Sunday, February 10, 2008

Hebrew Calendar

Today we finally learned about the Hebrew Calendar and how it numbers the days and how it is different than our calendar, the Gregorian Calendar. Here are a couple of the main differences.

  • The Gregorian calendar is a solar calender.
  • The Hebrew calendar is a lunar calendar.
  • The Gregorain calendar has 365 days per year.
  • The Hebrew calendar has 354 days per year. (Brent would like you to notice that that is an 11 day difference!)
  • The Gregorian calendar year is 2008 with year 0 being approximately the year Jesus was born, give or take.
  • The Hebrew calendar year is 5768 with year 0 dating from creation.

What is also interesting to me about the way they count their days is they do not use numbers. Every Hebrew letter is also a number. The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet (aleph-bet) is aleph, and it equals 1. The second letter is bet and it equals 2, and so on. After that, though, they don't just go up by one. At 10 you start to combine letters to equal 11-19 then they start going up by increments of 10 ending with 400. Confused yet? We just learned this today so don't think I'm an expert. I have papers in front of me explaining it. But I think it's really interesting. So the Hebrew date today is Daleth (fourth letter of the Hebrew aleph-bet) , Adar, which is the Hebrew month, year 5768. For those who know this stuff already I must clarify that it is month Adar aleph. For those who don't know, it's a little complicated to explain right now but basically it's a leap year in the Hebrew calendar and the month of Adar happens twice this year.

This also means that every word has a numerical value. Hmmmm. "Here is wisdom. Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for the number is that of a man; and his number is six hundred and sixty-six." Revelation 13:18 Now, my husband is the Bible prophecy teacher and maybe some day he will go into deeper teaching on this, but think about it. I'm not claiming to know the name of the "beast" but is it possible we could figure it out when the time came? Think on that for a while.

In what other ways could you see that this information could bring more understanding to scripture?

5 comments:

Kris the Girl said...

That is really interesting! Gosh, any numbered thing in the Bible could be seen through a "number" eye - and I suppose the same is true for words then, that they could be given a "numerical" value. Cool! I'm not saying it would all be meaningfull, but it is very interesting.

Natalie Witcher said...

Waa? You sound smarter than me...gerr.

Summer said...

Well, if really did get a grasp on this then I wouldn't have to have the dates translated into English by a study bible.

Anonymous said...

Thanks that fit right in with our book of Daniel study. We're in chapter 9 right now (the one with the seventy sevens, 62 weeks and one week.
Their calendar also agrees with the literal 7 day creation by God and the correct age of earth that science and evolutionist are unable to disprove.

Kim Heinecke said...

4 8 15 16 23 42

Do these numbers mean anything in the Hebrew bible?...ha/ha