Lying For God v8 PartI pp9-16

Today we bring you installment #2 of Kerry Wynne's comprehensive study "Lying For God" version 8, Part I. Reproduced here by permission.

This section is particularly interesting to me, since it goes over the Lunar Sabbath theory (I've hinted at this idea in recent posts). In a nutshell, the Sabbath was the seventh day but weeks reset with each moon so the Sabbath was not every seven days in absolute succession. The Lunar Sabbath theory was a complete novelty to me upon leaving Armstrongism, as I recall no mention whatsoever about it in all of my years in the system. This study is remarkably fair-minded about the topic, properly addressing scholarly evidence both pro and con, which is refreshing in our time. Agree with the Lunar Sabbath theory or not, I believe you will be challenged by it. Hopefully in a good way.

Again, I want to make it clear that I am posting this because it is thought-provoking, not because I absolutely agree with every word and endorse the study in its entirety.

Today's installment picks up where the previous article left off, and will include material from pages 4-16. It's a lot of pages, but I felt it was better to include all of this since one idea flows throughout.

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Adventism And The Lunar Sabbath Issue

We do not take a position for or against the lunar Sabbath theory, but since the idea is creating so much controversy within Adventism at this very moment, we would be irresponsible not to cover this topic for our readers. We will try to show you the arguments pro and con. Our task is made difficult because of the obvious biases of those who write in favor or against the concept. It is our intention as researchers to find truth and to follow it at all costs. The cost to us seems to be that the idea of a lunar Sabbath appears to be so far-fetched that it is almost too much for even our anti-Sabbatarian supports to swallow. At its very best we can only make educated guesses about what happened in ancient times. However, some theories are more respectable than others. Most readers do not know some very unflattering things about the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s extensive knowledge of its credibility and its troublesome implications for Adventism:

1. William Miller learned about the lunar calendar from the Karaite Jews who were teaching him Hebrew. He applied the lunar calendar to help him solve some biblical time problems. It worked, and he was able to resolve those problems and arrive at the “correct” date Christ would return.
2. The Advent Movement adopted his prophetic charts, which were based on the lunar calendar, but in doing so they accepted an AD 31 date for the crucifixion—a date which differs from the AD 33 date accepted by most Christian scholars and which is supported better by historical and astronomical data. See Appendix IX for an analysis of the Adventist Sabbath “Paradox.”
3. The lunar Sabbath issue has been looked at three times by the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists. Each time the committees were disbanded and the records of the committee proceedings destroyed. The most significant lunar Sabbath research paper, submitted to the General Conference back in the 1930’s, has disappeared without a trace. The committee established in 1995 to study the question of the lunar Sabbath was scuttled when, so we are told, three of the delegates, theologians from the Church’s seminary at Andrews University, became convinced that the lunar Sabbath was correct and that the Church should adopt the practice.
4. Seventh-day Adventists would naturally have a bias against the lunar Sabbath for at least two reasons:

1. The concept that one day of the week is intrinsically holy is dependent on the idea that such a day represents an exact seven-day multiple of the seventh-day of Creation. If the Jews kept the Sabbath according to a lunar calendar, the Sabbath day would have wandered, rather than having been fixed, making it next to impossible, if not impossible, to keep track of that exact seven-day multiple.
2. It makes the loaded question of who changed the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday irrelevant. You can’t “change” a moving target. The lunar Sabbath concept would make it impossible that the papacy could or anyone else could have “changed” it.

5. William Miller probably new that the position of the Karaite Jews was that a number of factors, including calendar issues, make it impossible to know which day of the current “fixed” week was really the 7^th day and that Jews have known for a very long time that they were keeping an arbitrarily chosen 7^th day as their Sabbath. The earliest leaders of Adventism might have known that the current 7^th day has only one chance in seven of being an exact seven-day multiple of the 7^th day of Creation.

SCHOLARLY OBJECTIONS TO THE LUNAR SABBATH THEORY

Nehemia Gordon, a prominent advocate for Karaite Judaism and the webmaster for the Karaite Corner, listed the following objections to the lunar Sabbath theory in a recent podcast. His position is that the Jews never observed the lunar Sabbath. (Later we quote from an entry on the Karaite Corner’s website the current position of Karaite Judaism that Jews have known for a very long time that the day they accept as their 7^th day was arbitrarily chosen and may or may not be an exact seven-day multiple of the 7^th day of Creation.) Gordon is a former president of a Jewish university, and his opinion is worthy of respect because of his presumed knowledge of the Hebrew language and the history of Judaism:

1. People who espouse this concept tend to have gotten their idea from skeptical scholars from the past who believe that the Hebrews borrowed the Sabbath idea from the pagan nations around them. The pagan “sabbath” was lunar-based. Currently (2014), even most skeptical scholars have abandoned this theory of the origin of the Sabbath concept.
2. You can go anywhere in the world and find that the Jews in every country where they are found worship on the same seventh day. Furthermore, this has been true for over 2,000 years. None of these Jews seem to know anything about a wandering Sabbath that was based on the lunar month.
3. The only scriptural evidence of something Sabbath-related that “moved” was the Sabbatical Year, which had to be adjusted frequently to adjust their year to correlate properly with the seasons.
4. Although the Jews eventually adopted pagan names for the days of the seven-day week, this fact did not mean that the Jews abandoned a supposed lunar week with Hebrew names for a fixed week with those pagan names. Furthermore, the theory that the wandering Sabbath had to be moved to “fixed” Saturday because the pagan name for the fixed 7^th day, Saturday, was related to the word from any language for “sabbath.” Rather, Saturday was named in honor of the pagan god, Saturn.

In addition to these objections of Nehemia Gordon, other biblical scholars report that they have studied the Scriptures and have not found any evidence that God instructed Israel to observe the Sabbath according to the lunar calendar. Researchers report that they find exceptions to the rules of the so-called lunar Sabbath principles that disprove the entire theory. The work of scholars who oppose the lunar Sabbath are widely available on the Internet and appear to us to have some validity.

SUPPORT FOR THE LUNAR SABBATH THEORY

The best way to see the very best that the lunar Sabbath community has to offer is to study Appendix XI, excerpts from John D. Keyser’s paper entitled, “From Sabbath to Saturday.” Whether his research proves that the lunar Sabbath concept is true or not, he appears to make a respectable case for it. He utilizes resources we have not seen elsewhere. Together with a study of Appendixes IX, X, and XI, our readers should walk away with less reluctance than ever to reject the idea categorically.

Let us evaluate the objections of Nehemia Gordon. First, the issue of whether the Hebrews borrowed the Sabbath concept from the pagans or it came from direct, divine revelation is a serious issue, but it tells us nothing about how the Jews practiced that belief, wherever that belief might have come from. (Hopefully all of us belief the Sabbath concept came directly from God on Mt. Sinai during the Exodus.)

Second, the fact that Jews everywhere have kept the same fixed 7^th day for a very long time—perhaps for a couple thousand years—tells us nothing about whether the ancient Hebrews observed the lunar Sabbath prior to the building of the second temple hundreds of years before the birth of Christ. The primary claim of lunar Sabbatarians is that the Jews kept the Sabbath according to the lunar calendar prior to the building of the second temple, although they cite evidence that some of the Jewish sects were observing the lunar Sabbath at the time of Christ and that some Christians and some Jews kept the lunar Sabbath for a few hundred years after the death of Christ. (We will look at the evidence for these additional claims later.)

Third, there is some evidence that Israel kept the Sabbath according to the lunar calendar, and some very tenacious lunar Sabbath researchers have uncovered it. As you will learn later, world civilizations did not have any notion of a fixed calendar until around the time of the building of the second temple. Just as the idea of a lunar calendar with extra days at the end of the month is incomprehensible to us today, so the idea of a fixed calendar would have been unfathomable to the civilizations of the world back then. It appears that in these ancient times the concept of a week existed, but not that of a fixed week. The week was based on the four phases of the moon, which were approximately seven days in length. It would be unreasonable to expect God or any Old Testament writer to specify that the Sabbath had to be kept according to a lunar calendar because there was no other way in existence to keep track of time.

While we will give you more documentation in regard to the extra days of the lunar months later, the only reasonable explanation for the biblical account of the Battle of Jericho involves the use of the lunar calendar. Recall that the Israelites were instructed to march around the city for seven days in a row. It is unlikely that God would have instructed the Hebrews to break the Sabbath, and one of those seven days would have to have been a Sabbath day if Israel had been using a fixed week at that time to determine their Sabbaths. See Appendix X for a full explanation. Please do not skip reading this appendix.

The ancient civilizations contemporary to the time of the Israel’s Exodus from Egypt marked time by lunar months. We also know that their smallest “absolute” unit of time for periods of time less than a solar year was the lunar month. They had no concern for numbers of days within a lunar month. Universal to virtually all ancient societies contemporary with Exodus Era Israel was that the number of days between the lunar months were of no consequence or concern. These civilizations were focused on the absolute reference point represented by the appearance of the new moon. (The reference point was always an absolute, fixed event, but this is not at all the same thing as saying that the time between the reference points were absolutely the same length.)

Furthermore, we know that in between the new moons they kept track of time by seven-day weeks that were correlated to the four phases of the moon. Finally, we know that their focus on the new moon as the absolute reference of time-keeping resulted in a total lack of concern for the number of days between those absolute reference points. This is one more prime example of the danger of studying the Bible without an understanding of the culture and the language which produced the biblical record. It is a very naive biblical scholar who would demand that Moses explain that his time references were lunar at a time when the entire world had no concept of fixed calendars.

Many of the cuneiform writings discuss a day of cessation from work at the end of each phase and suggest that the extra days between the last new moon and the first new moon were spent resting, rather than working. This information, which has been widely available for a very long time to scholars, raises serious questions about the usual Sabbatarian explanation for the existence of the pervasive heathen concept of a seven-day week and a day of rest at the week’s end. Sabbatarians claim that this heathen familiarity with a kind of sabbath principle is due to the retention (with corruption) of the memory of a seven-day fixed week and a Sabbath ordinance that all people were supposed to keep since Creation. Unfortunately there are better explanations for this phenomenon – the universal association between seven-day periods of time and the four phases of the moon. Since there was no Sabbath ordinance in Genesis, other explanations demand to be found.

The Hebrew word for Sabbath is closely related and derived from a word that means “propitiation.” When God ceased His creative work on the 7th day of Creation, He did not ask to be propitiated, and there is nothing in the story of Adam and Eve to suggest that any such propitiation if for no other reason than sin had not entered the world yet. The fact that in these ancient languages the sabbath concept was equated with the need to appease the gods is a major linguistic barrier to the idea the Sabbath originated at Creation.

The work of D. A. Carson and his team of distinguished biblical scholars published From Sabbath to Lord’s Day in 1982. This landmark study of the Sabbath-Sunday Question provided the world with a break-through understanding of the Hebrew linguistics of Genesis 2, Exodus 16, and Exodus 20 that definitively proved that Moses worded his language carefully to make it impossible for his Hebrew readers to see a Sabbath commandment in Genesis 2. Their studies also proved to the point of over-kill that Christians abandoned Sabbath-keeping for biblical reasons and that all the known conspiracy-apostasy theories to explain this abandonment are contrary to facts of history that have been known for nearly 2,000 years.

The lunar connection explains the development of the Heathen concept of a seven day week and a day of rest at the end of the week better than any other theories, since we now know for certain that there was no Sabbath in Genesis.

The Encyclopedia Biblica (The MacMillan Company, 1899, p. 4180) says that the Hebrew word for Sabbath, or sabbathon, conveys the propitiation or appeasement of divine anger:

It is the opinion of [Professor Jastrow] that the idea of propitiation or appeasement of divine anger, and it is . . . the opinion of [Professor Jastrow] that the Hebrew Sabbath (i.e. Creation Sabbath) was originally a Sabbathon – i.e. a day of propitiation and appeasement; marked by atoning rites . . . it was celebratred at intervals of seven days, CORRESPONDING WITH CHANGES IN THE MOON’S PHASES, and was identical in character with the four days in each month, i.e. 7^th, 14^th, 21^st, and 28^th! (page 4,180). Cited in From Sabbath to Saturday by John D. Keyser.)

The Encyclopedia Biblica also notes that the word translated “rest” in Genesis 2:1-2, indicates that the 7^th day of Creation was a day that divided something and has nothing to do with resting. For our immediate purposes, note that the word indicates a division of the month—not days. (We hasten to point out, as discussed elsewhere, that to us it seems to divide the seven days of Creation into two categories —the days that God created and the day that he did not create.) However, since Jastrow is an expert in Ancient Hebrew linguistics, we may find ourselves having to defer to his interpretation – one that represents still another serious argument against a Creation Sabbath from Hebrew linguistics. On page 4,173 we read:

The word, “Sabbath” is a feminine form/word. The ROOT (of Sabbath) has NOTHING to do with resting in the sense of enjoying repose; in transitive forms and applications, it means: “to sever,” “to put an end to”—“to come to an end.” In a transitive sense – “the divider” – indicates the Sabbath as dividing the month. It certainly cannot be translated “The Day of Rest.”

Lunar Sabbath Researcher, John D. Keyser, has studied the “heathen” Sabbath in depth, and he presents numerous examples of it in his remarkable book, From Sabbath to Saturday. These are some examples he discovered:

Assyria

Discovered by Assyriologist, George Smith in 1869 among the cuneiform tablets in the British Museum and summarized here by Hutton Webster:

. . .a curious religious calendar of the Assyrians, in which every month is divided into four weeks, and the seventh days or “Sabbaths,” are marked out as days on which no work should be undertaken.”It appears to be a transcript of a much more ancient Babylonia original, possibly belonging to the age of Hammurabi, which has been made by order of Ashurbanipal and placed in his royal library at Nineveh. The calendar, which is complete for the thirteenth or intercalary month, called Elul II, and for Markheshwan, the eight month of the Babylonia year, takes up thirty days in succession and indicates the deity to which each day is sacred and what sacrifices or precautionary measures are necessary for each day.All the days are styled “favourable,” an expression which must indicate a pious hope not a fact, since the words ud-khul-gal or umu limnu (“the devil day”) are particularly applied to the seventh fourteenth, nineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-eight days . . . With regard to the reasons which dictate the choice of the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-eighth days, two views have been entertained. It has been held, in the first place, that the “evil days” were selected as CORRESPONDING TO THE MOON’S SUCCESSIVE CHANGES; hence the seventh day marks the close of the earliest form of the seven-day week, A WEEK BOUND UP WITH THE LUNAR PHASES.(Hutton Webster, Rest Days: a Study in Early Law and Morality, New York: The MacMillan Company. 1916, p. 223-224.)

It seems like the utilization of the lunar calendar appears to have produced some extra rest days between the months:

Assurbanipal in the seventh century promulgated a calendar with a definite scheme of a seven-day week, a regulation of the month by which all men were to rest on days 7, 14, 19, 21,28. The old menology of Nisan made the TWO DAYS OF THE DARK OF THE MOON, 29, 30, rest days, so that each lunar month had 9 rest days, on which neither the sick could be cured nor a man in difficulty consult a prophet, none might travel, and fasting was enforced.

Babylon

Keyser cites Hutton Webster, a contributor to Rest Days: A Study in Early Law and Morality, pp. 228-229, regarding the fact that the Babylonian “Epic of Creation,” includes a discussion of lunar weeks that end in a Sabbath rest day. Keyser says:

“Finally,” writes Webster, “in the fifth tablet of the Babylonian ‘Epic of Creation,’ a work which in its original form is traced to the close of the third millennium B.C., it is told how the god Marduk, having created and set in order the heavenly bodies, then placed the moon in the sky to make known the days and DIVIDE THE MONTH WITH HER PHASES.” “Although this interesting production, in its present mutilated state,” elicits Webster, “mentions only the seventh and fourteenth days, we are entitled to believe that the original text also referred to the twenty-first and twenty-eighth days of the month.”

Keyser’s research suggests that the seven-day week synchronized to the four phases of the moon was virtually universal in the ancient world that surrounded Israel. He cites the work of Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible (Charles Scribner & Sons, New York, 1892-1902), the article, “On Sabbath: Babylonian,” it appears that the document referenced by Hastings is the same one referenced by Webster above:

Almost all scholars today agree that the primal seven-day calendar, as used among the very ancient Semites (including the Babylonians and Hebrews), was based upon the moon. Furthermore, this unique weekly cycle was observed in tandem with the lunar phases. An example of the early week, based upon the phases of the moon, is described in the Fifth Tablet of the Semitic Story of Creation. Note that the moon is said to “make known the days” and its horns “the seasons,” creating the Sabbath on the 7^th and 14^th days of the month. Quoting the tablet’s translation, he finds:[The moon] He caused to shine, ruling the night: He set him then as a creature of the Night, to make known the days.Monthly unfailing, He provided him with a tiara.At the beginning of the month then,Appearing in the land,The horns shine forth to make known the seasons.

MORE ABOUT THOSE EXTRA DAYS!

With the ancient lunar-solar calendar, the first sighting of the new moon started the first day of the first week of the new month. The ancients viewed the monthly cycle of the moon as the absolute marker for any period of time less than one solar year, and they cared nothing about the number of days in between the markers represented by the appearance of each new moon. But what about the extra days between the new moon months? They never seem to add up to seven.

If you look back at our example of a lunar month and analyze it, you can’t help being puzzled by the fact that the new moon seems both to end the month and to begin it. The orbit of the moon around the Earth varies by up to several days. Therefore, there are almost always (it seems) these extra days left over at the end of each lunar month. As “moderns” accustomed to a fixed calendar and having never known anything else, our first reaction to the lunar concept of marking time is that these extra days “mess up” the weekly cycle. This perception is the result of normal cultural bias, but one that is dangerous when it comes to translating one language into another. We will explain momentarily that the Hebrews simply discarded these days and either rested or worked on them. Their absolute standard was the appearance of each new moon. The records left by these societies strongly suggest that they simply rested on these extra days. Recall from the previous section that Assurbanipal’s calendar of the 7th century BCE had a total of nine rest days, a few of them represented by the extra days in between the months.

Elsewhere in VERDICT, we cite the work of Benner, a noted Hebrew language scholar. Benner says that the Hebrew language is impossible to translate accurately without an advanced understanding of the culture that produced it. The culture in which the early Israelites and their ancestors found themselves was overwhelmingly enmeshed in the concept of the lunar calendar and the lunar week. The trouble we have comprehending the variable day lunar month is the result of our Western idea, forged into our minds by our fixed calendar cultural experience. Since a fixed calendar has been used by civilizations roughly since the time of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, the weeks “butt up” against each other consecutively. However, by either method of reckoning time, a week is always seven days.

The fact that the ancients likely rested on these extra days is supported by the obsession they appear to have had on fertility subjects and celebrated with fertility rites. They did not fail to notice that the number of days it takes the moon to go around the Earth is roughly equal to the number of days in a woman’s reproductive cycle. Notice the research of Janet and Stewart Farrar in their book, The Witches’ Goddess (Phoenix Publishing, pp. 24-25, & p. 106):

The modern use of seven day weeks also stems from the ancient lunar calendar. The first of every lunar month was marked as the first day of a new week and a Sabbath was celebrated every seventh day to mark the 4 quarters of the moon. The last week was followed by the days of the dark moon when the goddess was held to be menstruating and so an extended Sabbath was observed until the waxing crescent moon reappeared and the new month began.

The Jewish Encyclopedia addresses the problem of the extra days between the lunar months with this explanation in Volume 10, p. 482, the article, “Week:”

The idea of the week, as a subdivision of the month [was found] . . . in Babylonia, where each lunar month was divided into four parts, CORRESPONDING TO THE FOUR PHASES OF THE MOON. The first week of each month began with the new moon, so that, as the lunar month was one or two days more than four periods of seven days, these additional days were not reckoned at all. Every seventh day (sabbatum) was regarded as an unlucky day. This method of reckoning time spread westward through Syria and Palestine, and WAS ADOPTED BY THE ISRAELITES, probably after they settled in Palestine.

Another well-respected encyclopedia supports this view as well. The New Schaff-Herzog Religious Encyclopedia was an English translation of a German encyclopedia that had been published first in 1805, and the American version was released between 1908 and 1914, according to its Wikipedia entry:

“The Israelites . . . made the Sabbath the feasts of a living and holy God. The work of man became symbolic of the work of God, and human rest of divine rest, so that the Sabbaths became preeminently days of rest. Since, moreover, the LUNAR MONTH had 29 or 30 days, the normal lapse of time between Sabbaths was six days, although sometimes seven or eight; and six working days were accordingly assigned to the creation, which was to furnish a prototype for human life. The connection of the Sabbath with lunar phases, however, was [later] discarded by the Israelites . . . .” (The New Schaff-Herzog Religious Encyclopedia, pages 135-136.)

WORKING TOWARD A NEW THEORY OF SABBATH ORIGINS

Thanks to advanced studies in Hebrew linguistics we now know that there is no possibility that the Sabbath ordinance was imposed on God’s people until the time of the Exodus. We also know that Heathen societies that predated Exodus Era Israel had a “sabbath” concept based on the four phases of the moon and fertility themes. The next logical step requires the obvious conclusion, and that is that the sabbath of propitiation and fertility associations that was so prevalent in the societies that predated ancient Israel could not have developed as the result of some kind of “dim memory” of the “original Sabbath” in the Garden of Eden. No such thing ever existed! Additionally, some historians see evidence that this lunar-fertility sabbath was part of the Egyptian culture when the Hebrews were their captives.

The next logical step is to conclude that the evidence available to us suggests that when God gave Israel its sabbath system, His thinking was that He would take a useful but purely heathen concept, redeem it, wash it clean of its fertility and superstitious connotations, and present it to Israel in the glorious and holy form in which it came down to them from Mt. Sinai – The Mountain of the Moon. It would appear that while it was washed of its Heathen connotations, its association with the four phases of the Moon was retained. After all, in Genesis, Chapter One, God stated that the sun and moon were given to the human race to determine “sacred times.” The lunar connection with the Sabbath, then, did not need to be cleansed as it reflected His provision for time-keeping for all peoples for all time from the beginning of time. The earliest societies on Earth had retained the memory of the lunar method of time reckoning that God had given to the world in the very beginning. And, this memory was not a “dim” one either. With each appearance of the Moon, all the people on the Earth recognized the existence of God's long-lasting timepiece.

This theory of how the Jewish Sabbath came into existence is in keeping with God’s apparent habit of communicating spiritual truths to Israel through cultural concepts with which they were already familiar. For example, God modeled the Ten Commandments after the formula for the treaties that Israel’s neighbors made with one another. It was the custom of the time to draft these agreements so that a list of required actions by the people of a conquered nation had a ceremonial requirement placed right in the middle. The ceremony that the people were required to enact at regular intervals was designed to help the conquered people to remember the one who had the power to require them to fulfill their obligations, as well as to remember his actual requirements. Consider the fact that Jehovah did not choose to ban slavery for Israel. The practice of slavery was universal at the time. The way the Heathen practiced it created extreme human suffering. God’s regulations for slavery within Israel were just, humane, and designed to give the worker-slave hope for the future at the end of his seven-year indenture. Similarly, He chose to control—not to erase—certain inequalities between the role of men and women in society. The Law of Moses provided, for example, that women could own property, and they enjoyed many protections and privileges while the women of Israel's neighbors were frequently treated as having less value than livestock. Jehovah seems to have chosen to work within the culture of the day whether in regard to the Sabbath, slavery, or women’s rights. Even female slaves had a status of honor and protection unheard of in the Heathen world. In the New Testament, Jesus redeemed the concept of baptism – always a symbol of spiritual renewal – from heathen cultic sources.

It appears to be impossible to divorce the Sabbath from its lunar foundations. Recall once more that Jehovah gave these treaty-like Ten Commandments from the top of the Mountain of the Moon (Sin = Semitic for Moon) which sat on the edge of the Wilderness of the Moon. Furthermore, He thundered these requirements to the Hebrews on the same day as the pagan High Sabbath of the lunar month. The Sabbaths before and after the giving of the 10 Commandments from Mt. Sinai correlated with the designated sabbaths of the lunar month.

Was it just a coincidence that God chose the High Sabbath of the pagan lunar month to present the terms of His treaty with the ceremonial Sabbath requirement placed in the middle with His Hebrew people? It would seem that if we were to humbly attempt to think about the way God would view this question, we would reason that if He were concerned about the linkage between the Holy Sabbath of the Hebrews and the pagan sabbath concept of their neighbors, He would have avoided giving the terms of His treaty to Israel on that day. Because ALL the countries around Israel kept time by the phases of the moon, all sabbaths, whether sacred or pagan, would have been observed on exactly the same day in that part of the world.

The lunar month and the lunar-based seven-day week system was simply the way things worked at that time in the history of the world. Back then the concept of a fixed calendar would likely have been as incomprehensible to them as their lunar calendar is to us. To demand that Moses record the fact that Israel was using a lunar calendar at the time of the Exodus is as unreasonable as demanding that Robert Hemingway explain that in the age he wrote in, there were things called cars that drove on things called roads. He would simply put a car in his story if it was a necessary part of his story-telling, and his readers would already know what a car was.