" THE MOSAIC CALENDAR." 



171 



" Ohel Mo'ed " ; in A.V. " the tabernacle of the congregation " ; 

 E.V., " the tent of meeting." Neither of these renderings are quite 

 satisfactory. The A.V. would require the definite article before 

 Mo ed ; the R.V. restricts the meaning. The verb Ya'ad seems to 

 have for its root significance the idea "to fix " or "to appoint." 

 God promised to meet Moses and the Israelites at the Tent, but that 

 was not its only purpose. It was the place appointed as God's 

 Dwelling (Mishkan) where the Ark, the Candlestick, the Table of 

 Shewbread, and the Altar of Incense were appointed to be. It 

 would seem better, then, to take Ohel Mo ed as " the Tent of 

 Appointment," i.e. the Appointed Tent. 



Thus Mo'ed means that which is appointed, either of time or place, 

 and as it is used quite generally of time in Gen. i, 14, to introduce 

 " assemblies," reads into the text more than it actually says. 



Appointed times," as in Lev. xxiii, 4, is the preferable rendering. 



P. 139, " the month does not supply so close an analogy with the 

 day as does the year." But the lunar month also has its two parts. 

 In Burma the days are never reckoned for a complete month ; it 

 is always. Such and such a day of the Waxing, or of the Waning, 

 as the case may be. Is not the fixing of the 15th day (the day after 

 full moon) for the beginning of Passover and Tabernacles a recognition 

 of this division ? 



P. 138, " This month shall be unto you the beginning of months " 

 suggests that some other reckoning had been in use previously. 

 Exod. xxiii, 6 places the feast of ingathering at " the end of the 

 year," and xxiii, 22, " the revolution (or circuit) of the year " agrees. 

 May it not then be that, until the Exodus, the Israelites went by 

 the agricultural year ending with the completion of harvest ? That 

 would account for the present Jewish civil year beginning with the 

 festival of Rosh-ha-Shanah in the autumn. There may be a trace 

 of this earlier still. The Deluge began on the 17th day of the 

 second month (Gen. vii, 11), and the waters began to decrease on 

 the 17th day of the seventh month (viii, 3, 4).* If these months 

 were reckoned from the end of harvest, they would correspond roughly 

 to November and April, and the prevalence of the waters could 

 correspond to the winter period (still termed in Arabic Shitta, the 



* Does not the equating of these 5 months to 150 days imply a year of 

 360 days ? 



