When Does the Biblical Year Begin
This post is motivated by a number of people that have asked me to look into Mikal Shabbat’s Scriptural Studies channel, but also because another Full Moon calendar website, TheCreatorsCalendar.com have made similar but different errors in how they start the year. As a result of these errors, they are occasionally out of sync with what I believe to be the true calendar.
Why does any of this matter?
If you are watching for his return, as we are commanded to do, then we must know his true calendar. If you don’t know the calendar then you can’t find the appointed times and if you don’t know the appointed times then you will struggle to find the signs in the stars.
Approach to Starting the Year
If we are to identify the start of the year then it must be objective and it must fit with the harvest cycle over a period of 6000 years because on the 16th of the 1st month the first fruits of Barley must be waived. This rules out any system that starts the year based upon whether the sun is in a particular constellation.
Because over 6000 years it will move moved 3 constellations making Barley arrive a month too early during Abraham’s time and a month too late today. The entire Barley crop could be lost if people waited a month too long to harvest and it wouldn’t be ready at all if it was a month too soon.
We can therefore conclude, that the year must be linked to the tropical year that all plant life is following. Any system that isn’t stable in this respect should be suspect.
The “Creators” Calendar.com
I will address this website first because it is the one that I was following for almost a year before I realized the problem with the Barley and the Wobbling earth.
They have taken a sign that occurs in the fall as a signal of the birth pains of the second coming and turned it into a sign for the start of the new year and have done so by taking the fact that the word “moon” has a linguistic origin in the word “brilliancy” to imply that it is always a “full moon”.
One would have to ask what word they use for the moon when it isn’t full.
TheCreatorsCalendar.com also uses a faulty test for dismissing evidence that the year should start between Bethulah (Virgo)’s head and Spica rather than her feet. This very “test for legitimacy” requires that over 6000 years they will be off because it states their true test is the sun being in the constellation of Aries in the middle of the first month.
Every other argument they present must pass that test which we have already disproven. They
They open up by claiming that Barley and other crops do not legislate time, but then point out that the Barley harvest must be on time for the Wave Sheaf Offering. What I believe his real point is that we shouldn’t be looking to the crops to tell time, but the sun, moon, and stars. The problem is if you use the sun, moon, and stars incorrectly then the crop will not be ripe or it will be overripe. This happens if your calendar ignores the procession of the equinox over 6000 years.
As a result TheCreatorsCalendar.com puts the Full Moon between the feet and the star Spica (the branch/grain in Virgo’s hand) under the assumption that the Revelation 12 sign is relevant for the start of the year.
I reached out to TheCreatorsCalendar.com and pointed out some of these things but was told fairly bluntly to start my own website.
Mikal Shabbat’s Scriptural Studies channel
This YouTube channel advocates a full moon start of month and also starts the year when full moon is at the foot of Virgo. The difference is they define a slightly more “objective” definition of at the foot of Virgo to mean when the star Spica in Virgo’s hand sets before the moon.
The end result is a calendar that will follow approximately the same months as TheCreatorsCalendar.com. If you set the Stellarium to the year 6000 AD and then ask what month Passover will fall in, you will discover that Spica sets before the moon on June 13, which puts First Fruits at June 29th and the entire Barley harvest would have been lost.
The problem with Mikal Shabbat is that he subscribes to the flat earth perspective and therefore does not trust Stellarium or other star simulators that factor in the procession of the Equinox.
Here he is showing a program called “Flat Earth Pro” to demonstrate what “Enoch” saw from God’s perspective. I have no desire to get into a flat-earth debate, but this is an example where believing in Flat Earth has real-world consequences into how you identify Yah’s calendar. If He really wanted to take measurements in the real world he could observe the procession of equinox over a period of 10 years or he could trust the observations made over 100’s of years.
One must ask him how he consistently observes Full Moon when Enoch pretty clearly teaches the moon starts with the sliver.
Conclusion
Based upon these facts, I conclude that the year must start on the first Full Moon after the Equinox which is the only way to use the sun, moon, and stars to start the year.
The Bible has a principle that a day and a year are parallel units of time, especially in prophecy where calendar issues are very important. If the sun alone governs the start of the day, then it would stand to reason that it alone would govern which moon starts the year. A biblical year has two seasons “summer” and “winter” just like a 24 hour day has two seasons “daylight” and “night”.
Once you make this connection, then the instruction that month of Abib or Spring should be the beginning of the year it also makes sense that Morning should be the beginning of the day. This same principle applies with the “day as a 1000 years” principle.
Yashuah rose in the morning of the 3rd day and we will rise at the start of the millennial reign (1000 year reign) after 2000 years or 2 days.
The spring and fall equinox is similar to “sunrise” and “sunset” of the year. Starting the year a month too late has the consequence of starting the 7th month way after the fall equinox which puts the feast of Tabernacles too late when it gets too cold.
