'^THE MOSAIC CALENDAR." 



159 



The two great post-exilic feasts, Purim and Dedication, teach 

 the same lesson as the four fasts of the Captivity : they witness 

 that they are additions to the Mosaic Calendar, not original 

 parts of it. The fact, to which I have had to draw attention so 

 often, that the Jewish calendar is luni-solar, bringing together 

 the day, the month, and the year, no two of which measures of 

 time are commensurable, impHes that there must be some 

 elasticity in the calendar, some play " by which the necessary 

 adjustments can be made, some method by which the day may 

 be made to fit the month and the month to fit the year. Now 

 the Mosaic Calendar is rigid in the half of the year from Passover 

 to Tabernacles, and elastic in the remaining half. Purim and 

 Dedication fall in the elastic half, and so does the fast of Tebeth, 

 which commemorates the investment of Jerusalem in the great 

 invasion of Nebuchadnezzar. 



If it be the fact that the Mosaic Calendar as a complete system 

 was not instituted until post-exihc times, how is it that there 

 is only one case in the whole of the Old Testament in which 

 there is a departure from the Mosaic numeration of the months, 

 a departure from the acceptance of the Paschal month as the first 

 month of the year ? That instance is in the book of Nehemiah 

 ii, 1, " in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes the king," 145 years 

 after the siege of Jerusalem. 



The fundamental objection brought against the assertion of 

 the four books of the Law — that they were given during the 

 wanderings in the wilderness — is that many of its regulations 

 look forward to a time when Israel should be in possession of 

 a fruitful land. But this fact is perfectly recognised in the 

 narrative. In the Feast of Unleavened Bread the sheaf of the 

 firstfruits was to be waved " when ye be come into the land 

 which I give unto you." All the three great feasts of obhgation 

 were explicitly for the Promised Land, not for the desert. Where 

 is the impossibihty of the Law having been given in anticipation, 

 and, if given, of being accepted as such ? 



From the beginning to this present day Israel has been the 

 nation of Promise : its gaze has been forward from the time 

 that Abraham came forth from Ur of the Chaldees. He, and 

 his descendants, have Hved in the faith that God had given to 

 them a Promise, and in the sure and certain hope that He would 

 fulfil it. No nation has passed through so many disasters, or 

 disasters so overwhelming. Yet it has never lost heart. For 

 1850 years it has been " without king or priest, without city or 



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