ENDNOTES (Ctd.)
7 Josephus was charged by the Romans to write an official Jewish history.
8 BCE = Before Common Era, and CE means Common Era. In this system, CE behaves as AD, and BCE as BC. However, NASA’s (or Astropixels.com) moon chart calls the 1st year prior to 1 CE, “0” (zero); thus NASA’s “-99” is 100 BCE or 100 BC. Lately, I have not found this chart on NASA’s site, but it is found on Astropixels.com. I find that the easiest way to access this chart is to google “6,000 moon phase chart.”
9 Some historians assume Artaxerxes took the throne immediately after the assassination of his father, Xerxes, in August, 465, thus shortly before Tishri of that year. By Jewish (exilic, i.e. Nehemiah’s or Elephantine Jews’) reckoning (of the 5th century BC) this would have meant that Artaxerxes’ 1st year of reign (his 1st regnal year) began upon Tishri, 465 BC (not Tishri, 464, the position taken in this book). William H. Shea points out in Journal of the Adventist Theological Society, 12/1 (Spring 2001): 83—88 that this view is problematic because it fails to take into account certain facts:
First, there was the political turmoil after the murder of Xerxes. Second, there is the lack of any sources dated to Artaxerxes in the last half of 465 B.C. The Artaxerxes sources can be reviewed as follows: 1. Persian sources. The earliest tablets from Persepolis date to the third and fourth month of Artaxerxes’ first year, or June and July of 464 B.C. Babylonian sources. The earliest texts dated to Artaxerxes in Babylonia came from Nippur and Borsippa and they both date to the seventh month of his first year, or October of 464 B.C.
The problem [with the standard historical assumption that Artaxerxes took the throne immediately upon the assassination of his father, Xerxes, in August, 465] is even more difficult in Egypt, where an Aramaic papyrus written on Jan. 2, 464 B.C. is double dated to the accession year of Artaxerxes and year 21 of Xerxes. In this case the regnal year of Xerxes was artificially prolonged after his death in August because of irregularities in the succession. Since Horn has documented that the Jews at Elephantine were using a fall-to-fall calendar, it is of interest that the date in Artaxerxes’ reign is his accession year, not his first year, as would have been the case if he came to the throne before 1 Tishri.
I agree with much of Shea’s analysis, but not all. First, although Horn (and Wood) showed, at least to within a day, the range of (Julian) calendar dates constituting each of the Babylonian months for the Elephantine Jews, this in itself is not proof the Elephantine Jews necessarily reckoned their year from Tishri, as did (1) Nehemiah under Artaxerxes, and (2) Daniel and Ezekiel under the Babylonians. Second, Shea’s allegiance to the Seventh Day Adventist belief that the exile began in 457 BC, is incorrect. (See Endnote #30, explaining why 444 BC is the correct year.)
10 I disagree with Hoehner that the kings of Judah themselves used the Tishri to Tishri system. The impression that this is the case is mainly because the later recounting of the Judean kings’ reigns, according to the ca. 6th century BC Books of Kings and Chronicles, reckoned them from Tishri to Tishri. Jeremiah, whose ministry in Judah extended past the Judean kings, reckoned from Nisan to Nisan during the reign of Jehoiakim, as shown by Jeremiah 28, in which the 5th and 7th months are said to be in the same year.
11 http://www.raptureready.com/featured/ice/70-weeks-6.html
12 The first edict was issued by Cyrus in the 1st year of his reign, in which Cyrus states that the LORD God had given him the kingdoms of the earth and was now instructing him to build a house for him (the LORD God) in Jerusalem. This work was begun but then was hindered by the Jews’ enemies, who hired counselors to bring up false reports which effectively hindered the work all the days of Cyrus up to Darius’ 2nd year (about 15 years; see Ezra 4). The second decree was made by Darius, father of Xerxes (Ahasuerus) and grandfather of Artaxerxes, after he had made an investigation of a complaint against the Jews. Darius found that Cyrus had indeed made a decree for the rebuilding of the temple, and so authorized the Jews to continue their work. The third decree was made by Artaxerxes in 457 BC. Here he issues specific instructions that all the treasurers beyond the river (Euphrates) give Ezra what he needs, even unto specific amounts of silver, wheat, wine, and oil, but salt without how much prescribed, all for carrying out the function “of the house of the God of heaven,” so that prayers could be made for him [Artaxerxes] and his sons. However, he also puts a stop to unauthorized building of the city, stipulating that no building shall take place unless he authorizes it. This he could not have done if it reversed a previous edict authorizing the building of the city (such as Josephus claims happened under Cyrus), since according to the law of the Medes and Persians such edicts could not be reversed. Thus Artaxerxes leaves open the door for a possible rebuilding of Jerusalem, which, as history bears out, he authorized in his 20th year.
Incidentally, I once received a challenge about what occurred in Artaxerxes’ 20th year, claiming it was “not a decree to build anything at all. It is not even an order!” I think the reason behind this person’s comment was because Nehemiah, the king’s cupbearer, had an impromptu conversation with King Artaxerxes in which the king ends up granting Nehemiah’s return to Jerusalem, yet there is no specific mention of a decree or commandment in the text (though I would argue there is mention of it, but not until later). I replied essentially as follows:
First, Daniel speaks of a commandment, not a decree, in Daniel 9:25. The two Hebrew words have different lexical histories, different etymological roots, and are not strict synonyms for each other. The first three decrees in your list above are in fact specifically described as decrees according to the Bible. But the fourth is not…
Now regarding your claim that
“And the forth (sic) is not a decree to build anything at all. It is not even an order!”
First, as just noted, Daniel stated there would be a commandment to restore and build Jerusalem; and a commandment is not necessarily a decree. Second, in fact there was a commandment issued through letters given to Nehemiah addressed to various governors and also a letter to the king’s forest keeper pertaining to the rebuilding of Jerusalem (Neh. 2:7-8). The first was to supply Nehemiah with safe passage to Judah, the second was to instruct that timber be provided for (1) the gates of Jerusalem, (2) the wall of Jerusalem, and (3) the house where Nehemiah would stay. Moreover, note that the commandment need not necessarily be directed at Nehemiah, but merely be in regard to the restoration and building of Jerusalem. And indeed this is exactly what the contents of the letter to Asaph (the king’s forest manager) accomplished.
So when you say that the fourth was not even a decree, I would technically agree, since Daniel actually said it would be a commandment. But that you didn’t mean to split hairs here between what is a decree and what is a commandment is obvious, since (a) you don’t draw out any such distinction as I have done here, and (b) since under the impersonal pronoun “one” you refer to the last of four “decrees.”
Finally, when you say “It [the fourth decree] is not even an order!” I must ask what you suppose Artaxerxes’ letter to Asaph was, which instructed him to supply timber to Nehemiah for the building of Jerusalem’s gates and wall, if such does not constitute a command?
Others feel that another passage, Ezra 9:9, shows that the city, not just the temple, was built. For Ezra mentions that God allowed the Jews to set up and repair the house of God, and to give the Jews a wall in Judah and in Jerusalem.
But the wall mentioned here means the temple wall or perhaps even the wall defining the temple complex. For the building of the walls of Jerusalem would come in Artaxerxes’ 20th year under Nehemiah, who greatly details the work in Nehemiah 3.
Finally, some think that Isaiah 44:28 (“That saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure: even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built; and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid”), and 45:13 (“he shall build my city”) shows that Cyrus’ decree involved Jerusalem, not just the temple. But this is not conclusive for a number of reasons: (1) Daniel’s prophecy in 9:25-26a involved a command, not necessarily a decree (the latter being the form of pronouncement Cyrus gave); (2) Daniel’s prophecy involved a command which only addressed the city, not the temple, and Artaxerxes’ command in his 20th year is alone among the four pronouncements—three decrees and one command—that fulfills this stipulation, with specific language referring to the building of the gates and the wall; (3) neither of these two verses in Isaiah actually states that any building of Jerusalem by Cyrus (if that is what happened) was part of an actual decree or command; (3) Isaiah 44:28 may be understood as merely a prophecy, since Cyrus is simply saying to Jerusalem and the temple they would be built, while the decree itself, if it is assumed it was a decree Daniel had in mind when he spoke of a command, only addresses the temple; (4) Isaiah 45:13, as indeed the entire chapter 45 in which it appears, is heavily Messianic. But like Messianic passages in general, sometimes even adjacent sentences cannot be taken to mean both the writer (or other subject) and the Messiah. Even so, it may be more of an assumption than evidence that Isaiah 45:13 means to include Cyrus in verse 13, especially as he is not mentioned by name since verse 1. Also, verse 8, while it could refer to heavenly principles manifested through Cyrus’s reign, leaves the impression of a shift in perspective toward more of a Messianic focus: “Drop down, ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness: let the earth open, and let them bring forth salvation, and let righteousness spring up together; I the LORD have created it.” Most significantly, from verse 1 to verse 13 there is a change in the referent pronoun, from “you” in verse 1, to “him” in verse 13, thus (at least for the moment) moving the focus from Cyrus to the Messiah.
13 Here are some excerpted details from Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision (Part II, Chapter 8), showing how the Indians, Mayans, Chinese, Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, Babylonians, Hebrews, and Romans all had calendars of 360 days each, with no hint of a month’s periodic intercalation or addition of five days (epigomena) to each year, until about the 8th or 7th century BC. As we read the following, keep in mind Velikovsky sometimes quotes scholars who disbelieve the year was 360 days, to show at least their admittance to what the historical record actually states. Says Velikovsky:
The texts of the Veda period know a year of only 360 days. “All Veda texts speak uniformly and exclusively of a year of 360 days. Passages in which this length of the year is directly stated are found in all the Brahmanas.” “It is striking that the Vedas nowhere mention an intercalary period, and while repeatedly stating that the year consists of 360 days, nowhere refer to the five or six days that actually are a part of the solar year.”
This Hindu year of 360 days is divided into twelve months of thirty days each. The texts describe the moon as crescent for fifteen days and waning for another fifteen days; they also say that the sun moved for six months or 180 days to the north and for the same number of days to the south.
The perplexity of scholars at such data in the Brahmanic literature is expressed in the following sentence: “That these are not conventional inexact data, but definitely wrong notions, is shown by the passage in Nidana-Sutra, which says that the sun remains 13-1/3 days in each of the 27 Naksatras, and thus the actual solar year is calculated as 360 days long.” “Fifteen days are assigned to each half-moon period; that this is too much is nowhere admitted.”
In their astronomical works, the Brahmans used very ingenious geometric methods, and their failure to discern that the year of 360 days was 5 days too short seemed baffling. In ten years such a mistake accumulates to fifty-two days. The author whom I quoted last was forced to conclude that the Brahmans had a “wholly confused notion of the true length of the year.” Only in a later period, he said, were the Hindus able to deal with such obvious facts. To the same effect wrote another German author: “The fact that a long period of time was necessary to arrive at the formulation of the 365-day year is proved by the existence of the old Hindu 360-day Savana-year and of other forms which appear in the Veda literature.”
Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979)
Here is a passage from the Aryabhatiya, an old Indian work on mathematics and astronomy: “A year consists of twelve months. A month consists of 30 days. A day consists of 60 nadis. A nadi consists of 60 vinadikas.”
A month of thirty days and a year of 360 days formed the basis of early Hindu chronology used in historical computations.
The sacerdotal year, like the secular year of the calendar, consisted of 360 days composing twelve lunar months of thirty days each. From approximately the seventh pre-Christian century on, the year of the Hindus became 365¼ days long, but for temple purposes the old year of 360 days was also observed, and this year is called savana.
When the Hindu calendar acquired a year of 365¼ days and a lunar month of twenty-nine and a half days, the older system was not discarded.
In the Bundahis, a sacred book of the Persians, the 180 successive appearances of the sun from the winter solstice to the summer solstice and from the summer solstice to the next winter solstice are described in these words: “There are a hundred and eighty apertures [rogin] in the east, and a hundred and eighty in the west . . . and the sun, every day, comes in through an aperture, and goes out through an aperture… It comes back to Varak, in three hundred and sixty days and five Gatha days.”
Gatha days are “five supplementary days added to the last of the twelve months of thirty days each, to complete the year; for these days no additional apertures are provided. . . . This arrangement seems to indicate that the idea of the apertures is older than the rectification of the calendar which added the five Gatha days to an original year of 360 days.”
The old Babylonian year was composed of 360 days. The astronomical tablets from the period antedating the Neo-Babylonian Empire compute the year at so many days, without mention of additional days. That the ancient Babylonian year had only 360 days was known before the cuneiform script was deciphered: Ctesias wrote that the walls of Babylon were 360 furlongs in compass, “as many as there had been days in the year.”
The zodiac of the Babylonians was divided into thirty-six decans, a decan being the space the sun covered in relation to fixed stars during a ten-day period. “However, the 36 decans with their decades require a year of only 360 days.” To explain this apparently arbitrary length of the zodiacal path, the following conjecture was made: “At first the astronomers of Babylon recognized a year of 360 days, and the division of a circle into 360 degrees must have indicated the path traversed by the sun each day in its assumed circling of the earth.” This left over five degrees of the zodiac unaccounted for.
The old Babylonian year consisted of twelve months of thirty days each, the months being computed from the time of the appearance of the new moon. As the period between one new moon and another is about twenty-nine and a half days, students of the Babylonian calendar face the perplexity with which we are already familiar in other countries. “Months of thirty days began with the light of the new moon. How agreement with astronomical reality was effected, we do not know. The practice of an intercalary period is not yet known.” It appears that in the seventh century five days were added to the Babylonian calendar; they were regarded as unpropitious, and people had a superstitious awe of them.
Assyrian documents refer to months of thirty days only, and count such months from crescent to crescent.* Again, as in other countries, it is explicitly the lunar month that is computed by the Assyrian astronomers as equal to thirty days. How could the Assyrian astronomers have adjusted the length of the lunar months to the revolutions of the moon, modern scholars ask themselves, and how could the observations reported to the royal palace by the astronomers have been so consistently erroneous?
The month of the Israelites…before the present era, was equal to thirty days, and twelve months comprised a year; there is no mention of months shorter than thirty days, nor of a year longer than twelve months. That the month was composed of thirty days is evidenced by Deuteronomy 34:8 and 21:13, and Numbers 20:29, where mourning for the dead is ordered for “a full month,” and is carried on for thirty days. The story of the Flood, as given in Genesis, reckons in months of thirty days; it says that one hundred and fifty days passed between the seventeenth day of the second month and the seventeenth day of the seventh month.
The Egyptian year was composed of 360 days before it became 365 by the addition of five days. The calendar of the Ebers Papyrus, a document of the New Kingdom, has a year of twelve months of thirty days each.
In the ninth year of King Ptolemy Euergetes, or —238, a reform party among the Egyptian priests met at Canopus and drew up a decree; in 1866 it was discovered at Tanis in the Delta, inscribed on a tablet. The purpose of the decree was to harmonize the calendar with the seasons “according to the present arrangement of the world,” as the text states. One day was ordered to be added every four years to the “three hundred and sixty days, and to the five days which were afterwards ordered to be added.”
The authors of the decree did not specify the particular date on which the five days were added to the 360 days, but they do say clearly that such a reform was instituted on some date after the period when the year was only 360 days long.
On a previous page I referred to the fact that the calendar of 360 days was introduced in Egypt only after the close of the Middle Kingdom, in the days of the Hyksos. The five epigomena must have been added to the 360 days subsequent to the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty. We have no mention of “five days” in all the numerous inscriptions of the Eighteenth Dynasty; the epigomena or, as the Egyptians called them, “the five days which are above the year,” are known from the documents of the seventh and following centuries.
Cleobulus, who was counted among the seven sages of ancient Greece, in his famous allegory represents the year as divided into twelve months of thirty days: the father is one, the sons are twelve, and each of them has thirty daughters.
From the days of Thales, another of the seven sages, who could predict an eclipse, the Hellenes knew that the year consists of 365 days; Thales was regarded by them as the man who discovered the number of days in the year. As he was born in the seventh century, it is not impossible that he was one of the first among the Greeks to learn the new length of the year; it was in the beginning of that century that the year achieved its present length. A contemporary of Thales and also one of the seven sages, Solon was regarded as the first among the Greeks to find that a lunar month is less than thirty days. Despite their knowledge of the correct measure of the year and the month, the Greeks, after Solon and Thales, continued to keep to the obsolete calendar, a fact for which we have the testimony of Hippocrates (“Seven years contain 360 weeks”), Xenophon, Aristotle, and Pliny.
The ancient Romans also reckoned 360 days to the year. Plutarch wrote in his “Life of Numa” that in the time of Romulus, in the eighth century, the Romans had a year of 360 days only. Various Latin authors say that the ancient month was composed of thirty days.
On the other side of the ocean, the Mayan year consisted of 360 days; later five days were added, and the year was then a tun (360-day period) and five days; every fourth year another day was added to the year. “They did reckon them apart, and called them the days of nothing: during the which the people did not anything,” wrote J. de Acosta, an early writer on America.
We cross the Pacific Ocean and return to Asia. The calendar of the peoples of China had a year of 360 days divided into twelve months of thirty days each.
A relic of the system of 360 days is the still persisting division of the sphere into 360 degrees; each degree represented the diurnal advance of the earth on its orbit, or that portion of the zodiac which was passed over from one night to the next. After 360 changes the stellar sky returned to the same position for the observer on the earth.
When the year changed from 360 to 365¼ days, the Chinese added five and a quarter days to their year, calling this additional period Khe-ying; they also began to divide a sphere into 365¼ degrees, adopting the new year-length not only in the calendar, but also in celestial and terrestrial geometry.
Ancient Chinese time reckoning was based on a coefficient of sixty; so also in India, Mexico, and Chaldea, sixty being the universal coefficient.
The division of the year into 360 days was honored in many ways, and, indeed, it became an incentive to progress in astronomy and geometry, so that people did not readily discard this method of reckoning when it became obsolete. They retained their “moons” of thirty days, though the lunar month in fact became shorter, and they regarded the five days as not belonging to the year.
All over the world we find that there was at some time the same calendar of 360 days, and that at some later date, about the seventh century before the present era, five days were added at the end of the year, as “days over the year,” or “days of nothing.”
Scholars who investigated the calendars of the Incas of Peru and the Mayas of Yucatan wondered at the calendar of 360 days; so did the scholars who studied the calendars of the Egyptians, Persians, Hindus, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Hebrews, Chinese, Greeks, or Romans. Most of them, while debating the problem in their own field, did not suspect that the same problem turned up in the calendar of every nation of antiquity. [Concludes Velikovsky’s quote].
*[My note: since the Assyrians recorded the total solar eclipse in their 3rd month, Simanu, on what was concluded by British Assyriologists Sir Henry Rawlinson and George Smith to be (Julian) June 15, 763 BC, or what in the proleptic Gregorian calendar would be about June 7, this means that 60 days prior would be the 1st of Nisan, a New Year’s day (so to speak) of April 8. This is evidence that the equinox at Creation would have been about April 8 according to our calendar today, but has subsequently shifted backward in the calendar (a point discussed later in this book). The earth prior to the Assyrian Eclipse was about 890,000 miles closer to the sun because of the earth’s 360-day orbit. The eclipse in Simanu also shows that the Assyrians used the new moon, not the new crescent, to mark the beginning of months. For otherwise, if Simanu actually marked “May/June” as Wikipedia states, the eclipse could not have been so late as June 15. Incidentally, this reckoning from the new moon accords with the mention of new moon feasts in the Bible.]
To this long list of evidence given by Velikovsky, a short footnote may be added. We know from I Chronicles 24:1-19 that King David divided the Aaronic priests into 24 “courses” (divisions) of priestly work groups, based on clans derived from two of Aaronic descendants. However, it strikes one that this would have been a coincidentally efficient number to assign 15 days for each course—either new moon to full moon, or full moon to new moon—thus two per month for each of the 12 months of the year. King David lived (by Tishri reckoning) 1048 BC—977 BC, an era when the 360-day year was still extant. However, it has been pointed out that I Chronicles 9:25 states (or implies) that the length of each course was but one week, not two. But it must be remembered that I Chronicles 9:1 is from an exilic book which speaks of Jewish exiles who returned in the 6th century BC, a time when the orbit of the sun was no longer that of 360 days but of 365+, and that the change in the calendar may have made some change in the Levitical courses desirable. In my opinion, then, the Davidic division of Levites into 24 courses of priestly work groups may be an implied evidence of the 360-day year.
14 http://www.livius.org/cg-cm/chronicles/abc5/jerusalem.html
15 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Jerusalem_(597_BC)
16 Jeremiah’s list in chapter 52 comprises only those deportments that occurred under Nebuchadnezzar when he was sole regent, which occurred after Daniel’s deportation. It appears that of the four deportations mentioned by Jeremiah—(1) of Jeconiah, Daniel, and certain chief Jews about a year before Nebuchadnezzar’s ascension; (2) of Jehoiakim and Jehoiachin in Nebuchadnezzar’s 7th year; (3) of Jews who had defected (doubtless with the memory and lesson of Jehoiachin in mind) during Nebuchadnezzar’s 18th year prior to Zedekiah’s capture and the destruction of Jerusalem the following year (Jer. 38:19), and (4) of the final deportation of Jews under Nebuzaradan in Nebuchadnezzar’s 23rd year—the prophet lists only the last three in chapter 52, perhaps because these alone were carried out under Nebuchadnezzar’s sole rule. The number given by Jeremiah in the second deportation may refer to those in II Kings 24:15, with those listed in 24:16 being additional persons. That no deportation is listed in Nebuchadnezzar’s 19th year, the year of Jerusalem’s destruction, may be because of a fulfillment of the prophecy that, except for a tiny remnant of Jews left in the land, 1/3 of them would die by plague/famine, 1/3 by the sword, and 1/3 to be scattered to every wind (see Ezek. 5).