Re: "Thiering Pesher"

Whiskers wrote:
On 2007-03-02, Marshall Price <d021317c@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Whiskers wrote:
On 2007-03-01, Marshall Price <d021317c@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Whiskers wrote:
The Julian calendar, and its modern successor the 'Modified Gregorian',
and the modern Jewish or Hebrew calendar, and our rigid pattern of
weekdays, operate quite differently from the previous Jerusalem Temple and
old Roman systems.
I don't believe the succession of weekdays has ever been broken.
I don't know of any evidence either way. In a Judeo-Christian-Islamic
context it might be better to think in terms of the 'courses of the
priests' as set down in the time of Moses - each 'course' held office for
one week only, handing over on the sabbath to the next in the sequence of
24 courses. If anyone could keep track it would be the Israelite priests
- but they did not have un-interrupted power.

snip

Constantine Shmonstantine! :)

Really, none of this is relevant. If there had ever been an interruption
of the cycle of weekdays (in historical times),

Define 'historical times', now that you've introduced the concept.

Since pre-history. I don't want to get into semantics. My intention here
was simply to avoid the question of when "day one" occurred. By Jesus's
time, the Jews worked on the assumption that they had the Sabbath right.

The time from Moses decreeing the 'laws' during the (alleged) period of
wandering in the wilderness after the (alleged) exodus of the (alleged)
Israelites from (alleged) slavery in Egypt, to the time when we start to
have surviving documents produced by practicing Jews referring to methods
(allegedly) used for determining days and dates, covers more than 1000
years during which there is nothing remotely like that.

Huh? I don't get that paragraph at all.

During that period, the Jews (by their own claimed traditions) changed
from a nomadic to a settled way of life, involving a bloody and gradual
invasion of territory occupied by other people; their religious practice
changed from having a mobile 'tabernacle' which was forbidden to be fixed
in any one place, to having a substantial and costly temple; that temple
was destroyed and for a period of at least 50 years the Jews were in exile
in Babylon (since when they had no independent government of their own
until the mid 20th century - if you accept that modern Israel is anything
other than a puppet of the USA); by their own traditions, during that
period of more than 1000 years, the Jewish people frequently deviated from
their religious beliefs and practices, taking up the customs and religion
of their neighbours instead, and the few who wished to keep to the laws
of Moses struggled to have any influence; sometimes there were very few
indeed who seemed to want to keep the law.

Israel is not a puppet of the USA.

Religious practice is irrelevant. Day 2 follows day 1 regardless of
"religious practice."

The book of Nehemiah lists those who returned from the exile in Babylon,
and gets a total of 42,360 - and also complains at length about even the
'priests and Levites' abandoning their duties and breaking the Sabbath
within a few years of being allowed to return and having sworn to keep the
law of Moses.

Biblical books referring to the period after the return from Babylon,
continue to complain about the Jews falling away from the laws of Moses and
their religious duties. One could easily get the impression that getting
people to stick to the rules was a constant struggle, more often lost than
won.

I'm sure we'd all have
read about it. It would be an extremely controversial issue, since it
would involve officially and intentionally breaking the commandment to
rest on the sabbath! How could anybody do that,

Getting people to honour the Sabbath is the difficulty, not getting them
to ignore it. The Bible is full of complaints about that.

The days of the week have no practical meaning for anyone not personally
committed to observing them; farmers and hunter-gatherers can't just drop
everything and 'rest' or 'pray' for a whole day - work with animals or
crops has to be done when it has to be done, and takes no account of days
of the week.

"Committed"? "Observing"? Who's talking about that?

not to mention getting
everybody all over the world to _know_ about it and _agree_ to it --

Everybody all over the world? How many of them would be interested? As
for the difficulty of communicating, doesn't that apply at least as much to
agreement about what day it is anyway? It may be 'day 4' in Jerusalem as
far as the observant Jews living there are concerned, but why would it be
'Wednesday' for a pagan (or even with any certainty for a Jew) in Roman
Londinium? Let alone before or outside the Roman empire.

If the local ruler decrees that 'today is a holiday for everyone and we'll
put off having Tuesday till tomorrow' I doubt if many people would be too
bothered. Deciding to have two rest days in succesion would be even more
popular, wouldn't it? And that supposes that the local practice revolved
around a 7-day cycle in the first place; that was by no means universal -
any period less than 'from one full moon to the next' (or 'one new moon to
the next' if you want to introduce more scope for dispute/flexibility) but
more than 'one sunrise to the next' (or 'one sunset to the next' or 'one
midnight/mid-day to the next') is arbitrary.

If you do have a 7-day cycle, but also want each new year to begin on
(say) 'day 4' of that cycle (as the ancient Jews seem to have done), then
you have a problem; the number of days between astronomical new years is
not divisible by 7. There are more ways to adjust for that which involve
adding extra days, than there are which involve adding extra weeks; and
adding extra days is much easer to manage than adding extra weeks.

In fact, waiting for a new moon sighting (or more practically, a full
moon) before deciding to call tomorrow 'Thursday' (or whatever), is by far
the easiest way - the arbitrary cycle of sevens then gets broken
arbitrarily and everyone gets an extra feast-day or two from time to time
while the 'week' is re-set to match the heavens. Who's likely to complain
about an extra feast-day now and then? Now if a priest or king does that
in darkest Germania, and another does it in the land of Punt, are they
going to end up having their next 'sabbath' on the same day as each other?
Will they or anyone know or care?

not to mention God himself?

If God is so anxious to be worshipped according to some arbitrary cycle of
days, then God is perfectly capable of making it easy for the people He
wants to do the worshipping to work out when to do it; He seems not to
have arranged the heavens to get a 7-day cycle, so perhaps personal
revelation is the method he uses? If so, then there isn't a problem, is
there :))

Just look at the complications surrounding the
change (promoted by the pope) from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar.
It took centuries for everybody to get on board.

The adjustment from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar was a strictly
European affair, and had more to do with politics than with anything else.

What about the rest of the world? Why "politics", of all things?

Sooner or later, everybody everywhere came to adopt the modern calendar.
The history of it is quite complicated, and the main problem was getting
the word out to people and instituting changes as simultaneously as
possible.

The main concern of most people was that they would have to pay rent and
tax for 365 days when they'd only been paid wages for some shorter period
- which is probably as good a reason as any to avoid breaking the cycle of
pay-days they were used to. In England, the objection about rents and tax
was met by changing the date of the 'tax year'.

The British imposed the Gregorian calendar on all their colonies and
dominions (including those in America) in 1752 and whenever they acquired
new ones thereafter. Other European imperial powers did likewise, and
that is how the Gregorian calendar became so widespread for 'civil'
purposes, even in countries that had never been part of the Roman empire
and were not 'Christian'.

You'll notice that some countries still officially use their own calendars,
even if for international business and diplomatic purposes they do also
have to recognise the Gregorian. Other calendars continue in use for
liturgical or other purposes in many countries that have adopted the
Gregorian calendar for civil use.

The problem of Easter
is both complicated and controversial; it led to schisms which are still
irreconcilable.

That's a whole other kettle of fish.

Nobody could have skipped or inserted a weekday.

I dispute that assertion. I have adduced what I think is good
'circumstantial' evidence for the /possibility/ that even those who for
religious reasons do want a 7-day cycle, may not in fact be observing an
unbroken rigid cycle going back as far as the time of Moses, even if the
cycle has not been broken for the past 1600 years or thereabouts since
first being decreed by the Roman emperor Constantine (which unbroken-ness
is also a conjecture rather than a fact).

I'm sorry, but unless you give me some _reason_ for suspecting that a
day was inserted or skipped, or that all people somehow lost track and
wound up simultaneously thinking it was the same (erroneous) day of the
week, or *something*, I can't help thinking this is all utterly
unreasonable.

The Romans introduced a method for working out the day of the week
starting from the number of the year, which was adapted when they switched
from an 8-day week to a 7-day week and was adopted by the church of Rome
and has been modified to work with the Gregorian calendar; look up
'dominical letter'. That approach doesn't work, of course, when the year
is defined as always starting on a particular day of the week.

But even if you know such a method, or have a written table to help you,
that still requires that the year number be known - and that is arbitrary,
in essence. Our current numbering of years can be traced back to the
Easter tables calculated by Dionysius Exiguus in the 6th century; before
his year-numbers became generally accepted, some Christians counted from
the start of the reign of the emperor Diocletian (in AD 284) (a notorious
persecuter of Christians, so an odd choice!) and others used various other
equally arbitrary starting-dates for numbering the years for calculating
such things as the date of Easter. The year of the creation of the world
was (for some, still is) a popular choice; variously asserted, calculated,
or estimated, to have been 3760, 3592, 5509, 4004, 4000, or quite possibly
some other number of years, BC.

Gee, you sure have a lot to say! :)

When I mentioned the commandment to observe the Sabbath, I didn't mean
to imply that everybody -- or even anybody -- actually obeyed the
commandment, only that people generally knew which day of the week it
was at all times, or at least could find out by asking around. As for
the idea that nobody would object to a holiday, that's irrelevant. So is
the question of what was going on in other cultures. I'm sorry to
dismiss your long post abruptly, but there's really nothing in it that
seems applicable to the issue.

Perhaps you've gotten so used to modern communications you can't imagine
what life was like when towns were far apart and the only way to get a
message from one place to another was for somebody to actually carry it
there. I cannot conceive of a "local ruler" getting the word out to
everybody to "put off Tuesday until tomorrow" -- and then making the new
sequence stick all over the civilized world! If Caligula had tried that,
it would have been scorned and ignored by almost everybody, and written
up as scandalous immediately after his assassination.

--
Marshall Price of Miami
Known to Yahoo as d021317c
.

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