  Therefore, any artificial delay due to tying the Wave Sheaf ceremony to Unleavened Bread increased the chances of delaying harvest past the optimal time for picking.  For instance, let’s say the Karaites are correct, that you have to have ripe barley before one declares Aviv 1.  What happens when March 20^th rolls around and there is no ripe barley?  They insert a 13^th month.  They have now extended by six to seven weeks the time interval that must elapse before that barley crop can be cut and eaten.  Not only must Adar II elapse, but also two to three weeks into the following month, Aviv, before anyone can harvest the barley.  They have greatly increased the chances of rain ruining that which ripens over the six to seven week period after which the 13^th month is declared.  It is for this reason that Deut. 16:9 simply stipulates “from such time as you put the sickle to the corn,” without limiting when.  This principle may be encapsulated in Yeshua’s statement in Mark 4:28-29, which defines the term ‘harvest’:

[The farmer] is not aware how the earth is spontaneously bearing fruit–first the blade, then the ear, thereafter the full grain in the ear.  Now whenever the fruit may be giving way, immediately he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has now come.

When Passover is placed near the first full moon after the equinox, it ensures the earliest possible harvest of the barley without placing Passover in winter.  This method has the stamp of mercy on it, for it staves off scarcity by expediting the Wave Sheaf, rather than delaying it; and it prevents any needless ruination of standing barley. Solomon said, “Be not righteous overmuch, neither make yourself overly wise: why should you destroy yourself?”  But that is exactly what hyper-religious people do.  The unbiblical barley method for intercalation is a good example of this.  Refusing to make requirements that are not in the Law ensures that one can harvest the barley when nature and common sense require it to be done, i.e. when the farmers think best.  When we see how dangerous this rule was, it will help all of us to understand why historians tell us that 90% of the Jewish people in the first century did not belong to any Jewish sect.[59] Perhaps agrarian societies then had far too much common sense to fall for hypocrisy dressed up as religion.  And this was a good thing for those who depended upon affordable food to feed their families.  All of Yahweh’s ways and paths are pleasantness and peace/shalom (Prov. 3:17).  Those who add to His words are found to be liars (Pro. 30:6).  The ripeness of grain determined the time of harvest, not Unleavened Bread. Since no Torah command required the Wave Sheaf to be offered during Unleavened Bread, then there never was a need to intercalate a 13^th month based on the state of the barley.  J. B. Segal sums up the reasons for rejecting the ripening barley hypothesis for inserting an extra month:

One of the principal functions of the spring New Year festivals is to secure—as far as human beings have the power to secure—the success of the harvest in advance…the new crops may be put to everyday use only after the performance of the New Year ceremonial.  The festival, then, must precede the beginning of the harvest period.  It may be early, but it must on no account fall too late.  The time of Hebrew spring festival is rightly prescribed as Abhibh, the season of the green ears, not the season of the ripe corn.[60]

The Heavens Are Telling, But Is the Church Listening?

If calendar questions are too difficult for the Church to decide, then it behooves her to defer to the answer from the heavens.  But the Church has neglected the heavens ever since the Catholic Church convinced Christians that the signs in the heavens are wicked astrology.  Psalm 19, however, has a different story to tell about the constellations:

The heavens are recounting the glory of God,[61] and the firmament shows His handywork.  Day after day is uttering a saying, and night after night is disclosing knowledge. There is no audible saying, and there are no words; Their voice is unheard.  Yet into the entire earth their voice goes forth, and into the ends of the world their declarations.

Only in the last century or so has the Church‘s attitude toward the Zodiac begun to change.  In our day even the conservative “moral-majority” leader, Presbyterian evangelist D. James Kennedy, published a booklet, The Real Meaning of the Zodiac. The seminal work in this field dates back to 1882, The Gospel in the Stars.[62] This book was followed closely by E. W. Bullinger, whose popular book, The Witness of the Stars,[63] was published 100 years ago.   Bullinger states his purpose in publishing such a work:

…how far the foundation of our hopes of coming glory are strengthened by the prophecies which have been written in the stars of heaven…May the God of all grace use [this book] to strengthen His people in waiting for His Son from Heaven, even [Yeshua] which delivered us from the wrath to come.

It is evident from the antiquity of the evidence and the meaning of star and constellation names, that Yahweh Himself is responsible for these signs in the heavens and the story they tell.  Despite, this, Church pastors are wont to turn a deaf ear to those who claim that Yahweh speaks via the heavens.

A Warning from the Days of Jeroboam

Hearkening back to an oft-quoted story in the book of Kings, most of us are aware that around 940 BC Jeroboam switched the Feast of Sukkot from the seventh month to the eighth month[64] and established it in a new location (Bethel), because he was afraid of losing the loyalty of the ten Northern Tribes (I Kg. 12:32).  If they should go up to Jerusalem in the seventh month to tabernacle before Yahweh, Jeroboam thought that might spell the end of his personal kingship. This thing became a sin in Israel (v. 30), as it paved the way for wholesale idolatry.  Notice that Jeroboam’s false eighth month feast was “according to the feast in the land of Judah,” which obviously fell in the seventh month as per the Law of Moses.  Now the scripture says clearly that this phony feast was devised “out of Jeroboam’s own heart.”  Is it any wonder that Yahweh views all extra-Biblical rules that force Atonement and Tabernacles to fall completely in the eighth month—October—as devices of men?  Sects who opposed the Rabbinate of Baghdad, progenitors of modern Orthodox Judaism, accused them of following laws of their own invention.[65] For this and other reasons, the Karaites of the Middle Ages likened the rabbis to Jeroboam.  Many modern Christian Sabbatarian leaders are oblivious to the changes brought about by the rabbis of the Middle Ages, and have not learned from the Karaites who sought to bring Judaism back to the written Torah.[66] Is it possible that the keeping of Sukkot in the eighth month is to the modern feast-keeping movement what Sunday-keeping[67] is to mainstream Christianity?  Both are in need of reform!

Reform and unity is possible for the modern Christian feast-keeping movement.  Those in Jeroboam’s day were far more accountable than we on this matter; because they knew when Sukkot’s seventh month occurred (it had never been kept differently).  But knowledge is increasing exponentially in our day (Dan. 12:4).  I would like to suggest to the ekklesia a simple way of knowing when the seventh month falls.  The names of the original months are contemporaneous with Jeroboam, and may go back to Noah’s day.  According to Bede, when Rome was founded (753 BC), the Latin used ordinal numbers to comprise the names of the months. Rome at the time of its founding began its year with March.  April was the second month; May was the third month, kept in honor of senior citizens.  June was the fourth month.  July was called Quintillus (fifth) until the Roman Senate renamed it in honor of Julius Caesar. Sextus, the sixth month, was renamed after Caesar Augustus. That brings us to the seventh month of the year, the Latin September, “sept” meaning seven.  October = eighth, November = nineth, and December = tenth month.  Is it possible that Yahweh purposely left these month names intact, so that latter day feast-keepers might have an ancient witness to the approximate time of the seventh and eighth months?  Is it just a coincidence that the fall equinox falls during the “seventh” month, and the spring equinox in the first month of this ancient calendar, in March?  Remember Philo?

Please take note of this, Church, synagogue, independent believer, whoever you are who cares about the correct timing of the festivals.  It is apparent to thinking minds that when Passover is placed in the second month of spring, then the Feast of Tabernacles is pushed too far into the 8^th month of October.

I recommend Starry Night and Redshift software to my readers. They can be purchased online at a nominal cost ($10.00-$25.00), and used for determining the calendar at any date in history.

In all things, including the calendar, let us speak the truth in love, “endeavoring to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”

Addendum to Hebrew Calendar: The Elephantine Papyri of the Fifth Century B.C.

Elephantine Island is in the middle of the Nile River near the Aswan dam, in Upper Egypt.  In the 400’s BC a squadron of Jewish militia was stationed there, part of a garrison protecting the southern frontier of the Persian Empire.  Scores of Aramaic documents were unearthed there.  They are an early source of documentation of the unique social, economic, and religious life of a Jewish community outside of Palestine.  Those legal documents, covering the period 471 to 402 BC, use double-dating[68] indicate they were using a calendar similar, but not identical, to the Babylonian calendar.[69]

Some in the Church of God feast-keeping movement have tried to use the letters (called kraeligs) written by the Jewish priests at their temple in Elephantine, Egypt (5^th C. BC) to support the idea that standard Jewish intercalation in the post-exilic period never put Nisan before the equinox.  This approach assumes that Elephantine based its calendar on directives from the temple authorities in Jerusalem.  But the most prominent calendar scholars question this assumption.  The astronomer E. B. Knobel, well-known British astronomer J. K. Fotheringham, and E. Mahler, to name just a few, all have come to the conclusion that the Elephantine calendar was a computed calendar, not based on the visibility of the new moon.[70] Most experts believe their year began with Tishri 1 (contrary to Ex. 12:1).  The consensus is that “the Jewish calendar at Elephantine was not completely synonymous with the Babylonian calendar, unless every divergence is explained as a scribal error.”[71] In an article published by Hebrew Union College Annual, I found these comments by Julian Morgenstern:[72]

The Jews of Elephantine did not employ a calendar of their own, nor one of ancient origin and use among them.  Instead, the Babylonian month names were employed by them quite generally during the 5^th C. BC, at least a full century before these same names came into general use in Palestine.  And inasmuch as during the 5^th C. BC Egypt seems to have been a Persian province, under direct ad-ministration from the Persian court, the use of the Babylonian month names in Egypt during this period probably implied no more than that the Babylonian calendar had been introduced into that province by the Persian royal administrations.  And with this, of course, the reckoning of the year from the Babylonian New Year’s Day on the 1^st of Nisanu.  In other words, the Elephantine papyri probably evidence no more than that the Jews of this province employed the Babylonian calendar already in the 5^th C. BC, but in no wise does it follow from this that they independently reckoned the new year from the first of Nisan.

Later, in 1935, Morgenstern had this to say about the Jewish community in Elephantine:

[They] had no long established and fondly cherished tradition with regard to their own [prior] Jewish life and practice.  They had apparently manifested immediate readiness to adopt Egyptian modes of life and religious observation and to fuse Egyptian culture with their own native Jewish practice.  They were distinctly assimilative in spirit.[73]

To get a thoroughly prophetic/Biblical perspective on the Jews who were in Egypt during the days of Jeremiah, the reader may consult Jeremiah 44.  They were deemed as worthy of punishment as the inhabitants of Jerusalem.  Thus saith Yahweh of hosts, the God of Israel (Jeremiah 44:11-12):

I will take the remnant of Judah, that have set their faces to go into the land of Egypt to sojourn there, and they shall all be consumed…by sword and famine… they shall be an execration, and an astonishment, and a curse, and a reproach.

Therefore it seems very strange that contemporary Christian calendar pundits would wish to emulate, or hold up as a model, any calendar evidence from Jews in Egypt.   There is evidence they intercalated after the sixth month, putting Tabernacles in the 8^th month.[74]

Though it is true that most of the datable documents from Elephantine indicate a Nisan beginning only after the Vernal Equinox, exactly as the Babylonian calendar, there is one possible exception.  On papyrus Kraelig 8, the Egyptian date of Payni 22 corresponds to Tishri 6, year 8 of Darius II, or 416 BC.  If there was no scribal error here, then the date would correspond to September 22, 416 BC on the Julian calendar, and six months earlier would put the first day of Nisan at least two days before the spring equinox of that year, which fell on Julian date of March 27.  One must assume there was a scribal error at Kraelig 8 in order to postulate otherwise.

In conclusion, the Elephantine papyri indicate the Jews in the Egyptian Diaspora of the 5^th the calendar used a calendar that was not similar to the Jews of the northern Diaspora of Babylonia and Media, where crescents were used and there was no intercalated sixth month.  Furthermore, the calendar on the Elephantine papyri cannot be proven to have religious authority behind them, in as much as they may have been used only for civil purposes.[75] Anyone wishing to confirm this conclusion may take the time to reference the footnoted authoritative sources in this addendum.

www.americaspropheticdestiny.com

derstinetodd@yahoo.com

[2] A cursory reading of Colossians indicates it to be a predominantly Gentile ekklesia.

[3] J. K. Fotheringham, ‘The Evidence of Astronomy and Technical Considerations for the Date of Crucifxion,’ JTS 35 (1934), 159, 162.  Karl Schoch regards delaying Passover until Thursday, April 26 as “impossible at that season of the year.”  These two men are most responsible in their day for developing the minimal criteria for visibility of a crescent moon.

[4] See erev in Baumgarten’s Hebrew Lexicon.

[5] Article “Twilight” in Encyclopedia Judaica: gives bin ha ereviym as the Hebrew phrase defined by twilight/dusk.  For a more thorough discussion of why bin ha ereviym must refer to dusk and not afternoon, see appendix or www.americaspropheticdestiny.com.

[6] The time for slaying the Paschal lamb was moved up to 2PM on Fridays in order to avoid running into the Sabbath.  This is one of many arguments which may be adduced against the crucifixion being on Friday, since Yeshua died at 3 PM, not 2 PM.

[7] The appendix “Were Passover lambs killed at people’s houses during the time of Christ?” may be studied to show the unique nature of the Passover sacrifice.

[8] The reader may contemplate the following twelve Gospel verses to satisfy himself that the Savior and His disciples actually ate The Passover the night following Nisan 13.  Each verse has the definite article before Passover, ta pasca– Matt. 26:2, 17, 18, 19; Mark 14:12 (2x), 14, 16; Luke 22:7, 11, 13, 15.

[9]  Eusebius’ On the Easter Festival, cited by Geo. Declerq, Anno Domini (Brepols Pub., 2000), 16.

[10] Author has a study paper on bin ha ereviym: www.americaspropheticdestiny.com, also appendix of book.

[11] Matt 27:62; Mark 15:42; Luke 23:54; John 19:14, 31, 42.

[12] Masselkhtaot Rosh HaShanah 21b-25b.

[13] Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, p. 28.

[14] Ex. R. xv. 26.

[15] See Ormond Edwards, The Time of Christ, et al.

[16] Lecture by Avi Ben Mordecai delivered before Messianic group in Charlotte, NC, July 24, 2005

[17] Wayne L. Atchison, “Calendar of the Second Temple”, www.z2cs.com.

[18] The Jewish Study Bible, Edit. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (JPS, Oxford Univ Press).

[19] See Ex. 4:8-9, 30; 7:3; Num. 14:11;  Deut. 13:1-2; Ju. 6:17; Jer. 10:2.

[20] The foregoing examples were taken from Brown Driver Briggs Hebrew Lexicon, p. 16.

[21] Ernest Martin, “The New Testament Calendar”, A.S.K. publications, www.askelm.com Portland, OR.

[22] Posnanski, “Remarks on Early Karaite Critics of the Mishnah’” Jewish Quarterly Review (Vol. 1920) 237-39. They also prove from an analysis of Ezra 7:9 and 8:31-33 that had rabbinic rules been in place in Ezra’s day, then Passover would have fallen only on Mon., Wed., or Friday, making the dehiyya untenable.

[23] Citation in The Time of Christ, p. 37.

[24] Ernest L. Martin, “How to Calculate the Biblical Calendar,” p. 3. ASK publications,  www.askelm.com

[25] Elder Wayne Atchison, “The Observed Calendar of the 2^nd Temple”,  p. 1.

[26] A related word is nahkaph (ףqn), to make a circle, to go around.

[27] See Calendar article at www.yourarmstoisrael.org.

[28] II Peter 1:21.

[29] Grammatical and exegetical insight courtesy Miles van Pelt PhD. Greek and Hebrew professor, Reformed Theological Seminary, Jackson, MS.

[30] J. B. Segal’s article “Intercalation and the Hebrew Calendar” in Vetus Testamentum (1957), p. 276 is a perfect illustration of this ability to relegate Ex. 34:22 to a mere footnote.

[31] David T. Runia, Philo in Early Christian Literature (1993), p. 126.

[32] Antiquities of the Jews, III. x. 5

[33] Mike Molnar, PhD, Star of Bethlehem: The Legacy of the Magi (Rutgers Univ Press), 46, 96, 111, 120.  “Controlled” is an astrological term, indicating that the spiritual concept portrayed by Aries governed the Jews’ relationship with the Covenant God Yahweh.

[34] Handbook of Bib. Chron., op cit. p. 27-28.  Chart on page 28 reconstructed from Parker & Dubberstein shows that Ululu was repeated in 598 BC, forcing the following Nisanu to be in mid-April, a month later than the Jews.

[35] II Kg. 24:8 proves the “him” cannot refer to Jehoichin, since he only reigned 3 months.

[36] See Josephus, Wars of the Jews, VI.iv.1-4.

[37] A saying of Rabbi Jose in Seder Olam, transl. by. Heinrich W. Guggenheimer (Jason Aaronson, Northvale, NJ, 1998), 264.

[38] (II Chron. 24:4, 8; Josephus, Antiguities 7. 14.7; M. Sukkah 5:8; M. Tamid 5:1; Tos. Taanith 2:1f.

[39] Beckwith, Review Qumran Vol. 9 (1977): 81, 84-86.

[40] Heinrich W. Guggenheimer’s translation of Seder Olam (Jason Aaronson, Northvale, NJ, 1998), 264.

[41] In Volume du Congrès, Strasbourg 1956 (Supplements to Vetus Testamentum, vol. 4), 25, as cited by Roger Beckwith in Calendar and Chronology, Jewish and Christian (E. J. Brill, NY, 1996), 89.

[42] Beckwith, Calendar and Chronology, Jewish and Christian, (E. J. Brill, NY, 1996), 89.

[43] J. D. Douglas & N. Hillyer, editors, IVP, (1980), article “Calendar”, Vol 1, page 223.

[44] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, III. x. 5, “when the sun stands in the sign of the Ram.”.

[45] Shurer, A History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ, 1^st Div. Vol. II, Appendix III.

[46] Segal gives the example of J. Skinner, Genesis (in Int’l Critical Commentary), on Gen. 1:16.

[47] Segal, “Intercalation and the Hebrew Calendar,” op. cit., 268-69.

[48] Bullinger, Witness of the Stars, p. 106, says “on the 14^th of Nisan, in the year of the crucifixon, the sun stood at the very spot marked by the stars El Nath, the pierced, the wounded or slain.”

[49] Ibid., p. 105.

[50] The sun was in Taurus at the head of the equinoctial year from Adam through the flood of Noah!

[51] See Addendum at the end of this chapter for discussion on the Jews’ of Elephantine, Egypt.

[52] The sin of Jeroboam, putting feast of Tabernacles in the 8^th month, is covered later in this paper.

[53] Antiquities of the Jews, Book III. Chap X. sect. 5: “on the 14th day of the lunar month [Nisan], when the sun is in Aries (for in this month we were delivered from bondage under the Egyptians), the law ordained that we should every year slay that sacrifice…called the Passover.”

[54] Bullinger, op. cit. p. 120.

[55] In I Cor. 5: 7-8, Paul tells the Corinthians: “Let us keep this feast (Passover).”  The issue is that while they were physically deleavened in preparation for the upcoming feast, they were spiritually leavened.

[56] We know this from Eusebius’ comments on this matter in his Ecclesiastical History.

[57] Fotheringham, “The Evidence of Astronomy and Technical Chronology for the Date of the Crucifixion” Journal of Theological Studies, Vol. 4, 1934, 157.

[58] Solinksi and Atchison, “A Calendar Discussion” p. 37.

[59] Ernest L. Martin, “Is Judaism the Religion of Moses?” www.cbcg.org. p. 5.

[60] Segal, “Intercalation and Hebrew Calendar,” Novum Testamentum (1957), 266.

[61] Concordant Version of the Book of Psalms.  Use both KJV and Concordant here.

[62] Joseph A. Seiss, The Gospel in the Stars: or Primeval Astronomy (Kregel, Grand Rapids, MI. 1972).

[63] Kregel Publications, Grand Rapids, MI. (1893).

[64] More likely from Sept. to October than from October to November.

[65] See comments of Nicolaus of Damasacus in Antiquities of the Jews 17.2.2 § 41-45 in “The Pharisaic Paradosis”, Albert I. Baumgarten, HTR 80:1 (1987), page 71.

[66] At least when it comes to making calendar and holy-day decisions.

[67] If you study the writings of the so-called Church fathers, Sunday is referred to as the “eighth day”!

[68] Egyptian civil year and the current regnal year of the Persian monarch.

[69] S.J. Horn and L.H. Wood, “The 5^th C. Jewish Calendar at Elephantine,” JNES 13 (1954)

[70] S. H. Horn & L. H. Wood, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol 13, 1/54, 2.

[71] Ibid., 3.

[72] Morgentstern, Hebrew Union College Annual, Vol.III, (1926), p. 78.

[73] Idem., Vol X (1935), p. 119

[74] Ibid., and Kenneth Doig, Chap. 2 of NT Chronology (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), also online at http://doig.net/NTC02.htm, p. 2-3.

[75] Ibid. p. 4.

Two Are Better Than One: A Biblical and Logical Exposition of the Godhead of Yahweh and His Son

 About twenty years ago a long-time friend and fellow-believer showed me the Peshitta, which is an Aramaic version of the New Testament scriptures. Thirty-some verses in it contain the phrase demarYah (meaning “the Lord Yah”) as an appellation for Yeshua.  Some few have been led to the conclusion that this title signifies that since Yahshua is called demarYah, and Yah is the God of the Old Testament, that this makes Yeshua synonymous with His own Father!  We wish in this paper to deal with the assumptions inherent in this false conclusion.

 The New Testament reveals that the Father was not seen or revealed in the Old Testament!  This is the job of Yeshua and the New Testament, amazing as that may seem:

ALL THINGS are delivered unto Me (Yahshua) by My Father: and no man knows the Son, but the Father; neither knows any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him. (Matt. 11:27)

One of the disciples in John 14:8 said to the Master, “Lord, it is enough if you show us the Father.”  Yeshua’s reply indicates that seeing and knowing him was instrumental in seeing and knowing the Father.  Yeshua is thus the means or bridge to knowing the Father.

One of the themes in the Apostle John’s writings is the repeated emphasis on the fact that Yeshua and His Father are two individuals. John 5:27:

“You [Jews] have neither heard His voice at any time, nor seen His shape.”

Since Adam and Eve heard the voice of Yahweh walking in the garden, Yeshua, not the Father, must be the member of the Godhead who interacted with Adam and Eve.  I John 4:12: “No man has seen Theos/God the Father at any time.” Both of these verses prove that the Yahweh of the Old Testament was a DIFFERENT individual of the God family than the Father.  Abraham ate a meal with Yahweh, and conversed with Him.  Jacob wrestled with Elohim, and called the name of the place Peniel (the face of EL).  Moses was shown Yahweh hinder parts and spoke face to face with Yahweh, and definitely heard the voice of Yahweh up on Mt. Sinai, unless one wants to postulate that Yahweh brought His personal secretary down to earth to dictate things to Moses.

Returning to the Aramaic NT, in none of the thirty-five verses where demarYah occurs is the Tetragram–name of Yahweh–spelled out in full. It is plausible that the Peshitta’s prolific use of demarYah could be, on the face of it, a reference to either Yeshua the Son (who came in His Father’s Name) or Yahweh the Father.  John 5:43:

I have come in My Father’s Name, and you receive Me not: if another shall come in his own name, him will you receive.

But the context in all of these verses does show that the New Testament translators who translated the Apostles’ works into Aramaic[1] used the title MarYah to refer to the Son, not the Father.  Many of these places clearly show a clear distinction between the Father and the Son.  For instance, in John 8:11 (the woman caught in adultery) said to Yeshua, “No one, MarYah.”  Did this woman think she was talking to the Creator Yahweh in Heaven?  We think not!  Only a highly philosophical Greek mindset similar to Gnosticism could possibly construe these references as being to the heavenly Father.  Since we are to receive the Kingdom of Heaven as a little child would, we do well to take the straightforward, plain sense of these passages, understanding them as any child would naturally. As we shall see, wherever the Father and Son are spoken of in the New Testament, the context makes a differentiation between the two.  And if it didn’t it would be the first instance in all of history where a Father and a Son were the same individual, as it is quite impossible and ludicrous to suggest that a Son begets Himself.  No child fails to distinguish between himself and his Father. Since we, in order to enter into THAT Kingdom must do so as a little child, let us therefore delve into the plethora of Biblical reasons why Yahweh the Father is NOT Yeshua.

Scholarly inquiry leads to the almost unanimous conclusion that the Peshitta was not originally written in Aramaic, but translated from a Greek original into Aramaic!  In my own research comparing Lamsa’s readings with other Greek texts, I have noticed various instances where the Peshitta reflects an underlying Greek text.  Wherever the NT Greek text has the word pentecostos, in Acts 2:1, 20:16, and I Cor. 16:8, the Peshitta also has pentecostos.  One would certainly expect a more Hebraic term if the Peshitta were an original work.  Bullinger and other linguistic scholars date the Peshitta to the late 2^nd Century, or early 3^rd.  At this stage in Church history, there was already some confusion among copyists as to what to do with the sacred name as it appeared in the original transcripts of the NT.[2] However, even Origen preserved the Tetragram using block style Aramaic script in his Hexapla, five versions of the OT in Greek.

There were many Reformers during the 1500’s and 1600’s who understood that Jesus was the Lord YHWH of the Old Testament, not the least being John Calvin.  My own highly-credentialed Hebrew and Greek professor (Miles van Pelt) at Reformed Theolo-gical Seminary believed the same as Calvin and others on this subject.  Therefore, we are not surprised that the New Testament text (Aramaic or Greek) contains much evidence linking the identity of the Savior Yeshua with the Yahweh of the OT.  It is, however, only the presumption of absolute Oneness of the Godhead that leads to the false conclusion that Yeshua is therefore synonymous with the Father.  So we will show in this paper that there existed two Yahwehs in the OT, and that One always remained in the background in heaven, and the Other often came down to earth as His Spokesman and interfaced with men!

YESHUA WAS WORSHIPPED

There are no less than three occasions in the Gospels when healed individuals worshipped Yeshua, yet He made no effort to dissuade them from doing so.  Let’s face it, folks who deny the divinity of Yeshua have a lot of explaining to do, not the least being their lack of respect for the only scriptures which give testimony of the life and work of Yeshua, the Greek NT scriptures (as well as the Aramaic Peshitta).  No doctrine is more well-established than the fact that Yeshua pre-existed.  Also, those who deny the Divinity of the Son must explain why and how Yahweh’s Only-begotten Son could possibly be a different genus, species, or kind of being than His Father.  In the terms Elohim/God we take to mean the kind of Being that Yahweh is.  Therefore, any sugges-tion that Yeshua is not also God would constitute an anomaly in nature, the first time in history that an offspring got categorized into a lesser kind of species or being than its progenitor.  Some ‘scholars’ have tried to suggest the NT “obscures the divinity of Jesus.”  The sheer absurdity of such an assertion is shown by the fact that there is hardly any mainstream Christian church that denies the Divinity of Jesus.  The Reformers of the 15-1600’s derived these conclusions from the Greek NT, as well as a number of passages in the OT, such as Daniel 7: 9-10, 13-14:

The Ancient of Days took His seat, whose raiment was white as snow, the hair of His head like pure wool; His throne was fiery flames…a million served Him, and 100 million stood before Him.  The court sat in judgment, and the books were opened…[later] Behold, One like the Son of Man came with clouds of heaven, and He came to the Ancient of Days, and was presented before Him.  To Him was given dominion, glory, and a Kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve Him; His dominion is an everlasting dominion…

Since we already knew (didn’t we?) that the basic meaning of YAH is I AM, and that Yeshua on no less than four occasion in the book of John referred to Himself as I AM—Before Abraham was, I AM, etc.—we already had a pretty good idea that Yeshua pre-existed.  But as any great work of Creation or Redemption requires two individuals in order to carry out that work, it never occurred to any of us who were familiar with the Peshitta that demarYAH automatically made Yeshua the Father. For instance, manufac-turing and construction require a Designer or an Architect for the initial stage of Creation, while the actual implementation requires a foreman to give orders and speak things that carry out the Design and Will of the Designer or Architect.  Yeshua was the Foreman or Spokesman who carried out His Father’s plans.  Mankind and this entire Universe was a project involving the Family of Yahweh from the outset, “for which cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Yeshua the Messiah, in Whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named.” (Eph. 3:15)

That Redemption itself requires the activity of two individuals is clearly seen in scrip-ture.  After all, the whole nature of Redemption and the separate roles of the Father and the Son are pictured quite graphically in the most referenced story in the history of Judaism–Genesis 22 and the account of Abraham offering up his son Isaac.  Redemption re-quires one making a sacrifice, offering up the victim, but it also requires a compliant, willing offeree, a willing sacrificial host, one like a lamb willing to lay himself down on Yahweh’s altar.  The adult Isaac fulfilled this picture.  He played out the future role of Yahshua there at Mt. Moriah some 2000 years before the Coming of Yeshua.  Abraham is a type of the Heavenly Father.  Abraham’s pre-eminent status as ‘father of the faithful’ lies in the fact that he was willing to give his only begotten son Isaac in order to satisfy an unwavering faith in Yahweh, whom he met on the plains of Mamre (Gen. 18:1).  Thus the concept of redemption demanded the loving role of both the Creator and His Son.

The Greek term Theos, translated God, virtually always refers to YAHWEH the Father in its many occurrences in the NT.  George Howard, discoverer of the antiquity of The Hebrew Gospel According to Matthew, has pointed out that the earliest manuscripts of the LXX, the Qumran Dead Sea copies of OT passages, and other sacred writings of the Jews from the 200 BC to the time of Origen around 220 A.D. ALL used either two-letter abbreviations—KS (for Kurios) and ΘS (for theos)—with lines over them, to substitute for the sacred name, or preserved the Tetragram in block style Aramaic.  Jack Finegan, one of the greatest Biblical archaeologists and chronologers of the 20^th Century, agrees that the abbreviations were put there in replacement of the sacred name.  But in none of these many passages is there any suggestion that the Father and the Son are the same individual.  It should be apparent to anyone, including Reinhold, reading I Cor. 8:6 that “there is ONE Theos, the Father, From Whom comes every thing, AND ONE Lord Yahshua (demarYAH in the Peshitta), By (or Through) Whom are all things.”  Some folks find it difficult adding ONE plus ONE!

The Greek words translated From (ex=ex), means out of.   All things, including the Son, came OUT OF or OUT FROM the Father.  That was His Function, according to I Cor. 8:6. The Father is the Source of ALL. But the Son Himself had a quite different function.  Several passages in John and Paul’s writings indicating Yeshua was the Agent of Creation.  The word translated ‘By’ (dia) in I Cor. 8:6, indicates a completely different function, i.e. that all Creation came into existence Through Yahshua. John states that “NOT EVEN ONE THING has come into Being without or apart from Yeshua.  It is evident therefore that Two individuals were involved in the business of creating the entire universe and man—ONE had the ideas and concept for propagating His family and giving them a universe to inhabit, the OTHER was the MEANS through which the worlds were spoken into existence.  Heb. 1:3 says that God the Father (YAHWEH) indeed made the Ages through His Son.  If the Father was all there was to the Godhead, and he was the only person doing the creating, then every one of these passages in Clossians 1:13-16, John 1, Hebrews 1, in Ephesians 3:9 and Revelation are redundant, superflous, misleading.  If there was only one individual, God the Father, who created everything, then the Holy Spirit needed only a dozen words to state this fact.  Neverthe-less the Truth stands out clearly, that He used His Son to bring about The Universe and the Ages of Time.

Col. 1:14f says the Son is the IMAGE of the invisible God.  To say that the IMAGE of something is one and the same as the original is quite contrary to experience and to nature, not to mention unscientific.

Yahweh uses the phrase EYAH ASHER EYAH to describe His Name to Moses in Exod. 3:14.  It may be translated I AM THAT I AM, indicating self-existence not depen-dent on anyone or anything else.  The connotation is that NO ONE MAKES ME WHAT I AM, I JUST AM.  And yet Acts 2:26, in the Peshitta, we are told that “Theos (the Father, YAHWEH) HAS MADE THIS VERY YESHUA, WHOM YOU CRUCIFIED, BOTH MARYAH (Lord Yah) and the Messiah.”

NO ONE has ever made YAHWEH into something He wasn’t already.  Yet the Father made His Son to be Messiah and Lord, according to Acts 2:26, just as Dan. 7:14 describes so vividly.  The Son could do nothing of Himself, and spoke not His own words even, but did only those things He had seen from His Father.  The Son was made subject to weakness and temptation of the flesh (in order to condemn sin in the flesh), and made subject to death.  None of this fits the description we have of the Father given by James, the Lord’s brother:

“Every good and every perfect gift (Yahshua) is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with Whom is no variableness, nor shadow of turning.” (James 1:17)

Father Yahweh Named His Only-Begotten After Himself

Just as many human fathers call their sons by the same name as themselves, hence John Jr., or John Smith II, Yahweh the Father also named His only-begotten Son Yahweh.  That is why at the creation of Adam and Eve, they said to one another, “LET US MAKE MAN AFTER OUR IMAGE AND AFTER OUR LIKENESS.”  Since the scripture never says that angels were created in Yahweh’s image or likeness, this statement cannot be viewed as a conversation with the angels.  In Gen. 19:24 Yahweh called down upon Sodom and Gomorrah fire and brimstone from Yahweh out of Heaven.  It makes absolutely no sense to state it in this manner if there were only one Yahweh.  The first Yahweh was on earth, having come down to have some fellowship with Abraham, and to verify the reports concerning the wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah.  After finishing a conversation with Abraham concerning the planned destruction of these two cities, Yahweh departed and went there for the purpose of calling down judgment from His Father out of heaven.  The double occurrence of YAHWEH in Gen. 19:24, and the plain sense of the statement, led many righteous Jews in ancient times to believe in the existence of a Greater and Lesser Yahweh. Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, a most prestigious institution for postgraduate studies in Hebrew, Aramaic, and advanced Judaic studies, teaches that the Jewish sources reveal the existence of such sects of Judaism who understood the dual nature of the God-head!  These of course, were persecuted out of ex-istence in favor of the Cult of One Adon, which began to flourish in the days of Jeremiah, who prophesied during the very time when Judah first experienced the wrath of Yahweh.  This cult foisted a strict monotheism upon Judaism that has persisted to this day.

The Jews’ insistence upon strict Oneness of the Godhead was fundamental to their condemnation of Yeshua, whom they saw as making Himself equal with God.  Had they understood their own scriptures, such as Solomon’s profound statements in Proverbs 30:4, they might have hedged their self-righteous narrow-mindedness:

Who has ascended up into Heaven, or descended?

Who has established all the ends of the earth?

What is His Name, and what is His Son’s Name, if you can tell?

No author of the NT more exemplifies the need to believe in BOTH the Father and the Son as separate individuals than the beloved Apostle John, who said:

If that which you have heard from the beginning shall remain in you, you also shall continue in the Son AND in the Father (I John 2:24).

Again, if these are not two individuals, then this manner of speaking is deliberately confusing and misleading.  But in truth only someone suffering from a short circuit of their own God-given human reasoning could construe this and numerous other statements as referring to one and the same individual.  It is apparent that John is confronting anti-Christian Gnostic philosophy when he says, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit,

“Who is a liar but he that denies that Yeshua is the Christ?  He is Antichrist that denies the Father AND the Son.”(I John 2:22).

“He that believes not Yahweh HAS MADE HIM A LIAR; because he believes not the record that God gave of his Son.” I  John 5:10

“ONENESS” and the Unbiblical Doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul

The Christian apologist Justin Martyr taught that any teacher who taught that man has an immortal soul was a Hellenist, not a Christian.  Up to 150 AD only Greek philosophy, Plato, and pagan religions taught that man possessed a soul that never died.  Justin went so far as to say that such teaching was a dead give-away that such a person was not a Christian at all.  This indicates that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul had not yet been adopted, by and large, by the orthodox Christian churches, and it must be assumed that the apostolic church taught the Biblical doctrine of the state of the dead.  The dead know not anything (Eccl. 9:5), but are completely unconscious, depicted as sleeping in the grave.  I Cor. 15: 26 shows that death is “the LAST ENEMY that shall be destroyed.”  This resurrection chapter (Cor. 15) proves that death is not conquered until Yeshua raises the dead from their graves at the resurrection of the dead at His Coming.

Now Yeshua Himself emptied Himself of His Divinity, took on the form of a man, came down from Heaven, and “being found in the fashion of a man, He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.” (Phil. 2:8)  It is true that Yeshua “had authority (Greek exousia)–to lay down His life, and authority to take (Greek labein= to receive) it again, i.e. life from the dead (John 10:18).  But as a man who had emptied Himself of His Divinity (Phil 2:7), HE DID NOT HAVE THE POWER (Greek dunamis) TO RESURRECT HIMSELF FROM THE GRAVE.  That is why the New Testament declares that “God (Theos, invariably the Father) raised him from the dead.” (Acts 13:30)  Oneness forces one to abandon the truth concerning the powerlessness and absolute enemy status of DEATH.  The idea that anyone can raise themselves from being dead back to life again is just about the most ludicrous idea ever entertained by the religious fringe.  Frankly, it is an idea which greatly offends the Heavenly Father, for it leaves Him out of the picture, no matter how we try to sugar coat the idea.  After Paul states that the last enemy destroyed is death itself, he goes on to make this amazing differentiation between the Father and the Son (I Cor. 15:27-28):

For He (Yahweh the Father) has put all things under his (Yeshua’s) feet.  But when He says all things are put under him, it is evident that He is excepted, Who did put all things under him.  And when all things shall be subjected to him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto Him that put all things under him, that [Yahweh] God may be all in all.

“Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labor.  For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falls; for he has not another to help him up.” (Eccl. 4:9)

When Yeshua “fell” at His crucifixion, and was laid in a tomb for three days.  Thanks to Almighty Yahweh in Heaven, Yeshua was not alone.  He had his Father Above to help raise him up. He was the One who “lifted up his fellow” as it were, for they had loved each other from the foundation of the world.  And Yahweh so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever should believe into Him, might not perish, but have life into the Age.

Todd Derstine     www.americaspropheticdestiny.com derstinetodd@yahoo.com

[2] See George Howard’s articles Tetragram in the New Testament, Journal of Biblical Literature, 1978, and “The Name of God in the New Testament” Biblical Archaeological Review.

A Lesson from the Time of Ezra and Nehemiah

Does the Lord wish for non-Jewish Christians and believers in Torah to uproot themselves from their jobs and hometowns in America and other countries and relocate to Eretz Israel?  Major Messianic ministries are currently teaching their followers that if certain prophetic milestones are reached here in America or in the Middle East, then the faithful few need to be prepared to sell out and move to Israel.  We set aside, for the time being, the impractical nature of this proposition, and address in this article a major precedent in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah that indicates the mind and will of Yahweh on this matter, as expressed by His prophets, Ezekiel and Daniel.

Most zealous believers, intent upon pleasing Yahweh, have not stopped to consider: Was there ever a time in history when the Ten Tribes had another opportunity to return in large numbers, but did NOT?

Ten Tribes of the Median Empire Were Invited By Ezra to Return to Palestine

Darius Hystapes the Persian (also called Artaxerxes) gave authority to the Levites and Jews of Babylonia to return to Jerusalem with Ezra around 520/519 BC.  This decree is given in Ezra 7:12-13:

Artaxerxes, king of kings, unto Ezra the priest, a scribe of the Law of Elohim of Heaven…I have made a decree that all they of the People of Israel, and of his priests and Levites, in my realm, which are minded of their own free will to go up to Jerusalem, go with thee.

According to Josephus, Ezra sent a copy of Darius’ letter “to those of his own nation that were in Media.”[1] As we shall soon see, Josephus is referring here to non-Judah, non-Jewish Israelites living north of Babylonia, in the former territory of the Median Empire. A great multitude of these other tribes had been living in Media since the days of   Assyrian captivity, when Assyrian king Sargon II exiled them there.  This deportation of the inhabitants of Samaria and the northern tribes to the “cities of the Medes”[2] preceded that of the Jews by Nebuchadnezzar by about 120 years. Media was well north of Babylonia, in the Caucasus Mountains area (modern Georgia), and the area from which the Caucasian people of Europe migrated in the early centuries of the Christ-ian era. Josephus goes on to say that many among them, when they heard that King Darius gave authority to Ezra to return to the land of their forefathers, were “greatly pleased,” and “came to Babylon as very desirous of going down to Jerusalem…” Then what happened?

This story has a peculiar twist, the explanation of which holds quite a lesson for those in our day overly zealous of returning to the land of Israel.  Josephus continues: “…but then the entire body of the people of Israel remained in that country [Babylon]; wherefore there are but two tribes in Asia and Europe subject to the Romans, while the ten tribes are beyond the Euphrates till now, and are an immense multitude, and not to be estimated for numbers.”

What did Josephus mean, “beyond the Euphrates”?  In his day the phrase could mean only one thing, because there was only one nation, or rather empire, “beyond the Euphrates” and that was the Parthian Empire (c. 250 BC – 243 AD), comprising the territory of modern Iran, Iraq, Georgia, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan and the Mekong delta of Vietnam. We conclude then that thousands of ten-tribed people from Media moved southward into Babylonia during Ezra’s day, and over the next several hundred years grew into “an immense multitude” fulfilling to some degree the promises given to Abraham concerning his descendants.  The question we wish to answer is why thousands of Median Israelites failed to complete their migration from Media back to Jerusalem/Palestine in the days of Ezra/Nehemiah. No doubt Ezra felt Judah would need more than 42,360 Levites and Jews to defend Jewish interests in Jerusalem against the Samaritans and other hostile Palestinians already in the area.  So Ezra gave great encouragement to the ten tribes to come, during and after Adar of 515 BC, to help give Israel “a nail in His holy place…to repair the desolations of the house of God, and to give them a fence in Judah and Jerusalem.” (Ezra 9:8-9) Ezra, the son of a high priest, a ready scribe in the Law of Moses, was, like Nehemiah, very devout; but he was not a prophet.  In Babylonia, however, the “desirous” Median Israelites discovered very specific prophetic messages in Ezekiel 37 and of Daniel chapter 9.  Any illusions these Israelites had entertained about returning to The Land hastily were dispelled by Ezekiel, from whom they would have learned the following:

Thus says the Lord Yahweh, Behold, I will take the stick of Joseph, which is in the hand of Ephraim, and the tribes of Israel his fellows, and will put them with him, even with the stick of Judah, and make them one stick, and they shall be one in My Hand. (Ezek. 37:19)

Many modern believers seem incapable of discerning the difference between what man can accomplish and that which only Yahweh and His Son can bring about.   Ezekiel continues his prophecy on behalf of Israel’s Savior in verses 21-24:

Thus says the Lord Yahweh, Behold, I will take the children of Israel from among the heathen, whither they be gone, and will gather them on every side, and bring them into their own land. And I will make them one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel; and one king shall be king to them all: and they shall no more be two nations [thus healing the breach which occurred under Solomon’s son Rehoboam], neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more at all.  Neither shall they defile themselves any more with their idols, nor with their detestable things, nor with any of their transgressions.  [has this been the result of modern-day Israel’s return to the Land?]  I will save them out of all their dwellingplaces, wherein they have sinned, and will cleanse them: so shall they be My people [implication, they haven’t been My people up to this point (see Hosea 1:9), and I will be their God (Yahweh has not been the God of most of the Jews since Hosea 1:9 came to pass).  And DAVID my servant shall be king over them, and they all shall have one shepherd…

For David to be shepherd-king over all Israel requires the setting of this prophecy to be after the Second Coming (not before), just as in Ezek. 34, which is very similar to Ezek. 37 in its emphasis on what the Lord says He will personally accomplish. It is the time of final judgment, during which the Lord Yahweh personally seeks out his sheep and brings them to the mountains of Israel to feed them.  The personal pronoun “I” occurs 26 times in Ezekiel 34, peaking with the statement “I will set up one shepherd over them, and he shall feed them, even my servant David; he shall feed them, and he shall be their shepherd.  And I Yahweh will be their God, and my servant David a prince over them.” (vv. 23-24)  It is, therefore, only once the Father has sent His Son back to this earth to judge (vs. 20), concomitant with the resurrection of the dead, that the prophecy of Ezek. 34:13 can come to pass: “I will bring them out from the people, and gather them from the countries, and bring them to their own land…”  The suggestion by Dave Hunt, John Hagee, Pat Robertson, most Messianic teachers, together with countless other modern-day prophecy interpreters that these prophecies in Ezek. 34 and 37 are “being fulfilled before our very eyes” is to displace them from their natural setting, which is the early stages of the Kingdom of God on earth.

Yahweh divided Israel due to Solomon’s grievous sins, and only Yahweh and His Son can undo the effect of this breakup.  Two thousand years of woefully deficient rabbinic and pastoral supervision is enough to demonstrate our need for His personal intervention and supervision of the flocks of Israel.  When the prospective returnees of the Ten Tribes in Ezra’s day read Ezekiel’s prophecies (both chapters 34 and 37), they understood that only Israel’s Messiah could heal the breach and restore them to the land of Israel.  The “lost” ten tribes of Israel began to comprehend, at least at that time, what it would take for them to be restored, and that Yahweh had no intention of a premature restoration which would lead to another repeat of the events of the 8^th Century BC.

At the same time that they came to know Ezekiel’s message, the Median Israelites discovered through Ezekiel’s contemporary, one of the greatest prophets of all time, Daniel, exactly how long it would be before the Messiah would appear.  The Median Israelites who relocated to Babylonia, as per Josephus’ historical record, during the days of Ezra, would have come into contact with fellow-Israelite Daniel,[3] or his book, sometime around 515 BC.  Daniel’s reputation for prophetic wisdom was Solomonic and far-reaching (Ezek.14:14, 20; 28:3).  Josephus says this about Daniel’s reputation in his own day:

Daniel was to them a prophet of good things [in contrast to other prophets who only foretold misfortunes], and this to such a degree, that by the agreeable nature of his predictions, he procured the good-will of all men; and by the fulfillment of them, he procured the belief of their truth, and the opinion of divinity for himself among the multitude.[4]

The substantial concerns raised by Ezekiel and his prophecies (see above, chapters 34:13, 14, 23-24; 37:19-25) caused the Median Israelites in Babylon to realize they should wait until Israel’s Messiah, the Son of David, came on the scene before attempting to repatriate to the holy land with their Jewish brethren. This understanding was confirmed and quantified by Daniel 9:25’s explicit prophecy indicating that 69 weeks of years, or 483 years, would elapse before Ezekiel’s Messiah would appear.  As Josephus says, Daniel was known, not just for predicting the future, “he also determined the time of their fulfillment.”[5]

The Apostle John uses the apt metaphor “Sodom and Egypt” to describe the spiritual condition of latter-day Jerusalem (Rev. 11:8, cp. Gal. 4:25).[6] Repatriating the holy land when it is filled with iniquity is, in my opinion, foolhardy.  Instead, Yshua challenges us to “occupy til I come” (Lk. 19:13), wherever we may reside.

derstinetodd@yahoo.com

www.americasproheticdestiny.com

[2] See II Kings 18:11.

[3] If Daniel was still alive at this time, he would have been in his 90’s, assuming he was in his mid-teens at the time of captivity in December of 598 BC.

[4] Josephus, Ant. X.xi.7.

[5] Ibid.

[6] The Apostle John also records in the fourth chapter of his Gospel the fact that the Father is seeking people to worship Him, not in Mt. Gerazim (the sacred place of the Samaritans), nor in Jerusalem, but in spirit and in truth, wherever they are.

Are We Living in the Year 5770?

Persian Chronology in the Seder Olam

© 2009

We now turn to the matter of Jewish chronology to establish that there is in fact a 160-year difference between the commonly accepted chronology and Jewish tradition for the period encompassed by Persian world rule.  The question of how and why this 160-year difference came about is most relevant to the theme of this chapter.    If this 160-year discrepancy can be shown to be a deliberate misconstruction on the part of second century rabbinic authorities, not only would it have pointed to Simon bar Kokhba, the false messiah of the Second Jewish Revolt of 132 AD, but it would have concomitantly pointed away from the actual fulfillment of Daniel 9:25 during the lifetime of Yahshua the Messiah.  I am indebted to Dr. Jack Moorman and Floyd Nolen Jones for bringing this information to the fore.[1]

The Jews reckon 2010 to be 5770 years from Creation in Genesis 1.  This Jewish reckoning of years goes back to R. Yose Ben Halafta, one of the main disciples of R. Akiva, “the father of the Mishnah.”  Yose was responsible for codifying Jewish chronology in the Seder Olam around 140 AD.  The words Seder Olam Rabbah mean ‘Book of the Order of the World.’  Although the Seder Olam is not a formal part of the Mishnah or Talmud, it is a work of Talmudic authority which no orthodox Jew would think of openly contradicting.[2] It forms the basis for traditional Jewish historical dating even today, despite their realization that it is missing around 240 years.  At the time the Seder Olam was compiled, the Jews dated their years from 312 BC, the beginning of the Seleucid era.  According to the Encyclopedia Judaica, “only when the center of Jewish life moved from Babylonia to Europe and the calculation according to the Seleucid era became meaningless was it replaced by that of the anno mundi era of the Seder Olam.”[3] From the 11th Century onward anno mundi reckoning became dominant throughout most of the world’s Jewish communities.

As with Archbishop James Ussher’s chronology of the 17^th Century, the Hebrew Scriptures are the basis for Seder Olam dating.  Ussher’s chronology fixes 4004 BC for the creation of Adam and Eve, while the Seder Olam comes up with 3761 BC.  Why the 243-year shortfall in Jewish chronology?

In the Seder Olam, there is a sixty year shortfall between creation and the birth of Abraham.  There is a mere seventeen year shortfall from Solomon down to the consecration of the Second Temple in 516 BC.  However, from dedication of the Second Temple to 70 AD there is a whopping 164 year discrepancy between the two chronologies!

The Seder Olam records only five Persian monarchs.  The following are the particulars of the highly truncated period of Medo-Persian rule:

·         Darius the Mede’s reign is reduced to one year, 374-373 BC.  His actual regnal length was anywhere from 25-35 years, depending on whether one counts from his assumption of the throne of Media when his father died, or from 575 when he acceded to the throne of Babylon at the murder of Belshazzar.  His kingdom was subsumed by Cyrus the Great in 551 BC.

·         Cyrus the Great’s reign is reduced to three years, 373-371 BC.  His actual reign is either 22 years (551-529 BC, from his defeat of Darius the Mede), or 10 years, from the time he conquered Babylon in 538 down to 529 when Cambyses ascended his throne.

·         Cambyses (whom Seder Olam calls Artaxerxes) was allotted a mere half year (should be seven years ending in 522 BC).

·         A fictional ‘Ahasuerus’ reigns 14 years, 370-356 BC, and weds Esther, who bears Darius the Persian.  There is no room in Persian inscriptions, Herodotus or any ancient historian for any monarch between Cambyses and Darius the Great, except Pseudo-Smerdis, who claimed to be Cambyses’ brother, and was deposed within seven months in 522.

·         Darius the Great, the Persian (Hystapes), is assigned a reign of 35 years (356-321 BC) in the Seder Olam.  This is the only monarch allotted the correct regnal length, 35 years.  Seder Olam has Second Temple dedicated in 355, the next year after Darius’ accession, whereas the book of Ezra indicates very late in the sixth year of his reign!   The chronology at this point is 160 years too late, as the Temple was dedicated in 515 BC!  The Seder Olam, incredibly, has the Darius who provided the umbrella of protection for Joshua and Zerubabbel to complete the Temple as the same Darius defeated by Alexander the Great in 321 BC![4] Notable Christian chronologer of the 19^th Century, Humphrey Prideaux, provides this insightful summary of this untenable Jewish position:

In the last year of Darius Hystapes, the prophets Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi died, that thereon the spirit of prophecy ceased from among the children of Israel.  The [Jewish] tradition tells us that the kingdom of the Persians ceased also the same year, for they will have it that this was the Darius whom Alexander the Great conquered, and that the whole continuance was only 52 years.[5]

The Encyclopedia Judaica has this to say about R. Yose’s “compression of the Persian period” [Emphasis mine]:

The most significant confusion in R. Yose’s calculation is the compression of the Persian period, from the rebuilding of the Temple by Zerubabbel in 516 BC, to the conquest of Persia by Alexander, to no more than 34 years.[6]

Other Jewish scholars are aware of this problem.  The more religious among them, such as R. Simon Schwab, have tried to justify this chronological sleight of hand with the following amazing words (emphasis Schwab’s):[7]

The gravity of this intellectual dilemma posed by such enormous discrepancies must not be underestimated…How could it be that our forebears had no knowledge of a period in history, otherwise widely known and amply documented, which lasted over a span of 165 years and which was less than 600 years removed in time from the days of the Sages who recorded our traditional chronology in Seder Olam?  Is it really possible to assume that some form of historical amnesia had been allowed to take possession of the collective memory of an entire people?  This should be quite like assuming that some group of recognized historians of today would publish a textbook on medieval history, ignoring all the records of, say, the 13^th and 14^th centuries…our Sages—for some unknown reason—had ‘covered up’ a certain historic period and purposely eliminated and suppressed all records and other material pertaining thereto. If so, what might have been their compelling reason for so unusual a procedure? Nothing short of a Divine command could have prompted…saintly ‘men of truth’ to leave out completely from our annals a period of 165 years and to correct all data and historic tables in such a fashion that the subsequent chronological gap could escape being noticed by countless generations, known to a few initiates only who were duty-bound to keep the secret to themselves.

Really, a Divine command to cover up and deceive the Jewish people about the chronology of their nation and the world?  Perhaps this is why the prophet Amos makes the blanket indictment of Judah: “Their lies have also led them astray, those after which their fathers walked.” (Amos 2:4)  A number of Jewish scholars, including Schwab, have suggested that the reason God directed the sages of the second century to falsify the data was to confuse anyone trying to use the prophecies of Daniel to predict the time of the Messiah’s coming.  By removing 165 years from Persian chronology, R. Akiva and Yose ben Halafta apparently hoped to steal the thunder of a thriving movement in Judaism’s midst which had successfully argued since 31 AD that the 483 years of Daniel 9 had been fulfilled by Yahshua of Nazareth.  Indeed, it is not hard to conjecture that the motivation to fiddle with chronology was strong between the time of Josephus’ Antiquities (94 AD)[8] and the heyday of R. Akiva, whose imprimatur on Bar Kokhba led to the unified revolt of 132-135.

If one ever needed evidence that the Jews of the first and second centuries were well aware of the relevance of Daniel 9’s 69 weeks,[9] he need look no further than the Seder Olam.  Its abbreviated Persian chronology not only deflected attention away from Yahshua of Nazareth’s fulfillment of Daniel 9, but facilitated Akiva’s effort to authenticate Bar Kokhba as the fulfillment of the 483 years.  Indeed, there are 483 years between the Seder Olam’s date for the dedication of the Second Temple (355) and 129 AD (483 – 355 + 1 (no year zero) = 129 AD), when Jewish deliberations over Emperor Hadrian were deadly serious.  Hence, we deduce that the falsification of Jewish chronology by Akiva and R. Jose Ben Halafta was deliberate, just the kind of “thinking to change times” that Daniel 7:25 anticipated.  The fact that the paramount prophecy of the Old Testament, a foundation block of chronology, was dislodged by this unhistorical subterfuge meant little to those seeking to extricate themselves from Hadrian’s abuses.  This misidentification of messiahs led to all Judea being laid waste.  Jews were no longer allowed to live within ten miles of Jerusalem.  Jews throughout the Empire, including women and toddlers, were required to pay a head tax to support the new temple of Jupiter in Jerusalem.  What we find astonishing is the respect for Bar Kokhba among Jews to this day, despite the results of the Second Revolt: As Encyclopedia Judaica states, “Even in later generations, despite the disappointment engendered by his defeat, his image persisted as the embodiment of messianic hopes.”[10] The consistent verdict of Jewish historians is: “The most important historical messianic figure was surely Bar Kokhba.”

Why Were Cuts Made in Persian Chronology and Not Seleucid Chronology?

R. Yose ben Halafta could not make cuts from the Greek Seleucid era, because the chronology of that period was still in use, was firmly fixed among the Jews, and was well understood.  No years could be pared from the history after 312 BC, the beginning of the Seleucid era. Since the prophecy of Dan. 9: 24-27 dealt with a decree that was issued by a Persian monarch, the empire which preceded the Greeks, this left only the Persian period of history for them to exploit.

How Many Years Were Cut From Persian Chronology By Seder Olam?

In establishing the deliberate nature of this historical hoax it is important that we remind ourselves that Josephus, writing Antiquities one short generation prior to R. Akiva and R. Jose, knew exactly how many years there were in Persian history.  He states there were 408 years from the time Daniel gave the prophecy about Antiochus Epiphanes in the third year of Belshazzar, until Antiochus’s desecration of the Temple in 167 BC.[11] This 408-year span yields the eminently plausible date of 575 BC for the third year of Belshazzar (Dan. 8:1), which doubles as the very year when Darius the Mede received the throne of Babylon (Dan. 5:31).  Therefore, the arguments of those who say this shortened chronology among the Jews precedes Josephus ring hollow.

We are now prepared to answer the questions posed at the beginning of this Addendum: How much was deleted from Persian chronology, and why that amount?   These answers have significant implications.  If the approximate amount of the rabbinic alteration to Persian chronology can be determined, then we can speculate about how they understood the original terminus ad quem for Daniel 9:25.

There are two ways of calculating how many years were deleted from Persian chronology. First we compare the span of years between the dedication of the Temple and Alexander’s conquest of Persia.  R. Jose said “The Persian Empire existed during the time of the Temple for 24 years.”[12] This tells us he understood 331 as the year when Alexander defeated Persia, for he gives 355 as the year of the Temple’s dedication.[13] But the real date for the dedication of the Temple is Feb. 10, 515, accepted by Fotheringham, Parker & Dubberstein, and most historians (some might put it in 516, but this year causes inappropriate activity to fall on the Sabbath for events dated in Ezra 6-7-8).  The unequivocal date for Alexander’s defeat of the Persians is 331 BC, making a span of 184 years (515-331= 184). This indicates a deletion of 160 years from the Persian period.

The other method of calculating the difference between the Seder Olam and the standard Ptolemaic system of chronology is to compare the number of years spanning the period from Cyrus the Great down to the destruction of the Second Temple.  The Seder Olam gives 373 BC as the date of the Jews return in the first year of Cyrus.  The Seder Olam date for the destruction of the Temple is 103 years after 34 BC, or 68 AD.  This is a span of 440 years.  The actual span is 607 years (538 BC to 70 AD), making a difference of 167 years.

We see then that the compiler of the Seder Olam c. 140 AD deprived Persian history of 160-167 years in order to propel the 69 weeks of Daniel 9 into the second century and help unify the Second Jewish Revolt.  Each Medo-Persian king, except one, is given a ridiculously truncated regnal length: Darius the Mede of Daniel = one year, Cyrus the Great = two years, Cambyses = 6 mos.  Their last Persian king is Darius I, who is defeated by Alexander of Macedon in 331, a mere 24 years after the completion of the second temple.  Thus the Seder Olam knows nothing of a Xerxes (21 years), a Artaxerxes Longimanus (40 years), Darius II Nothis (20 years), Artaxerxes II, or Darius III, etc.

Of the five Persian kings, Darius I alone is given the correct regnal length of 35 years.  It is worth speculating why Darius the Great is singled out for his actual allotment of years.  Obviously, second century Jewish historical acumen for Ezra-Nehemiah and the inception of the second Temple was far less confused than it has been among Christian scholars.  This higher level of awareness prevented R. Jose from tampering with Darius’ kingship, the king whose name was inextricably tied to the completion of the Second Temple.  This situation lends significance to the fact that the Seder Olam assigns Nehemiah’s work to the reign of Darius Hystapes (Neh. 5:14, 13:6), the same king R. Jose has Ezra dealing with.

Despite its chronological shortcomings, the Seder Olam has given us, even if indirectly, valuable insight into the original endpoint of Daniel’s 483 years, as seen through early second century Jewish eyes.  An undoctored time line of Persian history before Simon bar Kokhba  would have placed Daniel 9:25’s beginning point in the reign of Darius I, many years before the time of Artaxerxes I.   R. Akiva and R. Jose ben Halafta changed the time line, but because of general awareness that the fourth decree of Daniel 9:25 was during Darius I’s reign, they had to retain him as the king who issued this decree 483 years before Bar Kokhba, as well as his correct regnal length, in order not to provoke too many questions among their students.

The Seder Olam is also very helpful in determining the new year for the priestly courses at the Temple when it tells us Jehoiarib was serving on the 9^th of Ab in 70 AD.  Without knowledge of the priestly new year, one could not be certain of the birthdate of John the Baptist or Yahshua the Messiah.  We have made good use of this information in our study dating the year of Christ’s birth.

Matthew Henry had some poignant comments about Daniel 9:25 which we reproduce here:

[Daniel 9:25’s 483-year prophecy] does serve still to refute and silence the expectations of unbelievers, who will not own that Jesus is he who should come, but still look for another. This prediction should silence them… for, reckon these seventy weeks from which of the command-ments to build Jerusalem we please, it is certain that they have expired above 1500 years ago; so that the Jews are for ever without excuse, who will not own that the Messiah has come when they have gone so far beyond their utmost reckoning for his coming. But by this we are con-firmed in our belief of the Messiah’s being come, and that our Jesus is he, that he came just at the time prefixed, a time worthy to be had in everlasting remembrance.

One further thing is now evident.  It is possible to deduce that Akiva and/or his contemporary rabbinic authorities must have changed the status of the book of Daniel.  As of the 90’s AD, Josephus placed only four books in the third section of Hebrew Canon, the Writings.  Daniel was definitely not one of the four; therefore he must have been included with the prophets.  At the end of the second century, the Jewish Canon had Daniel in the second section of Scripture, the Prophets.  The disillusionment over Bar Kokhba, and the refusal to accept the genuine article in Yahshua of Nazareth, led to the disbarment of Daniel from the Prophetic section of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Nevertheless, Daniel’s greatness can be known in the fact that his contemporary, Ezekiel, himself a great prophet, singles out Daniel as one of the three most righteous men of human history up to his day, in league with Noah and Job (Ezek 14:15-20).  He also enjoyed a tremendous reputation for wisdom, as Ezek. 28:3 would indicate.  The fear of Yahweh is the beginning of wisdom.  Had the ignoble rabbis of the second century feared Adonai, they would have trembled at His Word and kept back their foot from trampling all over divine history and presumptuously demoting the book of Daniel.  Something to think about next time you see a Messianic publication, website, or “rabbi” touting the anno mundi year 5769, 5770, etc.

derstinetodd@yahoo.com

www.americaspropheticdestiny.com

[2] Floyd Nolen Jones, Th.D., Ph.D., App. G, The Annals of the World (Master Books, 2005), 934.

[3] Article “Seder Olam”, Enc. Judaica, Vol. 14, p. 1092.

[4] Martin Anstey, The Romance of Biblical Chronology, (London: Marshall Bros., 1913), 23-24.

[5] H. Prideaux, The OT & NT Connected to the History of the Jews (Oxford Univ. Press, 1851), 223.

[6] Article “Seder Olam” in Enc. Judaica.

[7] Simon Schwab, Dr. Joseph Breuer Jubilee Volume, “Comparative Jewish Chronology” (NY, NY: R. Samson Raphael Hirsch Publications Society, Philip Felheim Inc., 1962), 182, 188.

[8] Josephus’ Antiquities is notoriously bad on Persian history.  He has Cyrus being next after Xerxes.  He has Ezra waiting until seven years after the death of Darius I (486) before obeying his order to deliver the precious vessels of the Temple, a delay of 37 years from its completion.

[9] It is very evident now why there were so many Messianic movements extant in Judaism during the first century: Herodians, Zealots, Sacarii, Judas of Galilee, etc.  Many were quite aware that Daniel 9:25 had run its course.  The only one which fulfilled the plethora of prophecies of was Yahshua of Nazareth.

[10] Enc. Judaica, Vol. 4, Article “Bar Kokhba.”

[11] Josephus, AJ X.xi.4.

[12] Seder Olam, Rabbinic View of Biblical Chronology (transl. Heinrich Guggenheimer (Jason Aaronson, Northvale, NJ, 1998), 260.

[13] Jones, op cit., p. 296.

“If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” We can speak up, so that our silence does not cause us to become partakers of other’s sins (Ezekiel 33, entire chapter). In this post-911 world, the sword has already come on the land with worse judgments to follow (verse 3), so when we see the connection between certain sins and an even more certain judgment, it is our job to warn the people being lulled to sleep by the complacency of Church leaders:

The righteousness of the righteous shall not deliver him when he transgresses…though I [YHWH] say to the righteous he shall surely live, yet if he trusts in his righteousness (his Sabbath-keeping, tithing, feast-keeping, and abstention from unclean meats) and commits iniquity, NONE of his righteous deeds shall be remembered, but in the iniquity that he has committed, he shall die. (Ezekiel 33:13)

When one separates from the Worldwide Church of God and its offshoots for more than two decades and then returns, one is struck by how drastically the outward appearance of our young people has changed. In the Church of God’s rush to accommodate modern culture, the license that the leadership and parents are extending to the X-generation in their midst is storing up judgment and ensuring that all three will live beyond the Second Coming into the Day of the Lord. In that Day, circumstances will dictate a far more conservative approach to dress and overall righteousness.

How can a generation steeped in American culture be brought to understand the mind of God concerning dress and modesty? How can the foundations be restored? Several scriptural passages give insight into our Creator’s standard of modesty. The first is Genesis 9:20-28. Noah planted a vineyard and became drunk and was found naked in his tent by his son Ham, father of Canaan. Ham told his two brothers, but “Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it on both their shoulders, and went backward and covered the nakedness of their father. When Noah awoke and realized what had happened, he said, “Cursed be Canaan,” but he blessed Shem and Japheth. This passage is a clear indication that prohibitions against nakedness, either codified or intuitive, existed long before Sinai. In the Torah are found specific statutes prohibiting nakedness. The priests were to wear britches under their garments, and “not go up by steps to my altar, that your nakedness not be exposed on it.” (Exodus 20:26) “And you shall make for them (the priests) linen trousers to cover their nakedness; they shall reach from the waist to the thighs.” (Exodus 28:42) Hear YHWH speaking through Moses, “According to the doings of the land of Egypt…..and according to the doings of the land of Canaan, you shall not do….None of you shall approach anyone who is near of kin to him, to uncover his nakedness; I am YHWH.” Leviticus 18:3-6. If almost an entire chapter in Leviticus warns against uncovering the nakedness of relatives, how much more displeasing to our Creator when we reveal our nakedness to brothers and sisters in the faith? As a people, we are thoroughly acculturated and corrupted by American society, and we have lost the innocence that comes with instinctive modesty. We must strive to understand the biblical definition of nakedness and make application to modern standards of dress. “Nakedness” is translated from the Hebrew word ervah, which according to the Strong’s Concordance means “nudity, especially the pudenda; the external genital organs, especially of the female.” Based on this definition, a conservative approach to dress would dictate that tight pants revealing the female form or short skirts (exposing the “pudendum” when sitting) are contrary to the mind and will of YHWH.

The leaders and parents who truly need to read and hear this message are not likely to “get it” this side of Christ’s return. Nevertheless, moved by the Holy Spirit, I set forth my window into the mind of YHWH in faith that 1) this Word, eventually, shall indeed find its mark among the “Left Behind,” and 2) His Word never returns to Him void. A word to the wise: Concern yourself with these matters now, or concern yourself with them later, but you will deal with them. Hosea 5:5 says: “The people that doth not understand [because their leadership did not raise the issue] shall fall.” We are talking about here is a grievous sin of omission on the part of parents and pastors, and the unwitting sin of commission on the part of teenagers taken in by the culture around them.

The word ‘gap’ only occurs one time in the scriptures, in Ezekiel 22:30 (RSV):

Her priests (ministers, those in Church authority) have done violence to my law and have profaned my holy things (such as the concepts of virginity, modesty in dress and dating, failure to uphold chaste standards)…they have made no distinction between the holy and the common (even mocking the idea that God’s people should look and dress differently than the world)…and I sought for a man among them who should build up the wall and stand in the breach (KJV says ‘gap’) before Me…that I should not destroy it; but I found none,

I do not fancy myself as fulfilling this scripture, because I am not among them, and have no power or standing in the Church of God, or any other church, with which to have any kind of influence. The Church is a closed shop. The commentaries tell us that Isaiah also lamented his inability to get the attention of his people, so he addressed his message in a remarkable way:

Give ear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth; for YHWH has spoken: “Sons have I reared and brought up, but they have rebelled against Me. The ox knows its owner, and ass its master’s crib; but Israel does not know, My people [the Church of God] do not understand.”

Nevertheless Almighty YHWH has His ways of getting the Church’s attention, and get it He will. If YHWH can use this particular writing to turn away a few from unrighteousness, then the effort will have been well worth it.

If one reads through the Ezekiel 22 passage quoted above, a Sabbath-keeper should be struck by the fact that Ezekiel, under inspiration of the Holy Spirit., prioritizes a whole list of sins long before he gets around to our Sabbath-breaking, nor is this the last sin mentioned. It is surely true that the New Testament apostles prioritized sins of fornication, unholiness, sexual uncleanness, and modest apparel (I Peter 3:3) in their ministry to the Gentiles (Acts 15:20, 29), before binding the Sabbath and holy days on them (though I don’t deny that the Gentile churches kept the latter).

Webster’s defines gap as an empty space, a breach. That breach in the wall of God’s Law which Ezekiel rails against is, ironically, symbolized by the deterioration in dress standards that has occurred in the past generation in God’s Church. In fact, believe it or not, the prophets of Father YHWH speak rather graphically and pointedly to that which epitomizes this breach. My first piece of evidence against the Church I present from the book of Hosea. The Church of God is fond of applying these prophecies to the nations of Britain and America, but rather blind to the suggestion that they describe YHWH’s beef with His Church. Hosea 2:2 (Concordant Literal):

Contend with your mother (the Church), contend—

For she is not My wife (not the Bride of Christ, for reasons about to be stated),

And I am not her husband.

And she WILL take away the signs of her prostitutions from her face,

And her adulteries from between her breasts.

Lest I should strip her naked

And put her forth as on the day of her birth

And make her as a wilderness

And set her as an arid land

And put her to death with thirst.

The underlined portion above is rendered by the Septuagint “I will remove her fornication (porneia) out of My presence.” Porneia is the same word used throughout the NT for ‘fornication’, and is the etymon for the English word pornographic. There was, of course, a time in English and American history, when the display of cleavage by a female was considered downright pornographic. Hosea has chosen his words very carefully to make it plain to God’s people that YHWH considers the uncovering of the gap between a woman’s breasts to be pornographic and adulterous–a violation of Torah. It is, after all, part of her sexual apparatus, as any married woman knows. Furthermore, it is that part of female anatomy that appeals to a man’s prurient interest, and entices him. It would be very poor hermeneutic for the Church to say that Hosea is simply being metaphorical, and then ignore the clear implications of his phraseology.

The so-called command-keepers of the Church of God have become rather lackadaisical with regard to righteousness. She—the woman of Hosea 2–has become like the loose woman of Proverbs 5, in that “she does not take heed to the path of life; her paths wander, and she does not know it.” Speaking of one’s wife, Proverbs 5:19 says—”Let her breasts satisfy you at all times.” At winter family festivals, and at the fall feasts, an awful lot of men–married and unmarried—are gazing on and deriving pleasure, not from their own wife’s breasts, but from nakedness that does not belong to them. Parents by the hundreds, who would never think of uncovering a daughter’s nakedness in violation of Leviticus 18, suffer them to divulge a portion of their nakedness to married men, ministers, and the boys in the Church of God. Let everyone who beholds this phenomenon come to see the significance of this display…the Church is fallen from grace (Galatians 5:4). The unveiling of female cleavage in the Church is a metaphor for the breach which the Church has inflicted upon God’s Law. Instead of her faith victoriously overcoming the world (I John. 5:4), America’s culture has overcome the Church. The Church of God, which prides itself as being the Philadelphia era of the Church (Revelation 3:7ff), has backslidden to Thyatira, because “you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and is teaching and seducing my servants to commit fornication.” (Revelation 2:20)

As we know, most fornication is committed with the eyes. Christ said whosoever looks on a woman to lust after her, has committed adultery already with her. And so the only solution for righteous males is that they do as the patriarch Job did (Job 31:1):

I made covenant with my eyes; how then could I look upon a maiden? What would be my portion from Elohim (God) above, and my heritage from the Almighty on high? Does not calamity befall the unrighteous, and disaster the workers of iniquity?…v. 7–If my heart has gone after my eyes…then let me sow, and another eat; and let what grows for me be rooted out.

You would think after seeing all the billions of dollars worth of Church of God tithes plowed into infrastructure and buildings on three college campuses, all of which has been rooted out and given to Sunday-keepers like Benny Hinn (Pasadena), and Catholics (Big Sandy), that someone in a Church of God pulpit would have had the gumption to put two and two together by now, based on Job 31 and similar passages. YHWH’s way is in the storm and the whirlwind (Nahum 1:3), and in 2004 He demonstrated his sore displeasure with all the lewdness of Floridian feast-sites by criss-crossing it with four hurricanes in the space of one month just prior to the Feast of Tabernacles (forcing cancellation of every one of those feast sites). Yet I have not heard one minister make the connection to the Church of God’s tolerance of bikinis and teenage girls uploading such photos onto their personal websites. Again,” the people that doth not understand shall fall.” Worse, Yahshua’s own prophetic words to Thyatira threaten to throw the Church of God, and those who commit fornication with her, into great tribulation, unless she repents of her doings (Revelation 2:22). “And I will strike her children dead.” The sequence of statements by Christ in this passage is most remarkable, suggesting that the young people, who have bought into the culture of lewdness and fornication, are NOT GOING TO REPENT, and so death is God’s only option in the end-time. The haughtiness of these same ‘daughters of Zion’ is described in Isaiah 3:16, a verse that the Worldwide Church of God used to quote often in years past to curb seductive glances and dress in its young people. And like the other prophetic passages quoted in this paper, the language used suggests that YHWH plans to march those who commit such lewd-ness naked on their way to being scattered among the nations. (Ezekiel 22: 9, 15 and 20):

So will I gather you in Mine anger and in My fury, and I will leave you there, and melt you [like lead, tin, brass, and iron in a furnace].

That is what you parents and pastors in the Church of God are doing to your children. You are winking at your children’s iniquity just like Eli the high priest did in I Samuel 1-4. Some of you are turning your children into sons of Belial (I Samuel 2:12), convincing them by your ongoing silence, month after month, one Church social and athletic event after another, that it is O.K. to be unrighteous in the display of one’s body. In so doing you have bought into a very Greek mindset. Well did Moses prophesy of our time in Deuteronomy 31:29:

For I know that after my death ye will utterly corrupt yourselves, and turn aside from the way which I have commanded you; and evil will befall you in the latter days; because ye will do evil in the sight of YHWH, to provoke him to anger through the work of your hands.

Isaiah 1:4 prophesies of our day:

Ah, sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity,

offspring of evildoers, children who are corrupters (SH # 7843, same word as Deut. 31:29)

They have forsaken YHWH, they have despised the Holy One of Israel…

The idea conveyed by the Hebrew word (ths=shachach) translated corrupt[er] is one of spoilage, decay, ruination, the same root used for grave, pit and ditch. It connotes uselessness. When this end-time generation has shown its disdain for every good and noble moral foundation of decent society and thus succeeded in rendering itself useless for YHWH’s purposes, thankfully the end of the Age cannot be very far behind. Meanwhile, the teenagers, with the tacit approval of adults in the Church of God, are fulfilling this very prophecy, turning it into “America plus the Sabbath and holy days,” instead of insisting that our dress reflect our desire to honor God’s Law.

America is a nation full of Christian churches, and headquarters for almost every major Sabbath-keeping Church in the world. The same thing is happening here as in every third world country receiving satellite television. American culture, via television and DVD, is undermining the moral foundations of many generations. Americans are so out of touch with the culture of historical Christianity and the apostolic holiness of the early Church, that Christ has no choice but to spue us out of his mouth (Revelation 3:16). Welcome to Laodicea, Church.

The Greek Mindset

In the previous section we spoke of the display of the human body as representing a completely Greek mindset. The Greek word gynasion, from which we get gymnasium, was a place where exercise and games were performed in the altogether, albeit women were not allowed in such arenas or in attendance at Olympic games in the early stages of antiquity.

Of far greater importance, however, is the depiction of Zeus and the other Greek gods in the nude. Christian paleographer Robert Bowie Johnson, Jr. has shown that the major purpose of Greek sculpture at the Parthenon and Greek pottery was to dramatize and symbolize the success of Greek culture in throwing off the restraints of Yahweh’s religion, depicted by Nereus, who is none other than Noah. Johnson’s book The Parthenon Code, shows how the Greeks retold the story of the Noachian Deluge and its aftermath, as well as the story of Adam and Eve, from the Serpent’s point of view! In fact, the whole idea that Adam and Eve partook of an apple tree comes to us strictly via the Greek depictions of paradise (the Garden of the Hesperides). The Greeks remembered this original paradise as featuring a serpent-entwined apple tree. On one vase, Eve/Hera is shown giving ear to the serpent, and willingly partaking of the forbidden fruit. She thereby is credited with bringing enlightenment to the human race. Amazingly, in all of Greek mythology, there seems to be no place for a Creator God, according to Johnson. It is, in fact, nothing more than a sophisticated form of ancestor worship, whereby the parents of the human race and the Greek race are apotheosized.

The shameful Greek pre-occupation with nudity in their gods and heroes of the ancient world is thus seen as blatant rejection of Yahweh, who clothed Adam and Eve (their Zeus and Hera) after their disobedience (Gen. 3:21). Athena, the post-flood re-birth of Hera/Eve, means without death, the false promise of the serpent, and the false premise of every pagan-inspired religious philosophy. The huge statue of Athena in Nashville’s Parthenon has an upright serpent standing beside her, reminding one of a faithful pet. Of course, this is totally at odds with womankind’s natural aversion for snakes. Yet snakes, like nudity, figure prominently in Greek art and mythology. The Parthenon Code shows how the Greeks “changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the things created more than the Creator.” “They changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man (Romans 1:23).” Yahweh then “gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, [causing them] to dishonor their own bodies between themselves (vs. 24). Taking nudity out of the bedroom and into the public sphere of sculpture, art, and sports was the essence of Hellenism. Rather than glorifying their bodies, they dishonored their bodies thereby. Stated another way, Yahweh’s intent was that man appreciate the beauty of the female body via his wife and his wife alone.

The Hebrew Mindset

The Hebrew Scriptures never taught the platonic dualism which pictured the body as evil, and the soul as separate and spiritual. In the scriptures, body, mind and spirit are presented as an inseparable whole. The Hebrews were emotional, passionate people who loved and lived life to its fullest. Paul’s depiction of husband and wife as a type of the relationship between Christ and the Church is an example of this kind of thinking. Asceticism, a later development in Christianity, does not have scriptural precedent. And yet the early Church fathers like Jerome and Augustine claimed that marriage did not sanctify children; all were born in sin. Sex, even in marriage, was viewed as only slightly better than fornication. Yahweh “gives us richly all things to enjoy.” (I Titus 6:17) The Song of Solomon and Hebrews 13:2 show the fusion of spirituality and sensuality within marriage. They stand as a witness against various forms of fanaticism, such as monasticism and Puritanism that would deny man the pleasures of the flesh. At the root of all such philosophies is Gnosticism and Greek dualism, which hold that everything of the flesh is evil. Yahweh’s Word sets boundaries for sexuality to protect the institutions of marriage and childrearing, and to cause men to imitate their Creator in all aspects of love. Therefore, the Victorian attitude toward sex which caused some women to withhold themselves from their husbands never represented the mind of our Creator.

When it comes to dress, the ancient Hebrew mindset was very conservative and distinct from the Hellenistic culture, covering nakedness from the shoulders all the way to the knees, despite the subtropical climate. Perhaps it is not coincidental then that those Reformation movements which respected Old Testament Law—Calvinist/Presbyterian, Methodist/Wesleyan, and Anabaptist (Mennonite and Amish) movements, to name a few—fostered a dress code very much in keeping with principles described herein. Disrespect for the Word of God during the past century has been concomitant with an onslaught of public indecency and dress styles that would have made almost every other generation of Christianity blush but our own. Jer. 6:13-15:

For from the least of them even to the greatest of them every one is given to covetousness; and from the prophet even to the priest every one deals falsely…Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? No, they were not at all ashamed. Nor do they know how to blush. So they shall fall among those who fall. In the time of their punishment they shall stumble, says Yahweh. (Jeremiah 8:12)

In conclusion, the contrast between the Greek pagan views of human existence vs. the Hebrew mindset of the scriptures has been drawn. In Genesis, Yahweh made coats of skins and clothed Adam and Eve after disobeying. Noah’s sons Shem and Japheth covered their father’s nakedness. When reminiscing over the time when He entered into a Covenant with Old Testament Israel, Yahweh pictures Himself spreading His skirt over His People and covering their nakedness (Ezek. 16:8). The very same thing happens in the book of Revelation (in Heaven) when the Elect are pulled out of great Tribulation (Rev. 7:15). By contrast, the Greeks see no need to cover their nakedness, because they have purposely glorified our first parents’ disobedience in the Garden of Eden. Indecent exposure throughout Greek sculpture, art, and architecture becomes a metaphor for the triumph of fallen man over the religion of Noah.

The implications of all this for the end-time Church, overcome by the osmosis of an all-pervasive Hollywood-inspired culture, become clear when Christ Himself has to warn the final era of His Church, Laodicea, “to buy from Me white clothes to cover your shameful nakedness.” Laodicea is not going to listen until she has been Left Behind, and gone through the Day of Judgment. Having so endured, the Living Christ has these final words of consolation at the end of the Bowl Judgments—”Behold, I come as a thief! Blessed is he who keeps his clothes on him, so that he may not go naked and be shamefully exposed.” Revelation 16:15 NIV

A Word of Wisdom to Our Young Women

A woman’s chastity, virtue, and modesty are the key to evoking the right response in the man. Women are in the driver’s seat when it comes to sexuality…she can entice or moderate sexual desire depending on her attitude and dress. It is sad and shameful when what would have been considered the attire of a harlot (Proverbs 7:10) a few generations ago, becomes the norm of the end-time generation.

What you win him with is what you win him to. If you knew the power of virtue and of a cultivated femininity, you would not take the risk of creating a soulish knot and attraction based on mere lust. She that sows with her flesh, shall of the flesh reap corruption (Galatians 6:8). Conversely, she that wins him with spiritual attributes lays a firm foundation for a lasting relationship. It is sadly true that when one lacks spiritual self-confidence, one is more likely to resort to physical means to attract. Indiscrete young women, oblivious to the effect of bare skin, cleavage, and tight jeans on guys who are trying to maintain a covenant with God (Job 31:1), are potentially robbing themselves of YHWH’s blessing and provision of a suitable mate. Christ said in Matthew 18:7 (RSV):

Woe to the world for temptations to sin! For it is necessary that temptations come, but woe to the man or woman by whom the temptation comes…v. 6 whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.

Girls, stop competing with your peers in the realm of fashion. If young girls, mothers and the leadership of the Church would follow the Apostle Paul’s directive in Colossians 3:17, what effect would it have on our standards of dress and morals:

Whatsoever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Yahshua, giving thanks to God the Father through Him…All things whatsoever you may be doing, work from the soul, as to the Lord and not to men, being aware that from the Lord you will be getting the inheritance as your reward; you are serving the Lord Yahshua (Jesus). For the wrongdoer will be paid back for the wrong he has done, and there is no partiality with God. (Colossians 3:17, 23-24)

Everything in society is directed in one way or another toward destroying young men—from the proliferation of estrogenic compounds in our environment and endocrine disruptors in our plastics and pesticides, to world trade forcing heads of household to compete with slave-labor wages in China and Latin America. Considering the preparation it requires nowadays for a young man to lay the groundwork for a successful life, he does not need his so-called “sisters in the faith” enticing him week-in and week-out with their ‘trendy’ dress, or lack thereof. Ideally, if, via a righteous Church and home environment, every young man came to the marriage bed never having viewed the female form, then they would each think they had been blessed with the most beautiful woman in the world, having had nothing to compare her to. This, in fact, was how the first husband Adam felt—”she is now bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh.” Let us not delude ourselves, having images of other women from magazine covers and TV in one’s mind is a curse on the marriage bed. The ironic thing is that ‘God’s Church government’ is permitting this spiritual onslaught to take place within the Church at the behest of girls who, in many cases, are not even baptized. The majority of them will never even marry a baptized member of the Church. Yet they are allowed to bring the spirit of fornication into the Church while nobody says a word.

Does the Church of God Have the Authority to Slacken the Torah?

By permitting this parade of stylistic promiscuity, the Church of God reveals its presumptive teaching that they have the authority to bind and loose the Torah, which is just what the Pope, Catholicism, and rabbinic Judaism all teach. HWA did this when he loosed the land Sabbath law from the farmers of the Church. This principle is repeated every year in our keeping of the holy days by the Jewish rabbinic calendar, which is patently unbiblical. Christ Himself forbade His very own apostles from exercising authority and lordship over the brethren after the manner of the Gentiles, and yet the Church of God is more hierarchical than many U.S. corporations, and appeals to “corporate decision-making” to justify the dismissing of ministers, rather than giving due process and fairness a chance to retain those beloved by their congregations.

We are struck by antithesis in these and many other matters. Only Yahshua and YHWH have the authority to change the Law, and Matt. 5:17-19 says that cannot happen until heaven and earth pass away. Christ said that “unless our righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, we will NEVER enter into the kingdom of Heaven (Matt. 5:20)”. Merely playing catch-up with the latest fashions, “dressing to impress” and deluding ourselves so long as we remain slightly more conservative than the world, is not going to cut it with our holy Savior, who “gave Himself up for the Church’s sake, in order that He should be hallowing it, and so that He might be presenting to Himself a glorious Church, not having spot or wrinkle or any [unholiness], but that it may be a holy and flawless Church.” (Eph. 5:27):

Do not conform any longer to the fashion/pattern of this world, but be transformed by renewing of your mind. (Rom. 12:2)

Truly, truly, I say this to any in the Church of God, Adventist, or Messianic movement: that the naïve Sunday-keeper and Christmas-observer who does not hold this doctrine will enter the kingdom of God before any Sabbath-keeper who ignores this kind of warning. The Church of God is besmirching YHWH’s name by linking Sabbath-keeping with ‘unrighteous decorum.’

For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world. And the world passes away, and the lust of it, but he who does the will of the Father abides forever. 1John 2:16

The men at the helm of the Church of God today who are presiding over this glorified capitulation are the same men who were the student body and senior class presidents when I attended Ambassador College in the 1970’s. Other men were the top picks to be hired and sent into the field ministry, the cream of the crop of the second generation Church of God. It is not that they are unfamiliar with the above scriptures, it’s just that we have always made the mistake of thinking they could only apply to end-time Israel (America), but not ‘the one and only’ true Church of God. And though the motives—fear of job loss, pride, spiritual blindness—may be somewhat different for different individuals, I must return to the Ezekiel 33 prophecy quoted in the first paragraph of this paper to identify the root cause for this spiritual blindness:

They hear what you say, but they will not do it; for with their lips they show much love, but their heart is set on their gain. Ezekiel 33: 31-32

Jude 11 (RSV)—Woe to them, for they walk in the way of Cain, and abandon themselves for the sake of gain to Balaam’s error, and Korah’s rebellion [which was a rebellion against Moses]. These are blemishes on your love feasts, as they boldly carouse together, looking after themselves, waterless clouds, carried along by winds, fruitless trees in late autumn, uprooted;

Balaam’s error was that he “taught Balak to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel” (Revelation 2:14), in order that they might practice immorality (KJV–commit fornication). So Satan and Balaam were aware that the only way for YHWH to curse Israel was to find a way to entice Israel to commit fornication with the daughters of Moab (Numbers. 25:1-3). Apparently the gifts of God’s people—their tithes and offerings—have blinded the wise (Heb.=those who normally see clearly) to the dangers of inappropriate dress. I suppose one could argue that when standards are not fixed, and love is not tough, the adoration of one’s own children can cause us to relax our judgment. No doubt the desire for the status quo and a combination of the above factors are contributing to the delusion of spiritual safety in the Sabbatarian movement.

What Will It Take To Turn Away the Spirit of Whoredoms?

“Israel is defiled. They have not framed their counsels to return to their God, for the spirit of fornication (LXX=pneuma porneiav) is in them.” (Hosea 5:4)

Solution #1 Admit that we have been focusing only on the narrowest definition of fornication at the expense of the spirit of the law. Our spiritual negligence has allowed the spirit of fornication to come into the Church.

Solution #2 Admit that Sabbath, annual feasts of the Lord, unclean meat laws, and tithing, as important as they may be, have far less direct impact on the immediate psychological, social, and spiritual well-being of young people than do the issues touched on here. How is it that we are willing to dot the ‘i’ and cross the ‘t’ to comply with Sabbath observance, and yet set such a low standard in dress and alcohol use that other Christians are offended? We need to humbly admit that we in the Church of God have been so dead to true righteousness, that we cannot even sense when our souls are being vexed by immodesty. We adults are so busy interacting with each other that we refuse to talk about this elephant in the middle of the room.

Solution # 3 Fathers, who often are not accustomed to commenting on their daughter’s dress, need to become alert and speak out when their daughters dress provocatively. Women dress to impress other women and to imitate fashion. Teenagers dress to impress their peers. Mothers and daughters may not consider the effect their clothing has on men, who are visually stimulated. Fathers have a protective role to play in the fashion arena, and need to exercise their authority!

Solution #4 Admit that our low standards are a reflection on the older women and mothers in the Church, who are charged with instructing the younger women “to be chaste” (Titus 2:5)…”in order that the Word of God may not be discredited.” When the matriarchal instinct which inculcates a sense of modesty in its younger women is again allowed to flourish in the Church of God, then we will begin to turn this sordid situation around. The chauvinistic male-dominated culture of the Church of God needs to encourage the older women to step up, raise the bar, and create a consensus among themselves on how to re-educate and confront the girls in the Church. The new standards, for starters, need to at least address these main areas:

Create modest swimming attire. For instance, wrap-around skirts to wear over bathing suits (the women will probably have to make these themselves) to cover the rump, thighs and crotch areas. The upper part of the suits must not expose cleavage. Frankly, the best solution is one that segregates the females from the males at Church functions where there is swimming. This was the standard up until WWI.

Families should use some forethought before planning an outing to the beach. The more they do so in privacy, the better, whether at the beach, or around their own pool. It makes no sense for righteous families to abide by the above Biblical guidelines, only to end up beholding their Canaanite neighbors parading their bodies all around them at a public beach or pool. The main question at this point is whether we can keep ourselves unpolluted from the world in these matters, and have the moral fortitude to make a difference in our own circles.

Dresses should extend below the knee to prevent exposure. The scriptural principle may be found in Exodus 20:36: “Neither shall you go up steps to my altar, that your nakedness be not uncovered there.”

Slacks and tight jeans need to be exchanged for more modest apparel, such as longer dresses and skirts. The Biblical standard is that “the woman shall not wear that which pertains unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abhorrent to YHWH Elohenu.” (Deut. 22:5) In our post-modern culture, pants have become the norm. But this development has followed on the heels of our rejection of our Maker and His Word. We are not wiser than the dozens of Christian generations who saw fit to make dresses the appropriate attire of Christian women, and loose-fitting slacks the appropriate attire for men. Paul in I Cor 11 spoke about that which is naturally becoming to a woman (long hair). Conversely, he says that nature itself teaches us that long hair is dishonorable in men. Nature taught our Christian forefathers the same thing about dresses for women. Pants were quite naturally seen as immodestly revealing the crotch and buttocks area of women. Understanding that men are visual creatures, Christian culture would never have allowed that. Modern Christian culture wants to identify with the world, not with their Christian ancestors.

Let the brethren of the Church of God admit that for us to teach the Ten Commandments, tithing, and unclean meat laws, together with the holy day statutes while failing to support a righteous standard of dress is puts the Truth that we do have in a bad light. Titus 2:10 says that we are to “adorn the doctrine that is of God, our Savior, in all things.” Jesus Christ gave “Himself for us, that He should be redeeming us from all lawlessness and be cleansing and procuring for Himself a People zealous of ideal actions.” (Titus 1:14, CLNT)

I realize that many in the Church of God will perceive this attempt at bringing about change as overly idealistic. But ideals are what true religion is all about. But after you have suffered the fulfillment of the prophecies of Ezekiel 20, 22, 33, and 34, YHWH will set his hand a second time to recover the remnant of His people which survives the events of the book of Revelation:

For YHWH will vindicate His people and have compassion on His servants, When He sees that their power is gone, and there is none remaining. Deut. 32:36

In the nakedness of our captivity, YHWH lovingly declares “I will spread My skirt over thee, and cover thy nakedness.” He will again swear unto us, enter into a covenant with our people, and we will become His again (Ezekiel 16:8). During the Day of Judgment, YHWH will purge out the rebels from among us during the wilderness ordeal (Ezekiel 20:38), and set up shepherds who will feed (teach) the youth YHWH’s ways:

I will set up shepherds (pastors) over them who will care for them, and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, neither shall any be missing, says YHWH. Jeremiah 23:4

In the process, Church youth and parents alike will learn that YHWH all along was against the shepherds (Ezekiel 34:10), who were feeding themselves (hirelings) instead of teaching the flock. They were shepherds who could not understand (Isaiah 56:11). To the ministers of the Church of God I say: What good does it do to say you understand Bible prophecy (theoretically because we understand the end-time identity of Israel), if you don’t understand how it might apply to you and your Church?

So now that the heavens and earth have heard this message, what will you do to stand in the breach? The Bible says the worldly “hate him who reproves in the gate”, but Isa. 58:1 commands us to “cry aloud, spare not, lift up your voice like a trumpet, declare to My people their transgressions, and the House of Jacob their sins”. Together we can build up the wall of righteousness and make the Sabbath-keeping movement a beacon of holiness to the world, and a more complete example of purity to the Christian Church. If we embark on this holy endeavor of confrontation, we shall have opportunity to say at some point, “Remember me, O my God, and spare me according to the greatness of Thy mercy…Remember me for good,” as Nehemiah did. (Nehemiah 13: 22, 31)

derstinetodd@yahoo.com

www.americaspropheticdestiny.com

The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat (καθεδρας): All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do you not after their works: for they say, and do not.    Matt 23:2-3

Matthew 23:2-3 is one of the most controversial passages in scripture, and is of particular interest to those seeking to arrive at a correct understanding of the historical context of Yeshua’s words. An article on Matt. 23:2-3 in the SDA journal Andrews University Seminary Studies (AUSS) that sheds light on the phrase “seat of Moses”.  In this article Kenneth Newport footnotes a number of scholars who believe in the literalness of a seat of Moses in local synagogues of the first century. These scholars provide no evidence, largely because most of them wrote before the archaeological discoveries of our day, but modern excavations have uncovered more than one “seat of Moses” to substantiate their belief.

Eleazar L. Sukenik, in his important study published in 1934, Ancient Synagogues in Palestine and Greece, provided several examples of “Chairs of Moses” found by archaeologists. The one at Hammath-by-Tiberias is most interesting, because the back of the chair faces towards Jerusalem, picturing the law going forth from that direction as the synagogue audience is facing Zion. Stone seats positioned so that their occupant sat facing the congregation have been found in synagogues at Chorazin (cf. Matt. 11:21, Luke 10:13) in 1962, in En Gedi, and two Diaspora synagogues, (1) in Delos, the marble seat found in its ruins is probably the oldest example of a seat of Moses known (ca. 100 BC), and (2) Dura-Europos. Noel Rabbinowitz says this evidence taken together bolsters our conviction that the “Seat of Moses” was a physical seat upon which the Pharisees sat.[1] He goes on to explain that most of the synagogue furniture was made of wood, which is why so few of these objects have survived.

There is a gap of about 300 years between Matthew’s reference to the seat of Moses and its next mention in Jewish literature, the Pesikta de-Rab Kahana, one of the oldest homiletic Midrashim (ca. 4^th century),[2] has a passage where R. Aha describes Solomon’s throne, and says it is “like the Kathedra of Moses” (כהדא קתדרא דמשה), καθεδρα being the same Greek word used in Matt 23:2 for the seat of Moses. Matthew and Yeshua use the phrase as though their audience knows what is meant. The plethora of contradictory interpretations incongruous with the rest of Matthew 23 and the background of the rest of the book result from our having missed something.  “His Gospel is not likely to present Jesus here as commending adherence to the teaching of Pharisees when elsewhere it presents Jesus as warning his disciples to beware of their teaching (12:34; 15:14; 16:12; 23:15).”[3]

M. Ginsberger once suggested that the Pesikta de-Rab Kahana be drastically amended, since a “seat of Moses” never existed,[4] but scholars have by and large rejected this notion. Newport states:

Relying partly upon the reading of Matt 23:2 itself, we may not be too far wrong in suggesting that this was a chair found in the synagogue of the type unearthed at Chorazin, Tiberias, an Delos.

All three of these chairs were wide enough for someone to sit in. The question remains, “How were these seats used?” Was it for the hassan, the Torah reader, or for setting the Torah scroll itself? Cecil Roth points to the Great Synagogue in Rome built 100 years ago as evidence that the Torah scroll was placed upon the “chair” especially designed for this purpose, having holes drilled into the seat into which the staves if of the scroll may be inserted.  The basement of this synagogue has other chairs designed the same way which date to 1594.[5] None of these was wide enough for a man to sit in.

Roth’s evidence for this use of the “chair” is confirmed by the report of Jesuit priests in China. In 1704 a priest named Jean-Paul Gozani visited a community of Jews at Kai-Feng-Fu in China, and describes a “magnificent and highly elevated chair, with a beautiful embroidered cushion. It is the chair of Moses, on which on Saturdays and the most solemn days they place the book of the Penteteuch. . . .”[6] Its use as a stand upon which the Torah scroll was placed when not in use during the synagogue service is supported by L. Y. Rahmi.[7]

If Yeshua is drawing a metaphor in Matt 23, then the Pharisees and scribes have sat down in a seat reserved for the Torah scroll alone and one is tempted to agree with the negative connotation of “intellectual arrogance” assigned to the expression by Roth.[8] But Newport feels it is more probable that “at one time the ‘chair of Moses’ was a seat upon which sat teachers who were in some way considered authoritative expounders of Torah.”[9] However one takes the expression, it remains a metaphor for the Pharisees’ role within the synagogue as expositors of Moses. Powell derives from this that Yeshua is simply acknowledging the powerful social and religious position the Pharisees and scribes occupied in a world where many were illiterate and copies of Torah are rare.[10] Yeshua’s own disciples may have been dependent on the synagogue readings to know what Moses said on any given subject, thus they are admonished to heed them when they pass on the words of the Torah itself.[11] It is implied that the leaders speak Torah but do not do Torah (cf. John 7:19 with Matt 23:3). The Pharisees and scribes are like Satan, capable of quoting scripture, but with perverse intent. They know that Messiah is the son of David, but fail to see that he was also David’s Lord (Matt 22:42-45). The chief priests and scribes know that Christ is to be born in Bethlehem, but think nothing of endangering Him by cluing in Herod on the possible whereabouts of Yeshua. They know that Moses commanded the giving of writs of divorce, but failed to see how their leniency in this area reflected upon their own hardness of heart, even in the eyes of the scandalized Gentiles. At best the Pharisees and other leaders can be commended for knowing what scripture might say, but without the understanding. They give Yahweh’s law a bad name by making it burdensome (23:4), which this author feels is a chief reason why 85% of the world’s Jews do not practice Judaism. Nevertheless, in the first century if a person wished to become a disciple of Moses, the synagogue was the place to go, and the Pharisees and scribes were the ones who recited and interpreted him. Christian interpreters are wont to forget that the concluding statement of the Acts 15 conference, after four negative prohibitions, was a positive referral to the weekly reading of the law of Moses in the synagogues of every city (Acts 15:21). Since interpreting Moses for the present day falls under the category of “binding and loosing,” and that responsibility was given to Peter and the Church (16:19; 18:18), it does not follow that Matthew 23:2-3 has left halakhic interpretation to any Jewish Sanhedrin ancient or modern.

In the following section we bring forth evidence to support the view that the Pharisees would not have hesitated to appropriate the seat of Moses to authenticate their theological and halakhic perspectives.

The Tradition of the Elders

“The Pharisaic Paradosis” is the name of a very insightful and scholarly article by renowned Jewish historian A. I. Baumgarten.[12] The paradosis of the elders (cf. Mark 7:5) is a religious tradition of laws going back to the time of the Maccabees that many Jews recognized as being extra-Biblical, as adding to the Torah of Moses (cf. Prov. 30:6). The literal meaning of the Greek word used to refer to these traditions, παραδοσις, is teaching or tradition handed down from one generation to another, including customs, precedents, laws and ideas, not all of which are bad. What we wish to look at is how this parallel[13] tradition gained respectability in the eyes of many Jews by the time of the Second Temple, and specifically the kind of methods that Pharisees used to equate their teaching with that of Moses. But first it is necessary that we establish that these Pharisaic paradosis were the subject of serious disputation. The Sadducees rejected it. In Antiquities of the Jews, written by first century history Josephus, the two sects are described as engaging in “controversies and serious differences” over these traditions.[14] Why?  Because the Sadducees received only those laws hand down in the written law of Moses. The Pharasaic paradosis were not. Secondly, the Sadducees felt that the traditions of the Pharisees led to pointless self-denial. Pointless, that is, if you don’t believe in an after-life. Why give up pleasure unnecessarily in pursuit of an illusion of righteousness when there may not even be a resurrection of the just anyway, according to the Sadducees?  Philosophically, the Sadducees were only interested in the here and now, particularly in acquiring political power and wealth.

The Essenes also rejected the Pharisaic accretions. According to Baumgarten, when the Pharisees are accused of following שְריִרוּת לְבָס in the Qumran scrolls,[15] it is attacked as human willfulness rather than divine law.[16] The Pharisees are seen as fulfilling Ps. 81:13, “I let them go after their willful heart (שְריִרוּת) that they might follow their own devices.”

The Herodians rejected the paradosis.  Herod’s biographer and closest advisor—Nicolaus of Damascus—the one who defended his will before Augustus Caesar—disliked the Pharisees, accusing them of “pretending to observe the laws of which God approves.”

Last, but not least, Yeshua of Nazareth rejected the tradition of the elders in Mark 7:1-23 when the Pharisees confronted Yeshua for allowing the 5000 to eat bread without washing their hands:

Then the Pharisees and scribes asked Him, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders (Greek = παραδοσιν των πρεσβυτέρων)?”

What we wish to focus on here is the term παραδοσιν των πρεσβυτέρων, translated “tradition of the elders” in Mark 7:5. Josephus uses the same phrase in Ant. 10.4.1 § 51.  Baumgarten is correct in concluding that carefully crafted terminology was one of the means by which the Pharisees vaunted themselves into the religious center-stage of first century Judaism.  It was a way of claiming great antiquity for their paradosis. Notice that Yeshua rejects their terminology and calls their traditionalism the “commandments of men.”

Before the time of the Maccabees, the elders formed the gerousia (council of elders) of Jerusalem.  Stating that their traditions were “of the elders” may have been an attempt by the Pharisees to connect their traditions with the leading center of power in pre-Maccabean Jerusalem.[17] Stating that their teachings were “of the elders,” of the gerousia, would have significantly enhanced the prestige of their traditions, according to Baumgarten.[18]

At some point the Pharisees began to teach that their oral interpretations were derived from an oral tradition which Moses received on Mt. Sinai, which again looks like an attempt to invest their tradition with genuineness based on antiquity. Some of these efforts seem designed to compensate for the fact that they were not the ones originally invested with the duty of teaching the people (cf. Mal. 2, Ezra, and Neh. 8:7-8 where it is the priests and Levites who are charged with instructing the people out of Torah, not the elders).

Given the lengths the rabbis were willing to go to lend credibility to their teachings, it is not unreasonable to suppose they would have used the “seat of Moses” to seat the rabbi giving not only the Torah reading, but also its exposition. Keener says the Pharisees “adopted the role of the law’s interpreters, since instructors sat to teach.”[19] We may suppose that Neh 8:8 was used to justify the necessity of both Aramaic translation and interpretation of any verse of Hebrew scripture: “So they (the Levites of v. 7) read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading.” The JPS explains this verse with the following words: “The idea that the Torah text cannot simply be read and understood in a straightforward way… is particularly prominent within rabbinic culture.”[20]

There is nothing in Yeshua’s statement, “The scribes and the Pharisees sat down on Moses’ seat,” which implies that Yahweh placed them there. It is only Yeshua’s supposed use of the plural pronoun ‘they’ in verse 3 that has led to total confusion on what the Savior actually taught. But was the original Hebrew Gospel of Matthew so-construed? The answer to this question may lie in Shem Tov’s Hebrew Matthew.

George Howard’s Hebrew Gospel of Matthew

The Hebrew Gospel of Matthew,^[21] called Shem Tov, has finally been published, translated, and thoroughly analyzed for the first time by Professor George Howard.[22] “The Divine Name occurs 19 times in the text.”  Howard argues cogently that it existed in the original Matthew,

“The conclusion seems inescapable that Shem-Tov found the Divine Name already in his gospel text, having received it from an earlier generation of Jewish tridents.  He permitted the Divine Name to remain in the text perhaps because he was unsure himself about what to do with it.”^[23]

It is inconceivable that Shem Tov or any Jewish scribe would have inserted the Divine Name into his text of Matthew. As Howard aptly states, “No Jewish polemist would have done that. It must have included the Divine Name from its inception.” This is but one of a number of linguistic facts which demonstrate that the Shem Tov did not originate in the Jewish community, although there is evidence to suggest it may have been held by 3^rd-4^th C. followers of John the Baptist. The only other possibility would seem to be that messianic Jews had given copies of Shem Tov to their fellow Jews in Spain as a prudent way to defend their observance of Judaism in the inquisitions. Keep in mind that Jews were reluctant to destroy works that contained the Divine Name.[24]

In addition to George Howard’s groundbreaking work (see footnote 16 below), Nehemia Gordon has made a very strong case for the validity of readings in the earliest copies of Shem Tov in his book, The Hebrew Yehshua. vs Greek Jesus. Shem Tov’s Matthew (which is dated 1380 A.D.) resolves the most critical, long-standing problem in the history of New Testament scholarship. More dissertations have been written trying to reconcile the word “they” of Matthew 23:3 with the balance of Yeshua’s teaching in Matthew 23, Matthew 15, Mark 7, Galatians, and Acts 15, etc. than any other single verse in the entire New Testament.  How does one explain Yeshua’s telling his disciples to do whatsoever the scribes and Pharisees bid them to do when the rest of Matt 23 and indeed the entire Gospel plainly contradicts this?

The solution lies in the Hebrew text found in Shem Tov’s Matthew 23:3.  Translated it reads:

Upon the seat of Moses the Pharisees and the sages sit. All which he (Moses) continues to say to you keep and do; but (according to) their takanoteem and ma’aseem, do not do because they say and do not.

Whatever is read from the Torah of Moses by the hassan, who was more often than not a scribe or Pharisee, DO THAT.  Note the Shem Tov verb  יֺאמַרin 23:3 is a Qal imperfect third person, masculine singular,[25] not plural. יֺאמַר, thus we have translated it “all which he continues to say to you keep and do.” Yeshua is not telling his disciples to do whatever they, the Pharisees, might tell them to do.  The corresponding verb in the Greek text, ειπωσιν, is a third person plural aorist active subjunctive, quite different from the Qal Imperfect of the Shem Tov. One should also note that when Matthew wrote his Gospel the schism between the synagogue leadership and messianic followers of Yeshua was already serious. To assume Yeshua directed his followers to continue to listen to the Pharisees when the decisions of the Sanhedrin attempting to squelch the new movement were only a matter of months down the road (Acts 4:1-21) is to accuse Yeshua of a very uncharacteristic shortsightedness. Matthew himself would have been even more acutely aware of God’s rejection of the Sanhedrin’s authority by the time of his writing.

Pappias said around 90 AD that everyone translated Matthew’s Hebrew Gospel “as best he could,” which is as if to say they did not know how to translate out of the Hebrew into Greek very accurately.  The student of Hebrew will note other instances in Shem Tov where the Hebrew verb is third person singular (“he”) where the Greek text has “they.”

Now let’s consider if the Shem Tov case were wrong. Then you would have an immediate internal contradiction in the text.  Because Yeshua goes on to tell His disciples NOT TO DO according to the Pharisee’s takanotiym and ma’asiym. These were the two most important categories of Oral Law, and in the first century had not yet been written down. But they were considered as binding on the religious adherents of Pharaseeism living in the first century as any command in the Law. Hence, it is absolutely absurd to suggest that Yeshua is telling his disciples to do whatever they bid Jews to do, but in the next breath telling them not to do according to the takanotiym and ma’asiym. For a fuller explanation of how important these two were to the Oral Law of the rabbis and what they comprised, you will have to read Gordon’s book[26] or Avi ben Mordecai’s Galatians.  Suffice it to say, that since the early translators into Greek of Matthew’s Gospel did not understand what these terms meant, it looks like they simply conflated the two into one Greek word εργον, (works), has a similar meaning to ma’asim (deeds, actions). These laws were based on deeds or customs that became precedents over time. For instance, when, during the Middle Ages, the majority of Jewish men began to wear head coverings^[27], this became a precedent which the rabbis made a ruling on (ma’asim), declaring it to be binding law or halakhah (הַלָחָה).

What is the upshot of all of this? Is it not apparent that somebody very familiar with Jewish Oral Law had to have authored the Shem Tov? Matthew, the accountant and tax-collector, noted exactly those areas of Oral Law that Yeshua spelled out as having gone beyond and added to the Law of Moses. Therefore, Shem Tov cannot be attributed to pro-rabbinic sources, as credulous Messianic teachers would like to do. The details about takanotim and ma’asim sharpen rather than blunt the attack on rabbinic authority.  These details are absent from the Greek texts.

Call No Man Father

Laying aside, for the time being, the blatant violation of Matt. 23:8,10 by the vast majority of Messianic congregations who indulge in calling their pastors ‘rabbi’, I would like my readers to turn their attention to Matt. 23:9 and realize that Orthodox Judaism had a several hundred year head-start on Catholicism in violating the Savior’s injunction to “Call no man your father upon earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven.”  The passage says nothing about what you call your physical father.  The context of the passage is that we all have one spiritual Father and no one else is entitled to that designation.  But what if you’re a sect of Judaism trying to gain credibility, a foothold as it were, with other unaffiliated Jews, in, let’s say the second century B.C.  Baumgarten suggests that this is when the Pharisees started calling their prominent teachers and rabbis “father,” in order to equate them with the patriarchs and Moses.

Since the Pharisees were not priests, they had no lineage or family ties to the priesthood.  Most ancient cultures, especially the Jews, accepted religious traditions handed down from father to son (see Amos 2:4b).  The Apostle Paul spoke in Gal. 1:14 how he had advanced in the Jews religion above many of his peers, being exceedingly zealous of the traditions of his fathers (Gr. πατρικων = of paternal ancestors). These traditions had been handed down to him through his own father, for Paul tells us he is the son of a Pharisee (Acts 23:6). Most scholars assume a link between Gal. 1:14 and the Pharisaic paradosis.  In the context of the strength of Jewish tribal tradition, and the importance placed upon patriarchy, it is doubtful that the schools of the Pharisees had displaced the family as the main instrument for transmitting Jewish tradition from one generation to another.  By the second century of the Christian era, however, all eyes began to look to the Pharisees for authority in religious matters.

The handing down of traditions was particularly true of priestly traditions (C. Apion 1.7 § 36).  The Jewish arguments for Jerusalem over against Mt. Gerizim as the legitimate place where men ought to worship mostly hinged around the high priests having received their office from their father.[28] The Pharisees, on the other hand, were scholastic, similar to Hellenistic schools, headed by scholarchs.[29]

“The notion [in the 1^st Century B.C.] that such a school possessed traditions concerning the religious laws to be observed by the nation would have been revolutionary in all the ancient world…Pharisaic tradition, as a nonpriestly school tradition, was therefore extremely vulnerable.”[30]

So what did the Pharisees do?   They engaged in a piece of legal fiction that must have seemed quite brash to the first generation of Jews who saw them do it.  Returning to Baumgarten’s article on the Pharisaic paradosis:

When the Pharisees chose מְסֹרוֹת (masorōt) as the name of the laws they observed not written in the Bible, they were investing those traditions with the prestige of the written word [because the term] means the written text of the Bible even in rabbinic sources.

Baumgarten sees this as part of the Pharisaic response to early Sadducaean[31] charges that the Pharisees had attempted to attach “the questionable to the unassailable.”[32] In a similar vein, Avi ben Mordechai states:[33]

The rabbis have a rule that allows them to attribute precedents (ma’asim) to those that have gone before them, whether or not they actually instituted them or not. Examples: Magen Avraham, Orach Chayim 156 b [canonical commentary on Shulchan Aruch, 17^th century] “If a person heard a ruling and it seems to him that the law is thus, he is permitted to say it in the name of a great person so that people will accept it from him.”

The takanot enactment that clothes be washed on Thursday and garlic eaten on Friday is thus attributed to Ezra without evidence. Rashi speaks of someone attributing a teaching to R. Yose so that he would accept it from him, without passing moral judgment on such a practice. The term masorot ’Abot—traditions of the fathers—is the name of a tractate of the Talmud.  In it, the founders of rabbinic Judaism of the first century B.C.–Hillel and Shammai—are called ‘Abot ha olam, or “fathers of the universe,” or alternately, “fathers of eternity.”[34] R. Akiva and other prominent rabbis are also called fathers.  Students of rabbis were called their b’nai, or “sons.” Calling the Pharisaic tradition that “of the fathers” was a very clever way for them to make a statement to the Jewish community worldwide: “Our rabbis are ‘abot just as Moses and the prophets were.”[35] To quote Baumgarten:

“The status of Pharisaic leaders as ‘abot seemed so obvious to the heirs of the Pharisees that they called the tractate that began with the old list of scholarchs Abot.”

As for calling Shammai and Hillel “fathers of eternity/universe,” that is just the kind of blasphemous title one would expect from a religion emanating from Babylonia.[36] The fact that they held contradictory opinions on every matter except “the washing of the hands” did not inhibit the Talmudic rabbis from saying–“the words of both are the words of the living Elohim.”[37]

We have learned that the terms paradosis of the elders and ‘father’ as a spiritual title for the rabbis was a deliberate attempt by the Pharisees to aggrandize their movement and their schools.  In defending their oral law, they hoped to raise its status from that of mere schools of men to the patrimony of the nation. As Yeshua indicated, they did whatever they did, “to be seen of men.” Any suggestion on the part of Messianic or Church of God sabbatarian leadership that somehow Yahweh placed them in Moses’ seat is disingenuous in the light of the present study. There is One Lawgiver who is able to save or destroy, and He gave but one Law to His servant Moses. Those who honor this parallel tradition to the holy writ by wearing yamulkas, calling their leader ‘rabbi’ in contravention of Yeshua’s instruction in Matt 23:8, and keeping the Jewish fixed calendar, are also supporting, directly or indirectly, a whole host of questionable and contradictory practices.

Many in the Messianic movement, I suppose, will continue to obfuscate the meaning of Matt 23:2-3 by supporting the patently false reading “whatsoever they bid you do, that do.” But those who are doing the will of God will welcome the light shed on this subject. It is surely ironic that the Hebrew roots movement, and Messianic Jews, who seem to be so interested in Hebrew and the Semitic origins of the New Testament, continue to neglect the study of George Howard’s ground-breaking research on Shem Tov’s Hebrew Matthew. Howard has shown that many of its readings reflect manuscript variants of the 3^rd, 4^th, 5^th and 6^th centuries, which make it as old as the vast majority of the extant documents of the New Testament.

Avi ben Mordechai’s chapter on “The Structure of Jewish Law” in his book Galatians is the major exception to this neglect. Mordechai points out that the Shem Tov has Yeshua using the same Hebrew word takanot in Matt. 23:3 as the Pharisees used in Matt 15:2, “Why do your disciples transgress the takanot of the first ones?” Yeshua responds to their question by saying, (in Shem Tov’s original Hebrew), “Why do all of you transgress the words of Elohim for your takanot?” Since takanotim and ma’asim were the biddings of the rabbis, an immediate and direct contradiction is created with the Greek of Matt 23:2-3, “all which they say to you do.”

Notice the Pharisees use the term rishonōt (Heb =  תרִאשׂוֺנִוֺ) in ST Matt 15:2, translated “the first ones,” to refer to their own leaders, the formulators of takanot enactments. When we get to Matt 19:30, Yeshua tells us, “Many who are first ones (רִאשׂוֺנִים) will be last, and many who exist behind [others] (Heb = אחרוֹןׂ [38]) will be first ones.” It is hard, given the many confrontations depicted in Matthew’s Gospel between the Pharisees and scribes and Yeshua, not to think that He had them in mind.

The singularity of the lexical form  יֺאמַר(“whatever he [Moses] is saying”) found in Shem Tov’s Matt 23:3 resolves contradictions and inconsistencies created by Greek texts’ problematic third person plural, “all which they say.” Followed to its logical conclusion, we would be left with the absurd non sequitur that Yeshua agrees with the teaching of the scribes and Pharisees on ritual hand-washing (15:1-2, 10-20), on Corban  (15:3-9), on Sabbath leniency (12:1-14), on divorce and remarriage (19:3-9), and a whole host of other teachings that He plainly disagreed with. Given the antinomian, anti-Judaic penchant of the second century Alexandria-based family of copyists, it is not surprising that the authorities there would have balked at such a clear-cut recommendation by the Savior to “Do whatever Moses bids you to do.” How much the transformation from “they say” to “he says” depended on ignorance of the Hebrew vs. New Covenant unwillingness to learn from Moses is impossible to say; but it is virtually certain that Matt 23:3 has mutated from its original Hebrew, which was consonant with the themes throughout the book.

derstinetodd@yahoo.com www.americaspropheticdestiny.com

[2] Enc. Judaica 13, p. 333.

[3] Mark Allan Powell, “Do and Keep What Moses Says (Matthew 23:2-7), Journal of Biblical Literature 114 (1995),

[4] M. Ginsberger, “La ‘Chaire de Moise,’”  Revue des Études Juives 90 (1931): 161-165.

[5] Cecil Roth, “The Chair of Moses and Its Survivals,” PEQ 81 (1949): 103-104.

[6] Kenneth Newport, “A Note on the Seat of Moses,” Andrews Univ. Seminary Studies 28 (1990), p. 56, Newport cites Sulzberger here.

[7] “Stone Synagogue Chairs: Their Identification, Use and Significance,” IEJ 40 (1990) 182-214.

[8] Cecil Roth, “The Chair of Moses and Its Survival,” Palestine Exploration Quarterly 81 (1949):110.

[9] Newport, op cit., p. 57.

[10] Powell, op. cit., 431-32.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Harvard Theological Review 80:1 (1987).

[13] Running parallel, or alongside the law of Moses, and competing with it for people’s obedience.

[14] Ant. 13.10.6  § 298.

[15] 1 QH 4 7, 11

[16] “The Pharisaic Paradosis,” HTR 80:1, p. 71.

[17] It is to that period of Jewish history we must look for the origin of this terminology.

[18] Ibid. page 74

[19] Keener, Gospel of Matthew, 541.

[20] See commentary on Neh 8:8 in The Jewish Study Bible (JPS: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004).

[21] Preserved by the Jewish community in Spain during the Middle Ages.

[22] See Howard’s ground-breaking work in The Hebrew Gospel of Matthew, Mercer Univ. Press, 1995.

[23] Cf. the famous rabbinic passage, Tosefta Shabbath, 13.5: “The margins and books of the minim (Christians) do not save.”  The debate then follows about what to do with heretical books that have the divine name in them.  R. Jose suggests the divine name should be cut out and the rest of the document burned.  R. Ishmael and R. Tarphon say the entire books including the divine name should be destroyed.

[24] For additional evidence that the Tetragrammaton was used in the Greek New Testament, see “The Tetragram and the New Testament,” Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 96 [1977], pp. 63-83, and “The Name of God in the New Testament,” Biblical Archaeology Review, Mar. 1978, 12-14.

[25] Miles V. van Pelt, Basics of Biblical Hebrew Grammar (2007), 420.

[26] The Hebrew Yeshua vs. the Greek Jesus, Nehemiah Gordon. Hilkiah Press, 2005.

[27] Messianic Jews would be hard-pressed to find a precedent during the Talmudic period for the practice of men wearing a yamulka.  It cannot be found in the Talmud, according to Nehemia Gordon, who was raised to become a rabbi by next of kin who were themselves rabbis.

[28] Ant. 13.3.4 § 78

[29] Elias Bickerman, Studies in Jewish and Christian History, p. 259-69.

[30] A.I. Baumgarten, “The Pharisaic Paradosis”, Harvard Theological Review (1987), p. 72

[31] Strong arguments could be brought forward at this point that Essene, Samaritan (and later Herodian) groups were leveling similar charges against the Pharisaic ‘laws’ as early as the 2^nd Century B.C.

[32] Ibid., p. 73.

[33] Galatians (2005), p. 77.

[34] Ibid., see also Wylen, p. 148.

[35] Baumgarten, ibid., p. 74.

[36] The rabbis who compiled the Babylonian Talmud were concentrated around their academies in Baghdad.

[37] Wylen, op cit., p. 51.

[38] Wm. L. Holladay, A Concise Hebrew & Aramaic Lexicon of the OT, 11.

Some of the most cherished institutions of Christendom are based upon a commonly assumed chronology which is in great need of revision.  I remember the cheery bright crisp spring mornings when, as a child, I accompanied my parents on their annual visit to the local Easter service.  More liturgy and psalm has been created for Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday than for Christmas.  For most of Church history, Easter has been far more important to the Church in every respect than the celebration of the birth of Christ.  There were disputes over when to remember Christ’s death and celebrate His resurrection, not over when He was born.  I argue elsewhere in this book that Church authorities squelched any texts or interpretations that might throw into doubt a Sunday resurrection.  Many devotees, even into the 4^th Century, felt that Passover and the remembrance of the day of Christ’s death was far more important than the day of the resurrection, which came to be known as Easter.  Jerome records a custom of the early apostolic Church whereby the Paschal meal was not eaten until early dawn, so that the full impact of Christ’s suffering might be driven home.[1] After all, the wisest man who ever lived (Solomon) said (Ecclesiastes. 7:2-4):

“It is better to go into the house of mourning, than to go to a house of feasting.  Because that is the end of every man, and the living takes it to heart.  Sorrow is better than laughter; for by sadness of the countenance the heart is made better.  The mind of the wise is in the house of mourning.

I would further argue that the Church’s unwillingness to be buried in the likeness of His death ensures she will not be raised in the likeness of His resurrection (Ro. 6:5).  Instead, the Church kills socially or literally those who would keep an appropriate Passover and choose to go into the house of mourning to proclaim the Lord’s death til He comes (I Cor. 11:26).  Those who sow in tears shall reap in joy Ps. 126:5).  The suppression of Passover together with the exclusive exaltation of the resurrection is the Church’s attempt at circumventing the Biblical emphasis on self-mortification and dying to self as commemorated in the Passover without which there will be no personal celebration of the resurrection in the end.  Giving the glory of the resurrection to the name Easter–the Babylonian fertility goddess Ishtar—at the expense of Passover is a crime against apostolic tradition whose perpetrators will be judged.

But in the end, who cares what happened on which day?  Does it really matter?  As long as we all believe in the atoning death and factual resurrection of Christ, why sweat the details?

Not so fast, folks.  Every fact presented in this book indirectly or directly goes to the core of how Christianity got off track in the Second through the Fourth Centuries.  Most people still are clueless as to what is fundamentally wrong with mainstream Christianity.  But it is a fact that the non-Jewish elements in the early Gentile churches pushed through an ‘orthodox’ agenda to have the Sabbath, the holy days, Passover, and the rest of the excellent precepts in the Old Testament relegated to heretical status.  The chief cornerstone in justifying this antinomian, anti-Moses, anti-Jew, Neo-Platonist theology was the misguided notion that Yeshua arose on a Sunday morning, thus giving excuse for the celebration of the so-called ‘Easter[2] event’ every Sunday.

Inattention to detail in the Gospel accounts, not to mention misrepresentation of the actual Greek words mia twn sabbatwn (mia ton sabbatown)—translated in the King James as “first day of the week”–has allowed this grand deception to masquerade as Christianity since the time of Constantine.  Mia twn sabbatwn literally means “one of the Sabbaths.”[3] This chapter, and this book, prove that it is Saturday that commemorates the resurrection, not Sunday.  The subject matter in this book cannot be presented without painstaking attention to detail.  What are the odds that a modern audience, with today’s “give it to me in a nutshell” mindset, will have the patience to study and comprehend this material?  Frankly, not many will have either the time or the inclination.  But as our increasingly lawless Church world gets hammered with joblessness from the New World Order, or once the Day of Yahweh finally arrives, there is going to be more time for sober reflection on the nature of the Christianity we practice.  Yahweh willing, the truth and the facts will emerge triumphant as this material finally finds its way into the hands of pastors who will actually feed their flocks with knowledge.  Remember, the western world lived for almost fourteen centuries under the hegemony of a very powerful Catholic Church, and later the Church of England, which did not even permit their members to read the Bible!   But the idea, carried over into many churches, was to let the Church spoon feed whatever knowledge and doctrine they wanted the people to have.  To this day, even in the most independent of churches, it is the individual who has been the most diligent in acquiring knowledge and understanding that church leadership feels the most threatened by!  This sad spiritual state of affairs does not bode well for the Church.

Revelation 22:15 says that Yahweh will refuse entry into the holy city to all those who love and make a lie, along with whoremongers, sorcerers, murderers, and idolaters.  This book exposes the plethora of lies associated with the Friday-Sunday scenario that make the Gospel accounts unnecessarily contradictory, thus casting doubt upon the veracity of these scriptures.  This chapter validates every verse having to do with the where, when, and why of what happened during the days leading up to the crucifixion.  This revised narrative will prove that Christ came out of the tomb on a late Friday afternoon, three days after His death on the cross on Tuesday March 27^th 31 A.D., and was encountered by Mary Magdalene the following Sabbath morn.[4] It is necessary that the Savior arose at the start of the Sabbath to symbolize the fact that He will return from heaven at the end of the 6000 year period we are now living in, and will be alive and endowed with power to commence His reign over the earth during the seventh millennium. This metaphor is lost even with the Wednesday-Saturday scenario of Wm. Graham Scroggie, E.W. Bullinger, the Church of God Seventh Day, and the H. W. Armstrong movement, since this version of events has Yeshua sleeping in the grave all the way through the Sabbath.  Prepare your heart to receive a presentation of the events of Passion Week as you’ve never understood them before.

Passion Week Narrative: Background and Explanations

Scholars old and new are fond of stating that the Gospel writers weren’t much interested in providing chronological information.  And while it is agreed that this is not their primary focus, it is wrong to assume that the Holy Spirit has not provided us enough data in the Gospel accounts to know when everything happened during the Passion Week.  This book dispels the notion held by some scholars that the Gospel accounts are hopelessly confused. Hence, I would like to provide a day by day account that demonstrates the complementary nature of the four Gospels. This effort is aided greatly by the fact that the four Evangelists go into far more detail about the final week than any other time of Christ’s ministry.  In fact, because the Gospel writers use a diary format during the final week, we should not expect any events to be out of sequence.  In the topical format used by Luke prior to the Passion Week, it is not necessary events be in the same order as the other Gospels.

We begin with Yeshua entering the city of Jericho one full week prior to the Passover. It is only March 20^th, three days before the end of winter,[5] but thankfully the Jericho valley sports a subtropical climate and is one of the warmest areas in Palestine.  Herod the Great built one of his palaces and a hippodrome in Jericho for the purpose of passing his winters under more ideal conditions.  Yeshua healed several blind men He passed by the wayside there, including Bartimaeus.  Great crowds accompanied Him.  While passing through the city, a Jewish man named Zacchaeus, who was the chief tax collector, climbed up into a sycamore tree to get a better view of the Master (Luke 19:1-4).  Being a tax collector, especially a Jewish tax collector, was a rather dangerous occupation, given the attitude of the Zealots and some Pharisees; hence, it is very likely that Zaccheaus lived in the midst of the city of Jericho in order to avail himself of the protection of the Roman garrison stationed there.   It is clear from Luke’s account that Yeshua encountered Zacchaeus near his house as He was passing through Jericho, and that Zacchaeus hurried down from the tree and welcomed Yeshua into his house.  All who saw it began to grumble and said to the Lord, “He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.”  In any case, Yeshua no doubt spent Tuesday night March 20^th at the house of a fellow Jew[6] who had grown very rich doing the bidding of the Roman government.  It was also at this point that Yeshua told the parable of the pounds.

The following day was Wednesday, March 21, the sixth day before the Passover of March 27, 31 A.D.[7] Before this day was through, Yeshua arrived at Bethany (John 12:1) after a long, uphill, difficult thirteen mile hike from Jericho.[8] Take notice that if the crucifixion was on Friday, this trip would then have taken place on Saturday.  The following misguided statement is typical of what is found in most Bible commentaries:

Since the Passover, according to [John’s] Gospel, took place on Friday [supposedly], Jesus apparently arrived on Saturday (the Sabbath)…[9]

Since the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem took place the very next day, it becomes apparent how people arrived at the popular notion of Palm Sunday.  All scholars realize that the synoptic accounts of Yeshua’s activities at Jericho directly precede his arrival at Bethany (John 12:1), where He ate a meal at Lazarus’ house.  But the trip from Jericho could not have been on a Sabbath, because Yeshua kept the law, observing the requirements of Sabbath rest (Exod. 20:8; Luke 4:16). The resultant Palm Sunday is thus a figment of men’s imaginations divorced from the Biblical account, as our first two chapters amply illustrate.  It is a natural outgrowth of the Church’s anti-Torah theology that their Passion Week scenario should picture the Savior breaking the holy Sabbath.[10] We choose here, however, to rescue the true Messiah from such a dilemma.  The Lord of the Sabbath has left us an example, that we should walk even as He walked (I Peter 2:21).  The thirteen mile hike from Jericho never happened on Saturday, as we shall soon see.

The Progression of Days in the Passion Week

In establishing a chronology for the Passion Week, it is important to realize that 1) moneychangers did not do business at the temple on Saturday, and 2) there were two days in a row when Yeshua drove out commercial activity there, and 3) the day following these two cleansings was indeed a weekly Sabbath.  When these truths are established, then it becomes easy to see when everything transpired.

Significance of the Meal at Lazarus’ House for the Passion Week Chronology

We know by a number of facts that Christ arrived at Lazarus’ house in Bethany near Jerusalem on Wednesday afternoon and ate this meal on Wednesday night. The main one is that when we harmonize the parallel accounts in the synoptic gospels, we find that on BOTH of the next two days, Yeshua cleansed the Temple of its moneychangers.[11] Since these moneychangers would not be operational on the Sabbath, these successive days of cleansing must have been on Thursday and Friday.  It is noteworthy that the third day after His arrival in Bethany there is no mention of cleansing the Temple, simply because there was no need to do so; it was the Sabbath and there would have been no business as usual in the Court of the Gentiles where the moneychangers operated (six days a week).

The well-known friendship and love between Yeshua and Lazarus (John 11:36) and his two sisters tells us that 1) they would have made Him their guest at their house Wednesday night, and 2) Martha’s diligence at serving (Luke 10:40), would not have allowed her very special guest to leave for Jerusalem the next morning hungry.  This little detail (together with the fig tree incident) is what distinguishes the morning of the Triumphal Entry (no hunger, no fig tree) from the following one (fig tree reminds Him He is hungry[12]).  The cursing of the fig tree takes place on the latter, but there is no fig tree on the former.  This hunger on Friday morning suggests to astute observers like Alfred Plummer that Yeshua was “not under the roof of friends [at Bethany]; they would have provided Him with food in the morning.”[13] All of this suggests a logical story flow.  He is not hungry Thursday morning because He just had a terrific meal the night before courtesy of Mary and Martha.  He is hungry Friday morning because He has not had the benefit of local hospitality in Bethany.  After all, it would have been an imposition to have returned to Lazarus’ house with the twelve, a disregard for the Biblical precept “Enter sparingly into thy friend’s house.”[14]

The Day of the Triumphal Entry

All four Gospels mention the Triumphal entry, which was on Thursday morning.[15] Yeshua left Lazarus’ house with the twelve, directing two of them to go into the village ahead to procure a donkey and her yearling.[16] John 12:12-13 is critical to the sequence here:

The next day [after the meal at Lazarus’ house] a great multitude that had come to the feast, when they heard that Yeshua was coming to Jerusalem, took branches of palm trees and went out to meet Him, and cried out, ‘Hosanna! Blessed is He who comes in the name of YHWH, the king of Israel!’

When the crowd began throwing their garments and shouting the Messianic Psalm 118—“Blessed is He who comes in the name of Yahweh,”—this violation of rabbinic taboos against pronouncing the name must have rankled the Pharisees.  Luke 19:40 says that some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Him, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples.” But Yeshua answered, ’I tell you that if these were to hold their peace, the stones would cry out.’”  This all took place on the outskirts of the city.

When He entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil.  Many in the crowd who had seen Yeshua call Lazarus from the tomb kept testifying about him (John 12:17). On account of this the multitude went out to meet their Messiah, because they had heard that He had done this miracle (John 12:18). The huge crowds followed Him as He made a beeline for the Temple.  The road in from the Mount of Olives provided a view into the outer court of the Temple itself.  Christ knew what He was going to do before He got there.  The Jewish authorities two years earlier had refused to hearken to his challenge “Do not make My Father’s house a house of merchandise.”  This time Yeshua would again cleanse the Temple of all commercial activity in order to make it a house of prayer for the crowds intent on hearing Him. Yeshua walked stridently through the outer gate and into the Temple courtyard and drove out all who were buying and selling (Matt.21:12). Matthew, being one of the twelve, was there and saw and heard everything.  He quotes Yeshua—“It is written, My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you are making it (poieite = present active indi-dicative, 2^nd person pl.) a den of thieves.” (NAS, CJB, NIV[17])  Yeshua at this point still holds out hope that they might accept His correction and leave things quiet enough for prayer and teaching.  But the transformation of the Temple which Yeshua brought about was only temporary.  By the following day, Friday, Yeshua will have taken a much stronger attitude, as is reflected in the difference in language between Mark’s account and Matthew’s.

Mark intersperses an evening not found in Matthew’s account to show that he is describing a cleansing of the Temple that is subsequent to the day of the Triumphal Entry. On this day, Friday, Mark uses the pluperfect tense to show that Yeshua now feels that the Jewish authorities at the Temple have irreversibly turned the place into a den of thieves, fait accomplit.  Mark quotes the Savior: “You have made it (pepoihkate) a den of thieves.” (Mark 11:17)  Let us imagine what Yeshua may have been thinking at this point:

Your refusal to hearken unto my words of correction, stubbornly insisting on undoing my work of cleansing this courtyard each and every time, has now turned this place (past perfect tense) completely into a den of robbers.  I have now dug about this fig tree on three separate occasions over three years running (compare Luke 13:6-7), but you stubbornly refuse to repent and reserve the outer court for its intended glory and original purpose—as a house of prayer for all the nations (Mark 11:17).  The judgment upon this house is now sealed, as it was in Jeremiah’s day (Jer. 7:11-15), for similar reasons.  You commit iniquity and then come back in here and use Yahweh’s Temple as a ‘refuge for robbers’, saying to yourselves ‘we are delivered to commit all these abominations.’

It was on this Friday, as well as the next day (the Sabbath), that Yeshua was prepared, with deep pathos, to foretell the destruction of the Temple (Luke 19:41-45; Matt.23:38; 24:2; Mark 13:1-4).  The desecration of the Temple in the First Century helps us understand why Yeshua was able to prophesy so succinctly “not one stone shall be left here upon another that shall not be thrown down.” (Matt. 24:2)  But to say this is to get ahead of our story.

Matthew understood that there was no intervening night between the entry into Jerusalem on a colt and the initial cleansing of the Temple on Thursday.  Mark mentions an intervening nightfall and retreat to Bethany (Mark 11:11), because his cleansing of the Temple is on Friday.  On Thursday afternoon, certain Hellenist Jews wanted to see Yeshua.  He sent word back to them: “Anyone who loves his own life shall lose it; and anyone who hates his life in this world, shall keep it into eternal life.”  Yeshua epitomized this attitude when taking total control of the situation in the outer court, knowing full well that His actions and words there would bring about the successful conspiracy against Himself.

It was Thursday afternoon when the people heard a thundering voice come from heaven which confirmed the Father’s was being glorified through Yeshua (John 12:28).  He foretold the demise of the ruler of this world, Satan, and the manner of His own death (John 12:32).  Having preached these things, He “departed and hid Himself from them” (John 12:36). Matthew says the same thing, “He left them, went out of the city to Bethany and spent the night there (Matt. 21:17 NRSV).” Mark, after giving an account of the Triumphal entry, parallels Matt. 21:17 at Mark 11:11:

Then He entered Jerusalem, and went into the temple, and when He had looked around at everything (as it was now already evening), He went out to Bethany with the twelve.

When one sees the Holy Spirit as directing the narrative in each Gospel to make them complementary, one has no problem with Mark’s omission of the cleansing on Thursday.  Mark, whom Church history tells us traveled with Peter and collected his teachings[18], is basically thought to have written the Gospel of Mark from Peter’s perspective.  It is also very possible Mark may have been in Jerusalem witnessing these events.[19] Mark also mentions the Triumphal entry on Thursday, but simply says Yeshua late that afternoon looked around at all things at the Temple, and retired to Bethany for the night, not mentioning any cleansing of the Temple (until the next day).  To argue that Yeshua could not have cleansed the Temple earlier that day is an argument from silence, as nothing in Mark’s accounts prevents that.  Mark also fails to mention Yeshua teaching in the Temple that same day, yet we know from Luke 19:47 “every day He was teaching at the Temple.”  When Yeshua looked around at everything in Temple at the end of that Thursday, He was seeing the Court of the Gentiles as it should be, totally rid of commercial tables, chairs, pens, manure and traffickers.  And yet He knew the transgression would resume once again the very next day, a Friday.  The love of money is a root of all evil (I Tim. 6:10).  The chief priests, instead of accepting Yeshua’s righteous indignation and rooting covetousness out of their practices, chose instead to allow their sins to force Yahweh’s hand in uprooting them and their Temple.

If there is only one cleansing here, then it is impossible to reconcile these accounts without cutting and pasting verses to fit our pre-conceived notions of what actually happened.[20] Most people begin with the premise that there had to be only one cleansing, and that any suggestion of successive cleansings is ludicrous. However, Throckmorton’s Parallel Gospels[21] for these two days illustrates clearly the points we are trying to make.  We wish at this point to establish the background for the necessity of consecutive cleansings of the Court of the Gentiles.

A Prophetic Perspective on Yeshua’s Cleansing of the Second Temple

Yeshua fulfilled a number of prophecies when He boldly and courageously cleansed the Temple in Jerusalem.  Christ’s zeal for His Father’s house literally and figuratively ate Him up.  Yeshua literally fulfilled Psalm 69:9.[22] These cleansings were pivotal events.  His actions so threatened the authority and profits of the High Priests, that it is clear from Mark and Luke[23] that it was from that point on that they “kept looking for a way to kill Him, for they were afraid of Him.” (Mark 11:18)

Malachi 3:1 is another prophecy that directly refers to Yeshua’s entrance into Jerusalem and the Temple on Thursday, March 22, 31 A.D.

The Lord[24] you are seeking shall suddenly come to His Temple; the messenger of the Covenant,[25] whom you delight in, behold, He will come, says Yahweh of Hosts.

Finally, at this juncture it behooves us to bring to the fore the prophet Haggai, who prophesied in the 5^th Century B.C., at the very time when the Second Temple was being constructed.  He boldly asserted, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, that:

The Desire of all Nations shall come: and I will fill this house with glory, says Yahweh Sabaōth…the glory of this latter house will be greater than the glory of the former (Solomon’s Temple).” (Haggai 2:7, 9)

With this prophecy, Haggai provided great encouragement to the Jews of his day who had returned from Babylon, but who were dismayed at the dimensions and lack of gold, detail and splendor in this, the Second Temple.  But the latter Prophets and the Writings leave us in suspense not telling us how Haggai’s bold assertion was to come to pass. The reader is left to wonder how such a physically diminutive Temple could possibly ever rival the glory of the Solomonic Temple.  It is the resolution of this anomaly that links both Old and New Testament together into an indissoluble whole, and provides one of the great proofs that Yahweh is the author of such interlocking thematics.

The original order of the Old Testament ended at II Chronicles. This book has the concluding words of the Old Testament.  Oddly enough, they are the words of a Gentile, Cyrus, King of Persia, who was appointed by Yahweh to decree the building of the Second Temple: “Any one of His people among you, may Yahweh his God be with him, and let him go up.”  These are the same words used in the book of Joshua for those who went up to do battle against the peoples of Canaan.  But the answer to “Who will go up to this Second Temple to do battle?” is found in the very next book of the Bible—Matthew!  And why did the Temple need to be the scene of battle?  Because Yahweh knew in advance the Jews would dishonor Him in the sight of the nations by turning it into a house of merchandise.  The ties between the Old Testament/ II Chronicles and the book of Matthew have been the subject of cutting edge theological inquiry in recent years. Yeshua is the thread that links the two testaments.  He alone is the fulfillment of these amazing prophecies concerning the Second Temple.

Why Was It So Necessary To Cleanse the Second Temple?

It was absolutely necessary for Yeshua to come and cleanse His Father’s house, not only to fulfill the prophecies, but in order to restore it to its original purpose.  The Tosefta in the Talmud pronounces Woes on the High Priests of Herod the Great’s day down thru the fall of the Temple, chiefly for their greedy practices.[26] Josephus speaks of the brutality of the Sadducees (who were in control of the Temple) in collecting tithes[27]. Many went hungry due to this brutality, as well as their failure to distribute Temple moneys on behalf of the poor, even retired priests. According to a second century tract of the Mishna (Kritut 1:7), the high priests allowed their monopoly on sacrificial animals to drive even the cost of doves to five times the market value.  Because of their greed, the market for birds rose so high that even the poorer women of the community could not afford them.  As Lev. 12:6-8 and Luke 2:24 show, the law of Yahweh required, at the very least, a pair of doves or pigeons to be sacrificed on behalf of every male that opened the womb, because such were holy to the Lord. Yeshua’s repeated interdiction of these practices led the high priests to realize that Yeshua was a problem that needed to be “dealt with.”  Saturday was the last day spent teaching the public in Jerusalem. By Sunday the Paschal meal was less than two days away.  It only speaks of Him being in Bethany for a meal at Simon the leper’s house.  There He was anointed ‘for His burial’ with very costly ointment; but we have no indication He went into the city that day.  From that anointing forward all His focus was on preparing for the Passover with His disciples.

The Outer Court: A Place of Petition and Prayer for the Gentiles

.

Isaiah 56 addresses lofty promises to the Gentiles who take hold of Yahweh’s Covenant by keeping the Sabbath, etc.  It is this very prophecy that Yeshua quotes from to justify His bold actions at the Temple:

Even these strangers will I bring to My holy mountain, and make them joyful in My house of prayer, for My house shall be called a house of prayer for all people. (Isaiah 56:7)

Only on Mark’s day of cleansing does Yeshua quote Isaiah 56 in full: “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? (Mark 11:17)  The word nations is ‘Gentiles.’  Where were the tables of the moneychangers set up?  Where was the market place for animals destined for sacrifice?  It was in the Court of the Gentiles.[28] This in spite of the fact that when Solomon dedicated the Temple, he did so with these words:

As for the foreigner who comes from a distant land to pray at this Temple, hear from heaven, and do whatever the foreigner asks of You, so that all the earth may know your Name [Yahweh]. (I Kg. 8:41)

Description of the Scene in the Court of the Gentiles

This Court of the Gentiles—which was called The Bazaar of [Joseph] Caiaphas[29] and later The marketplace of the family of Annas[30]–lay just inside the outer gates of the Temple.  Instead of creating a quiet, contemplative atmosphere where people from all nations could come and make their petitions to Yahweh, the High Priests had turned the huge area into “a mart of petty bankers who were intent on money business and rates of exchange.”[31] The smell of dung from bullocks, lambs, goats, and doves, permeated the air, not to mention the cacophony of distraught livestock and Jews dickering over prices:

Cattle and doves were a necessity for the prescribed sacrifices but a poor excuse for making this great court of the Temple into a stockyard…the necessity [for a money exchange] again was no excuse for making the Temple itself a mart of petty bankers…this outrageous sight was always the first that greeted the visitor when he was passing thru the outer gates…The Temple authorities themselves controlled this volume of trade and in typical Jewish fashion operated what amounted to a grand, lucrative monopoly.  If one bought his animals in the Temple, these animals would be accepted; otherwise he might have trouble on that score….[32]

…this great court of the Gentiles…was greater than all the other courts into which all Gentiles were freely admitted.  In the very structure of the Temple the universality of the true religion was expressed.  Yet right here in this important court what a sight met the eyes of any visiting Gentiles—and there were always many!  What must they think of a Temple whose greatest court was thus desecrated and of the God to whom such a temple belonged?[33]

Perhaps the Sadducees, due to the love of money, thought they could get away with turning the Gentile court into a flea market. When one reads these accounts of temple cleansing and the leaders’ responses, one gets the impression that they knew it was wrong.  They knew they were polluting Yahweh’s house.  The fear Christ evoked in them  stemmed from realization that they were being exposed before the people, being shown to be unholy hypocrites, peddlers of that which is sacred.  Yahweh would graciously allow this license to go on another 39 years, giving ample signs over that span indicating that He was about to abandon His house. In 70 A.D. the Sadducees and the priesthood faded into historical oblivion. Yahweh’s judgments are sure. Yahweh now desires to live in temples made without hands—you and me. The lesson of this is that if Yahweh spared not the Jews and His own Temple, neither will He spare us if we disobey the strictures of the Gospel (Jude 5, I Cor. 10:6-9).  Curiously enough, the Thursday and Friday of Passion Week correspond to the 5^th and 6^th Millennium (29-2029 A.D.), during which we see Yeshua, the Church’s High Priest, cleansing his Church with the washing of the Word, so He might present her to Himself in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle, that she should be holy and blameless (Eph. 5:26-27).

Winston Churchill once said that “courage is the mother of all virtue.”  It is certainly remarkable that no one in Israel had mustered the courage to do what Yeshua eventually did. Yeshua’s manliness and boldness in asserting His right to drive out the money changers brought on questions the next day, a Sabbath, from the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders of the people about where Yeshua derived His authority, “Tell us, by what authority are you doing these things?” (Luke 20:2)  Perhaps they knew that Yeshua’s boldness and courage stemmed from a higher authority.  It is plain to the believer that since it was His Father’s house, then He was doing it on behalf of His Father, in His Father’s name.  This truth was borne out when Peter was asked whether his Master paid the Temple tax (Matt. 17:24).  Peter spoke (out of place) on Yeshua’s behalf, and told the collectors of the two-drachma tax, “Yes, He does.” But Yeshua said, in effect, that since He was the Son of the One who owned the Temple, that He was tax-exempt.  Nevertheless, so as not to offend the Jews, He sent Peter fishing (literally) for the coin with which to pay the tax.

The overturning of the tables of the moneychangers and the driving out of those who were selling and purchasing offends the tender sensibilities of those who know only of a “gentle Jesus,” and not also of the holy indignation that prompted Him to act as He does here.  But in so doing He cleared out space for the great multitudes which followed Him to the Temple each morning to hear Him.  At this very point in the narrative, Luke, referring to the Friday cleansing, makes a summary statement (Luke 19:47-48, NRSV):

Every day He was teaching in the Temple.  The chief priests and the leaders of the people kept looking for a way to kill Him, but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were spellbound by what they heard.

Yeshua looked on the multitudes as sheep having no shepherd.  They were enthralled by His teaching, and the authority with which He spoke.  Yet there is no way the crowds would have been spellbound had Yeshua NOT cleared out the courtyard of all commercial activity. He had no intention of trying to teach over the noise and ruckus of the Bazaar of Caiaphas:

Yeshua seems to have taken complete command of the situation in the court of the Gentiles.  After he is rid of all the traffic he was not letting anyone carry as much as a vessel or utensil thru the court [only Mark mentions this detail].  This cannot be restricted to carrying things for lucrative purposes.  To make a mere convenience of the court was already to desecrate it.  Jesus must have remained in this outer court for some time in order to enforce this regulation.  No Temple police and no Sanhedrinists hurry up to him to stop him or to question his authority as they did [in John 2].  Did they know his authority by this time?  The change wrought by Jesus must have been astounding: all the turmoil was gone, no one was even carrying things across the court; everything was quiet and decorous as it should be in God’s House.[34]

Yeshua then proceeded to use this court for the purpose intended—“he engaged in teaching” (Mark 11:17 uses the durative imperfect).  Hundreds of people must have rushed into the space vacated by Yeshua’s demands.  We see then that Yeshua of Nazareth, the very Son of the Most High God, came and filled the courtyards of the Second Temple with the glory, the presence and the authority of Almighty Yahweh in a way that Solomon’s temple never had.  The first was the epitome of physical splendor and wealth; the latter enjoyed the presence of God’s own Son.  Very few of us, if given the choice, would choose the former over the latter if we had our chance to go back in time.  Yeshua, in short, was the fulfillment of Haggai’s remarkable prophecy.

The question we are asking is whether this happened more than once during the final week.  If so, then the Passover must have fallen on a Tuesday in the year of the crucifixion.

How Many Times Did Yeshua Cleanse His Father’s Temple?

This question is of the utmost importance to the chronological affairs here addressed.  We are not so much concerned with the cleansing of the Temple that took place at the first Passover near the beginning of Yeshua’s ministry in 29 A.D. (John 2:13-17).  With the thought that Mark’s account of the cleansing in 31 A.D. was very likely on the day after the accounts in Matthew and Luke, which place their cleansings on the same day as the Triumphal entry, I would like to quote some pertinent remarks by Lenski[35]:

The cleansing of the Temple reported in John 2:13 is not the same as the one reported by the synoptists.  To assert that what they placed at the very end of Christ’s ministry John placed at its very beginning is to undermine the credibility of the Gospels.  If these books contain such contradictions or take such liberties, who can be certain of anything they state?  The thesis that John corrects the synoptists is untenable, for if these needed such correction they should be discarded.

To be sure, the effect of the first cleansing did not endure.  Is anything needed to explain that fact beyond the hostility of the Sanhedrin to Jesus?  So Jesus cleanses the Temple again.  Both are Temple cleansings and thus resemble each other.  But why overlook the differences? In John 2:13ff] Jesus is at once confronted by the authorities, and his reply is made to them; in the second, no one dares to confront him and challenge his act, and the word he utters is addressed only to the mob which he throws out…In the first, Jesus uses words of his own; in the second, he quotes (even “robber’s den” is a quotation from Jer. 7:11).

The point we wish to make is that if it is wrong to confuse the John 2 cleansing with the later one(s), then it is equally damaging to the veracity of the scriptures to confuse the cleansing which took place on the day of Triumphal entry (described by Matt. 21:12-13 and Luke 19:45-46) with the one described in Mark 11:15-19, which was a day later.  Again, “Why overlook the differences?”  On the former morning Yeshua was not hungry, and saw no fig tree full of leaves.  On the latter, He was hungry and did see a fig tree in the distance by the dawn’s early light.  Mark alone has “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations.” Mark alone distinguishes his account by stating that Yeshua “would not allow anyone to carry anything through the Temple.”  Any attempt to edit the verses and make them come out on the same day is presumptuous, and assumes that neither Matthew, Mark, nor Luke had enough knowledge to edit and put things in their proper sequence, on their proper days.  Worse yet, “experts” living 2000 years later presume to edit and “harmonize” the accounts to make them more accurate!

On both Thursday and Friday, Yeshua basically took the attitude, “I am not going to compete with this mess and try to teach at the same time.  I will use violent means to prevent any trafficking of any kind while I am here, and for the time being I can count on the loyalty of the crowds to shield me from the authorities while I give out my most important teaching.  I am going to die for this; but this is what I have come for.”

If there was a need to cleanse the Temple on one day, then nothing diminished that need on the next day.  Christ was consistent.  It just so happened that the necessity of making the outer court a suitable place for teaching the multitudes and cleansing the Temple went hand in hand. There simply was no way, while He was there, that the One who was greater than the Temple was not going to have it His way.  It was a means to an end.  It was an issue for which He was willing to die. (Are we willing to sacrifice for the purity of ourselves and the Churches we attend?)  It is no exaggeration to say Yeshua lost His life asserting what should and should not be going on at the Temple. Yeshua prevailed largely because of the popular adulation of the crowds which swarmed Him inside the city.  The Temple authorities “could not find anything they could do (Luke 19:46 NRSV),” because “all the people regarded Him as a prophet” (Matthew 21:46 NRSV).  Judas provided the only solution to the Sanhedrin’s problem—a way to apprehend Yeshua privately while the crowds were gone.

It has now been established that Yeshua cleansed His Father’s house, not once, not twice, but three times—once at the beginning of His ministry, and on two consecutive days at the end of His ministry.

Third Temple Cleansing Tied to the Cursing of the Fig Tree

Thursday night Yeshua retired to Bethany.  There was no meal, nor friendly hospitality like the night before at Lazarus’ house.  Sunrise the next (Friday) morning, March 23, was around 5:45 AM, and Matt 21:18 says that is about when Yeshua returned to the city.[36] The sight of a fig tree in the distance made Him think of food and the fact that He had had none the night before.  We share the opinion of some scholars that the fig tree was used by Christ as a metaphor for the Jewish nation, and for the Jewish leadership in particular.  The next day, on the Sabbath, Yeshua warned the chief priests and the Pharisees to their face: “I am saying to you that the kingdom of God shall be taken from you and given to a nation producing its fruits.” (Matt. 21:43)

Baskets of very good and very bad figs had already been used by Yahweh to show the prophet Jeremiah the difference between those who were obedient to Yahweh and those who were not.  So there was already biblical precedent for comparing the tribe of Judah to a fig tree. The parable of the fig tree in Luke 13:6-8 seems to be saying that Christ came looking for fruit on the fig tree of Israel/Judah, but found none three years running, and that God was running out of patience and getting ready to cut it down.

The withering of this fig tree outside of Bethany is the only miracle of judgment Yeshua ever performed during His ministry, and almost surely was used as a metaphor for the curse that was about to befall the Jewish people for tolerating and partaking of the wickedness of their spiritual leaders.[37]

Once Yeshua passed by the fig tree, nothing is said about how He satisfied His hunger that day.  “My meat is to do the will of Him Who sent me.” (John 4:34)  We only know a few things about this Friday: that Yeshua came to Jerusalem, entered the temple, and ‘cleaned house’ again.  As already mentioned, He taught the people, saying that the Court of the Gentiles was meant to be “a house of prayer for all of the nations.” When Yeshua indicted the priesthood, together with all the buyers and sellers, for having turned Yahweh’s house into “a den of robbers”, the chief priests and scribes began looking for a way to kill Him.  Yeshua also took the additional step of prohibiting anyone from carrying anything thru the courtyard that day.  Mark gives us just enough details to let us know that it is not the same cleansing as the day before.  Because of the foregoing contextual and linguistic differences noted above, E.W. Bullinger,[38] could see that Mark’s cleansing of the temple occurred subsequent to Matthew’s.[39]

The temple cleansings had to be on Thursday and Friday, forcing the objective analyst to conclude that the Passover fell on Tuesday in the year of the crucifixion.   If two non-Sabbath days are needed to accommodate both cleansings of the Temple, then the arrival at Lazarus’ house from Jericho six days before the Passover (John 12:1)–is forced to be no later than Wednesday.  The arithmetic goes something like this: one day for the trip in from Jericho, two days of encounters with the moneychangers, one Sabbath day upon which the lion’s share of His teaching takes place. Saturday night He states it will be “after two days” when the Passover arrives, which was held on Monday night.  [1 + 2 + 1 + 2 = 6]  This is the basic outline of the six-day period John 12:1 is talking about.

The Sabbath before the Passover

The weekly Sabbath before Passover and after the temple cleansings was an important day. More is recorded about this day’s events than any other in Christ’s ministry–except perhaps the crucifixion day—and yet there is not one word about buying and selling at the Temple.  There was no need to cleanse the Temple this day as on the previous two, because it was Saturday, the one day of the week when they refrained from making the Father’s house a “house of merchandise” (John 2:16).  A great deal of teaching, prophetic and otherwise, took place on this Sabbath—the lesson from the withered fig tree, the question about Yeshua’s authority, the parable of the two sons, the parable of the wicked tenants, the parable of the wedding banquet, the question of paying taxes to Caesar, the question about the resurrection posed by the Sadducees, the Great Commandment, about Messiah being the Son of David, denunciation of the scribes and Pharisees (Matt. 23), His lament over Jerusalem, His prophecies at the temple (Luke 21) and later on the Mount of Olives (Matt. 24:3, Mark 13:3) which included His predictions concerning the destruction of the temple and the persecution that was sure to come upon His disciples, lessons on watchfulness, being faithful and wise, the Parable of the Ten Bridesmaids, parable of the talents, the Last Judgment, and then finally Luke’s summary of the days spent in Jerusalem:

Every day He was teaching in the temple, and at night he would go out and spend the night on the Mount of Olives…and all the people would get up very early to hear Him in the temple.  (Luke 21:37, 38 NAS)

There is absolutely no indication that Christ retired for the evening in between any of these teachings.  Such an omission, given the nature of the narrative over the last six days, indicates that it all took place on one day, that day being a Sabbath. To those of us who have made a habit of keeping the seventh-day Sabbath, it makes a lot of sense that it should work out in this manner.

Turning Alms-Giving Into an Exhibition on the Sabbath Day

The Synoptic Gospels provide us with further evidence that this day was indeed a Sabbath. We pick up the story in Mark 12:41.  Before Yeshua left the temple precincts that Sabbath He “sat down opposite the treasury and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury.”  Many rich people were casting in large sums also (Luke 21:1).  One poor widow came and put in two small copper coins worth a penny.  The fact that rich and poor alike in very large numbers had chosen this particular day to bring their gifts to the treasury is notable.  We know from Matt. 6:1-2 that the hypocrites of the day preferred to bring their alms at times when they could “be gazed at by men…so they that could be glorified by men.”[40] Maximum exposure was attainable on the Sabbath before Passover, due to the large influx of feast-goers arriving early.  Besides, Sabbath was the usual time for bringing tithes and offerings, whatever season of the year it was.

The Pharisee’s school of Shammai, who were arch-conservatives, did prohibit collections for the poor on the Sabbath.[41] Such a consideration should not dissuade us from believing that Temple donations were encouraged on the Sabbath.  After all, the Pharisees did not control the Temple, the Sadducean high priests did.  Does anyone seriously think, given what we have learned about their ability to turn the Temple into a money-machine, that they would have entertained any serious compunction about collecting tithes and offerings on the Sabbath day at the Temple?  The Pharisaic school of Hillel did not prohibit collections for the poor at their synagogues.  Both Pharisaic schools were far more conservative than the Sadducees, whose philosophy was, “Don’t make any more rules than are enumerated in the Torah.”  Nothing in the Law supports Shammai’s view.  His only reason for not collecting money for the poor on the Sabbath was that “they conflicted with the future material abundance which the day symbolized.”[42] I’m sure the poor, and they were legion in that day, appreciated such a magnanimous policy.  After all, the less money you allow to go to the poor, leaves that much more for the school of Shammai and their synagogues.  No such thinking applied at the Temple. We have every reason to believe that the high priests took advantage of the increased visitation to the Temple on the Sabbath to enlarge their coffers.

Before leaving the Temple, Yeshua predicted that not one stone of the Temple buildings would be left upon another.[43] The prophecy of Luke 21 was given at the Temple in direct reply to people’s questions about the impressive Temple structures. This prophecy was intended for the masses and speaks of vengeance and “wrath upon this people.”  Matt. 24:29-31 speaks of the gathering of the Elect at the end of the Age, and was given privately to the apostles later that evening on the Mount of Olives.  All the teachings of Matthew 25 were given on the Mount of Olives Saturday night. Matt. 26:1:

When Yeshua had finished saying all these things [which began with the Olivet discourse], He said to His disciples, ‘As you know, the Passover is two days away–and the Son of Man will be handed over to be crucified.’ (NIV)

Yeshua spoke this on Saturday night.  Monday night March 26, 31 A.D. was the night of the Passover meal.  Around midnight, Judas betrayed Christ in the garden of Gethsemane.  Yeshua, just as He said, was handed over to evil men two days after the Saturday night of the Olivet discourse.

At the same time Yeshua was speaking the words of Matt. 26:1 to His disciples, the elders of the people, the chief priests and the scribes were gathered at the palace of the high priest.  It is natural to suppose that they waited until after sundown on the Sabbath to hold this secret council.  Hence, Mark 14:1 narrates here with the same words Yeshua uses in Matt. 26:1, i.e. “Now the Passover [is] only two days away.”  This coincidence leads us to believe that Yeshua spoke these words to His disciples at the same time the Sanhedrin was plotting His arrest. This is another example of how Mark complements Matthew.

Sometime on Sunday (probably Sunday evening)[44] in Bethany Yeshua was anointed with precious oil by an unnamed woman at Simon the leper’s house (Matt. 26:6-13, Mark 14:3-9).  The oil was poured on His head as He sat down to eat. Some of the women disciples apparently understood, better than the men, what was about to befall their Master.  This anonymous woman, just like Mary of Bethany four days earlier at Lazarus’ house, did her good deed in preparation for His burial.  In fact, in John 12:7 Yeshua says to “allow her, for she has kept the ointment for the day of my burying.”  This shows that Mary was paying attention to what Yeshua was saying.  It would be wrong, as some scholars do, to confound and conflate these accounts, when the Gospels are so clear that the events were on separate days. Besides, other features show disparity between the two accounts.  No other activity is mentioned for this Sunday.  After Saturday, the people had gone back to their jobs, their fields and their preparations for the feast which was now less than 36 hours away.

The next day was Monday, and the Gospels tell us very little about this day, except to say that Yeshua sent two of His disciples, probably Peter and John, into the city to prepare for the Passover meal that night.  Of critical importance is the fact that the disciples knew that the meal was going to be that night, at the end of the 13^th of Nisan (at the beginning of Nisan 14).[45] Here is how Matthew, writing to potential Jewish believers in the Messiah, described this episode (Matt. 26:17):

Now on the first of the unleaveneds, the disciples came to Yeshua, saying to Him, ‘Where do you desire that we prepare for You to eat the Passover?’

The underlined phrase, prw,th| tw/n avzumwn,) is most assuredly not referring to the First Day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, as the KJV seems to indicate.  The KJV supplies “day of the feast,” but this is unwarranted.  The First Day of Unleavened Bread begins after, not before, the Passover.[46] The 13^th of Nisan was the first day that tradition authorized for deleavening one’s house.  Luke, who uses dawn to dawn reckoning for daily activity, calls it “the day of unleavened bread, in which the Passover must be sacrificed.” (Luke 22:7, Concordant Literal NT). They removed leaven from their houses on the 13th because they were commanded to eat unleavened bread with the Passover lamb which was killed at the end of Nisan 13 at sunset, even though the feast of Unleavened Bread began twenty four hours later at the end of Nisan 14, at the beginning of Nisan 15. Some scholars, realizing that the language of the Synoptic Gospels is abundantly clear that Yeshua and His disciples “ate the Passover,”[47] have erroneously concluded that they ate the meal on the early part of the 15^th of Nisan so that they could avail themselves of a lamb from the Temple Passover sacrifices.  But this view presumes too much: i.e. that no one was killing lambs in their homes on the early part of Nisan 14. We prove in the appendix entitled “Were the Passover Lambs Killed at Home in the First Century?” that the majority of the people obeyed Yahweh’s ordinances in Exodus 12 and kept the domestic Passover in their homes at the beginning of the 14^th day of Nisan.[48] The Pharisees and Sadducees ate the Passover one day later, on Nisan 15, as do modern Jews.  That is why John 18:28 says that,

The Jews led Jesus from Caiaphas to the palace of the Roman governor (praetorium)…They themselves did not enter the praetorium (Ft. Antonia), so that they might not be defiled, but might eat the Passover.

This took place during the wee hours of the night of the 14^th.  Christ was nailed to a cross only a few hours later at 9 AM. (Mark 15:25). The date was Tuesday, March 27, 31 A.D.  All four Gospels say that the day of the crucifixion was the preparation day for the annual Sabbath, the First Day of Unleavened Bread.[49] Since this High Day fell on the 15^th of Nisan, then the crucifixion occurred the day before, on Passover Day, Nisan 14.  Confusion has arisen because the Jews conflated Passover observance with the First Day of Unleavened Bread, even referring to Passover as the first day of the Feast.  It is hard for some people to realize that Passover Day itself is not a High Day or Sabbath until they have studied and begun to keep Yahweh’s appointed times.  “A good understanding have all they that do His commandments.” (Ps. 111:10) The truth is apparent to all who observe the Passover unfettered by rabbinic obfuscation. Yeshua and his disciples ate the Passover a night before the Jewish leaders ate it (John 18:28). Still, there are many in the holyday-keeping and Messianic Jewish movements who prefer to side with the rabbis and Pharisaic Judaism on this subject.  But there is an abundance of evidence in this book and many other sources[50] to disprove the keeping of a Nisan 15 Passover.

Returning to the first question posed by the disciples, “Where do you want us to go and prepare that You might eat The Passover?” Yeshua had already made arrangements to rent a well-appointed–furnished and carpeted—spacious room from one of His followers.  Yeshua told His disciples that they would meet a man bearing a water pitcher, who would lead them to his house where they were to observe Yahweh’s feast.

It might be of interest to some that we are now entering the Age of Aquarius.  This means that the sun will be in Aquarius during the spring equinox during the next 2000 years.  The precession of the equinoxes will accomplish these phenomena by 2020 A.D.  Since Aquarius is a man bearing a water pitcher, I feel strongly that one of the Passovers after 2020 will escort us to the Upper Room for the Lord’s Marriage Supper.  The Bible expects a lot of its readers, and subtle hints are there for those that have eyes to see them.

Last, but not least, is the matter of the preparation of the Passover meal.  As any woman will tell you who has prepared a meal for thirteen, it takes up the better part of a day. This is perhaps the best reason little else is said about Monday, the day prior to Passover.  Peter and John attended to the lamb and it’s roasting, provided the bread and other food items, and had everything ready for the celebration that evening.[51] This left Yeshua free to prepare spiritually for the important things He would need to share with His disciples that night, knowing all the while He was about to face the greatest ordeal any human has ever endured.

When evening came[52], He sat down with the twelve and ate the[53] Passover.  John focused in on the foot washing as well as the teaching that took place after the meal (John 14-17); the Synoptics focus in on the emblems of communion, the bread and wine.  If Protestant scholars and Christian theologians would keep Yahweh’s holy days, as Paul’s churches did,[54] they would not indulge in idle doubts about whether John placed this event on the same night as the synoptic gospels.  They would also know that Yeshua kept the correct night, the scribes and Jewish leaders taught and kept the wrong night, the 15^th of Nisan (John 18:28).

At approximately midnight on Monday evening, in the garden of Gethsemane, Yeshua was arrested and taken to the palace of the High Priest.  Peter followed Him from a distance and was found warming himself by an open fire there in the courtyard of Joseph Caiaphas (Mark 14:67, John 18:18, 25).   This is surely indicative of a late March Passover rather than a late April one.  We will raise this issue again in the chapter which shows the shortcomings of the Wednesday Passover which most Church of God, sacred name and sabbatarian groups espouse.  The only Wednesday Passover possible during the reign of Pontius Pilate is April 25, 31 A.D., the same year supported by this thesis, but one lunar month too late.

Summary of Events Leading up to the Crucifixion of Christ

The sequence of events of the Passion Week shows how deliberately our Lord “set His face to go to Jerusalem” to be sacrificed.  Yeshua arrived in Bethany on the Mount of Olives near Jerusalem on Wednesday, March 21, 31 A.D.  That evening, a dinner was held in His honor at Lazarus’ house.  The next day, Thursday, He made His triumphal entry on the colt, the foal of an ass, accompanied by crowds shouting hosannas in adoration.  He straightway cleansed the Temple outer court and after teaching there all day, retired to Bethany.  On Friday morning, Christ returned to Jerusalem, cursing the fig tree as He passed it en route.  He again cleansed the Temple, taught all day, and returned to the Mount of Olives that night.  On Saturday, the Sabbath, Yeshua returned to the city, passing the withered fig tree He had cursed the previous day.  He taught in the Temple all day, concluding with the prophecy of Luke 21, a prophecy of His Second Coming.  At sunset, He retired to the Mount of Olives with His disciples, and delivered the Olivet discourse, concluding with the words: “You know that after two days is the Passover, and the Son of Man will be delivered to be crucified.” (Matt. 26: 2)  At this same time, on Saturday night, two days before Passover, the Sanhedrin was plotting to kill Him.  On Sunday, Yeshua dined at Simon the leper’s house in Bethany, where a woman anointed Him with precious oil anticipating His imminent burial.  Monday was dedicated to preparation for the Last Supper, the Passover meal, after which Yeshua would be betrayed in the garden of Gethsemane and handed over to the Temple guard.  Christ was crucified by the Romans on the day portion of Nisan 14, which, according to modern reckoning, was Tuesday, March 27, 31 A.D.  Three days and three nights later, on Friday evening, at the beginning of the Sabbath, Yeshua arose from the dead in fulfillment of the sign of Jonah 1:17 and Matt. 12:40.

The Messiah is the ‘Lord of the Sabbath.’ It was necessary that He be alive at the beginning of the Sabbath, which is a type of the seventh Millennium, in order to picture the fact that He will return to earth at the end of man’s allotted 6000 years and rule as Lord of Lords over the earth during the seventh 1000-year period. Christ is Lord over all things created “whether in heaven or on earth” and all things were created by Him, through Him and for Him (John 1:3, Eph. 3:9, Col. 1:16, Rev. 4:11).  Yahweh chose the seventh-day Sabbath to commemorate His creative genius at the beginning of the world.  The time has now come for the Church to realize that the Sabbath is the symbol of New Creation and the resurrection of his Son. It also points to Yeshua as having been the Son of Elohim, the Agent used to speak the universe into existence.  The act of calling forth life from the dead is in itself an act of creation, and just as Yeshua called Lazarus from the tomb, He will also call the Church from her grave in the near future.

We are led, then, inexorably to the realization that the Sabbath is one of the great unifying themes of the entire Bible.  It unites the idea of Creation in the beginning with the renewal of that Creation via the Sons of Elohim/God, which will commence with their resurrection from the dead (Rom. 8:20-22, RSV & NIV):

For the earnest expectation of the creation is eagerly awaiting the revelation of the sons of God/Elohim…the creation will be freed from the slavery of corruption into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves having the first fruits of the Spirit do also groan within ourselves, eagerly expecting our adoption as sons and the redemption of our bodies [at the resurrection!].

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[2] The fact that the Church fathers could even countenance the use of the term ‘Easter,’ which is derived from the Babylonian goddess of fertility, and had nothing whatsoever to do with the apostles or Christ, speaks volumes about their blindness.

[3] See Concordant Literal NT, Matt. 28:1; Mark 16:2, 9; Luke 24:1; John 20:1, 19; Acts 20:7; I Cor. 16:2.

[4] What did Yeshua do during those intervening hours?  See appendix, “Leading Captivity Captive.”

[5] The equinox fell on March 23 in 31 A.D.

[6] Luke. 19:9 Yeshua says “he too is a son of Abraham.”

[7] J. K. Fotheringham, “Astronomical Data Limiting the Year of the Crucifixion” gives March 27^th as the only possible date of the Passover in 31 A.D., based on visibility of the crescent 14 days earlier and the criteria that Passover cannot fall more than one month after the equinox, which was March 23.

[8] Jericho is about 1000 feet below the Mediterranean, and Jerusalem is about 2600 feet above it.

[9] Drummelow’s One-Volume Bible Commentary, p. 795.  Note this commentators prejudice against the sabbath, which he fails to capitalize, and yet does capitalize Saturday.

[10] That the Seventh Day Adventist Church and S. Bacchiochi would promote such a scenario is almost inexcusable.

[11] Burton H. Throckmorton, Jr., Gospel Parallels, Thomas Nelson Pub., p. 154-156.

[12] Matt. 21:18, Mark. 11:12.

[13] Alfred Plummer, The Gospel of St. Mark, p. 260.

[14] Proverbs 25:17, LXX.

[15] Wm. Scroggie, though correct in identifying three full days and nights as the sign of Christ’s messianic claims, incorrectly places the Triumphal entry on the Sabbath [Guide to the Gospels, 574).  It is unlikely, however, that Yeshua would have offended Sabbath law (Ex. 20:10) by riding a beast of burden on that day. Similarly, many people broke limbs from various trees and strawed them in His path as He entered the city.

[16] Matt. 21:2-4.

[17] New American Standard Bible and the Complete Jewish Bible by David Stern. These translations are based on the earliest and most well-attested reading of this text.  The Textus Receptus/KJV reading here is best understood as a recension where the copyist sought to harmonize Matthew’s verb with the aorist tense found in Luke 19:46.

[18] Papias around 95 A.D. is an early, credible witness to Mark using Peter as his source.  Most scholars believe that Peter had Mark write his Gospel.

[19] Some scholars believe that Mark’s father was the owner of the house where Yeshua ate the Passover.  Mark. 15:51-52 is almost surely a reference to Mark himself at the garden of Gethsemane during Yeshua’s arrest.

[20] Many ‘Harmony of the Gospels’ and Bible exegetes indulge in re-editing these ‘cleansing of the temple’ passages for no other reason than they cannot fathom how Yeshua would do it two days in a row.

[21] Pages 154-156.

[22] Ps. 69:9–“zeal for Your House consumes Me, and the insults of those that insult You fall on Me.”

[23] Luke 19:47.

[24] Hebrew Ha Adon. This refers to Messiah.  See Bullinger’s Companion Bible, p. 1299.

[25] An entire study could be presented proving that Yeshua was the Malach-Yahweh of the Old Testament, as He is here in Malachi 3.

[26] Menachoth 13.21.

[27] Temple officers would forcibly collect tithes of grain at the site of threshing floors, no matter how poor the people were who came there to thresh.

[28] Alfred Plummer, The Gospel According to St. Mark, p. 264.

[29] Caiaphas the high priest was the man most responsible for the murder of Christ.

[30] The high priest who murdered James, the brother of Yeshua, in 62 A.D.

[31] Lenski, Interpretation of Mark, p. 486.

[32] Ibid. p. 486.

[33] Ibid. p. 489.

[34] Ibid. p. 488.

[35] Ibid. p. 486.

[36] According to Friberg’s Analytical Lexicon, Prwiav in Matt. 21:18 is between 3 and 6 AM.

[37] Those who have studied the views of the Karaite Jews will realize that they blamed the teachings of Pharisaic Judaism, the rabbis, for the curses that had come upon the Jews during the first millennium.

[38] Bullinger is one of the greatest, most prolific Biblical scholars of all time, and almost alone with Scroggie in defending the three days and nights of Christ’s burial.

[39] Bullinger, Companion Bible, App. 156.

[40] Concordant Literal New Testament, Matt. 6:1-2.

[41] Samuele Bacchiochi, From Sabbath to Sunday, p. 91-92.

[42] Ibid. p. 91.

[43] Josephus’ description of what was left in 70 A.D. graphically shows how Jesus’ prophecy was fulfilled.

[44] It is possible that Yeshua fasted from late Thursday until this meal at Simon the leper’s house.

[45] For proof of early 14^th Passover, read “Between the Two Evenings” at www.americaspropheticdestiny.com

[46] Lev. 23:5-6, Num. 33:3.

[47] Edersheim, The Temple: Its Ministry and Services, 312-318; Matt. 26:17-19, Mark 14:12-17, Luke 22:7-15.

[48] Fred Coulter, The NT in Its Original Order, York Pub., (2003), p. 392.

[49] Matt. 27:62; Mark. 15:42; Luke 23:54; John 19:14, 31.

[50] Fred Coulter’s The Christian Passover is the best, most comprehensive scholarly work proving that the Passover lambs were to be killed at dusk early on the 14^th of Nisan.

[51] Lenski,  Interpretation of Mark, p. 613

[52] Ibid. Mark. 14:17—“The genitive absolute with the aorist genomenhv means evening had fully come.”

[53] The Last Passover accounts in the Synoptics put the definite article in front of “Passover” nine times!

[54] I Cor. 5:7-8 (“Let us keep the Festival”), 11:26, 16:2 (correctly translated=“every one of the Sabbaths”); book of Acts; Col. 2:16; II Thes. 2:15.