The Beginnings of the Calendar Idea

by Fr. Mark Wojdelski, FSSP

(This is part of a series of articles, and will make little sense without the previous installments here (1) , here (2), and here (3))

We have seen some fairly strong correlations between the yearly cycle of Jewish feasts and the Roman liturgical calendar, and there are many more to come. Now that the last four Sundays have been discussed we have some time to take a breath, since there are no feasts in the 8th month of the Hebrew lunar calendar, which might be the topic of another article of its own, but now I think it is time to explain where all these ideas originally came from. It all started with a homily that I gave on Palm Sunday, in which I compared the two hosts that the priest (traditionally) consecrates on Holy Thursday, consuming one at that Mass, and reserving the other for the Mass of the Presanctified on Good Friday, to the practice of the Israelites gathering a double portion of manna on the day before the Sabbath. (see #4 in the link)  Of course, Friday is not the Sabbath, so it was nothing more than a fanciful comparison—but then again, Saturday is not our day of rest either.  However, it got me thinking, and so I went and read over the Exodus narrative, paying more attention to the small details. After all, there are no insignificant details in the Word of God, only details of which we have not yet been shown the significance.

When Good Friday came around later that week, we heard the same reading that we hear every year on Good Friday:

The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, “This month shall be for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year for you. Tell all the congregation of Israel that on the tenth day of this month they shall take every man a lamb according to their fathers’ houses, a lamb for a household; and if the household is too small for a lamb, then a man and his neighbor next to his house shall take according to the number of persons; according to what each can eat you shall make your count for the lamb. Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male a year old; you shall take it from the sheep or from the goats; and you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month, when the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill their lambs in the evening. Then they shall take some of the blood, and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat them. They shall eat the flesh that night, roasted; with unleavened bread and bitter herbs they shall eat it. Do not eat any of it raw or boiled with water, but roasted, its head with its legs and its inner parts. And you shall let none of it remain until the morning, anything that remains until the morning you shall burn. In this manner you shall eat it: your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it in haste. It is the Lord’s Passover. (Ex 12:1-11)

That got me thinking a little more: Passover is the 14th day of the month, and the lamb is slaughtered at sunset, in the evening. By the time of our Lord, this process ended up taking all afternoon in the temple due to the number of lambs being processed. The Last Supper was the Passover meal before our Lord’s crucifixion; therefore, the 10th of that same month would have been what we call Palm Sunday. Moreover, the eating of the paschal lamb would have taken place after sunset, meaning the first day of Unleavened Bread had already begun, i.e. 15 Nisan, Good Friday. Remember that feasts begin at sunset of the previous day, a point that was made explicit in the sacred scriptures. (Lev 23, see the first article in the series) It is then simple to see that the first day of the week, Sunday, would be 17 Nisan. The idea of some correspondence of Holy Week and Easter with the lunar calendar began to float around in my head. At that initial stage, however, I had no idea how deep the rabbit hole would go.

In any case, the tenth day of the month, Palm Sunday, is the day that the paschal lambs were selected, as God instructed Moses in the book of Exodus, and it was also the day that the people were crying out “Hosanna” to Jesus as he triumphantly entered Jerusalem. Then, just a few days later, they would be calling for his crucifixion. Whether this followed historical events precisely is irrelevant. The point of this exercise is not to present precise history, but to symmetrically arrange both Christian and Hebrew observances. It is important to realize that I am making no historical judgment on the issue of the synoptic chronology vs. the Johannine chronology, which would (seem to) suggest that the crucifixion took place on the afternoon of the 14th. I am approaching this issue from the standpoint of liturgical devotion, and as we’ve already seen (and will continue to see), this “arrangement” demands the synoptic chronology, and any meaning must be sought within that framework.

So in this arrangement of events, Our Lord was killed after fulfilling in himself the entire old law on the previous evening of the Passover. He was killed not as the lambs were being slaughtered.  It would have been impossible for the priests to be present jeering during the crucifixion, as they had a great deal work to do that day.  He was rather put to death after eating the old paschal Lamb and making it a part of Himself. It would have still been working its way through His digestive system even as He was being scourged and crucified. In like manner, on Good Friday (in the older form) as the priest is walking out of a church now devoid of the Real Presence, he carries within himself the sacred host that he just consumed, which he consecrated on the previous day.  He will once again make our Lord present on the altar on the following afternoon at the Easter Vigil.

These are all mildly interesting observations, but it was the later miracle of the manna that suggested to me that there might be something more going on, extending beyond Holy Week and Easter.

They set out from Elim, and all the congregation of the sons of Israel came to the wilderness of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had departed from the land of Egypt. And the whole congregation of the sons of Israel murmured against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness, and said to them, “Would that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate bread to the full; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you; and the people shall go out and gather a day’s portion every day, that I may test them, whether they will walk in my law or not. On the sixth day, when they prepare what they bring in, it will be twice as much as they gather daily.” So Moses and Aaron said to all the sons of Israel, “At evening you shall know that it was the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt, and in the morning you shall see the glory of the Lord, because he has heard your murmurings against the Lord. For what are we, that you murmur against us?” And Moses said, “When the Lord gives you in the evening flesh to eat and in the morning bread to the full, because the Lord has heard your murmurings which you murmur against him—what are we? Your murmurings are not against us but against the Lord.” (Ex 16:1-8)

Since the day begins in the evening, at sunset, both of these things, the quail and the manna, would come on the same day, the sixteenth day of the second month. The quail would come in the evening, to be eaten after sunset, just as the Passover was eaten after sunset, at night. Then the manna would come in the morning of the same day.

They were told to gather the manna for six days. Philo, a first-century Jewish author from Alexandria who lived while our Lord was walking the earth, but certainly never met Him or even heard of Him, was quite certain that the manna began to fall on the first day of the week, echoing one traditional school of thought that claims that creation began on the first day of the week with the creation of light.

“Now the greatness of the wonder was shown not only by the double supply of food and its remaining sound contrary to the usual happening, but by the combination of both these occurring on the sixth day, counting from the day on which the food began to be supplied from the air; and that sixth day was to be followed by the dawning of the seventh which is the most sacred of numbers. And therefore consideration will show the inquirer that the food given from heaven followed the analogy of the birth of the world; for both the creating of the world and also the raining of the said food were begun by God on the first day out of six. The copy reproduces the original very exactly: for, as God called up His most perfect work, the world, out of not being into being, so He called up plenty in the desert, changing round the elements to meet the pressing need of the occasion, so that instead of the earth the air bore food for their nourishment, and that without labour or travail for those who had no chance of resorting to any deliberate process of providing sustenance.”¹

The Exodus was meant to be a type of the death and resurrection of our Lord, and we know that it is, based on the account of the Transfiguration in the scriptures: “And behold, two men talked with him, Moses and Elijah, who appeared in glory and spoke of his exodus, which he was to accomplish at Jerusalem.” (Lk 9:30-31) Therefore, it is not unreasonable to suppose that not only the moon, but even the days of the week would have been aligned at the time of the first Exodus and the one that Christ underwent. Even if they didn’t, let’s suppose that they did, because otherwise a potential work of art could remain hidden. We’re not talking about two or three “coincidences” here, as we already saw in the previous articles, and will continue to see. During the liturgical year, most especially in the Easter and Pentecost season, we can almost imagine ourselves walking with the Israelites during their exodus from Egypt, their subsequent journey to Mt. Sinai, and even parts of the end of their wandering in the desert.

Making this presupposition, this sixteenth day of the second month after the Exodus could occur on two days, either Sunday or Monday, depending on whether Nisan had 30 days or 29. We can be reasonably sure that the Israelites would not be gathering manna on the Sabbath. And in fact, part of the manna story includes the establishment of the Sabbath, so we have another point of reference upon which to build our calendar (unless we want to imagine that the Sabbath fell on a Tuesday at some point in human history):  

On the sixth day they gathered twice as much bread, two omers apiece; and when all the leaders of the congregation came and told Moses, he said to them, “This is what the LORD has commanded: ‘Tomorrow is a day of solemn rest, a holy sabbath to the LORD; bake what you will bake and boil what you will boil, and all that is left over lay by to be kept till the morning.’ ” So they laid it by till the morning, as Moses bade them; and it did not become foul, and there were no worms in it. Moses said, “Eat it today, for today is a sabbath to the LORD; today you will not find it in the field. Six days you shall gather it; but on the seventh day, which is a sabbath, there will be none.” On the seventh day some of the people went out to gather, and they found none. (Ex 16:22–27)

This helps us to decide that Nisan must have 29 days in this liturgical arrangement of the calendar.  This departs from the current custom, based on the Metonic cycle, that Nisan must always have 30 days, but I hope that the reader can see that the goal is not to harmonize the current calendars, but to construct a primordial calendar for the time of the Exodus or the Resurrection (or both), where the new moons were still being directly observed.  This would put the 15th day of the second month (later called Iyar) on a Saturday. This might seem insignificant, except that the next day, the night and day during which the quail and manna came respectively, would be the 16th day of Iyar, which would correspond with the 4th Sunday after Easter, the first day of the week, agreeing with the previously mentioned opinion of Philo. Also, the matins reading for what would correspond to the fifteenth day of the second month is the end of the Apocalypse, when we pray, “Come, Lord Jesus.” (Apoc 22:20) That is the only remaining “complaint” that a Christian can make to God, begging that Jesus return soon and release us from this earthly tent.

Moving along to our next “random coincidence,” we have the epistle for the 4th Sunday after Easter, from the Catholic Epistle of James, and the first words are as follows:  “Every good endowment and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth that we should be a kind of first fruits of his creatures.” (James 1:17-18)

The manna comes from above, as a prefigurement of the heavenly manna, but indeed of every gift of God, including the Eucharist, the greatest of all the heavenly gifts that we can receive while on this earth. The greatest joy we can have is the possession of the unchanging Good, and we have a foretaste of this in the Eucharist, in which we receive the One who was for all eternity, the Lamb who was slain from the beginning of the world. (Apoc 13:8)

When Moses promised the manna, he framed it in terms of a precept: “and the people shall go out and gather . . . that I may test them, whether they will walk in my law or not.” It was very important that they follow the law of gathering the manna, such that every day, they had to put their trust in God. They had to believe that He would provide for them each day, including the Sabbath, when they had to gather a double portion the previous day.  Even the collect of the Mass supports this idea: “O God, who makest the minds of the faithful to be of one will, grant to Thy people to love what Thou commandest and to desire what Thou dost promise, that amid the changing things of this world, our hearts may there be fixed where true joys are found.”

The manna is always spoken of as falling from heaven, as we saw in the above passage from Philo. Earthly food (quail) in the evening, when things are getting dark, is replaced with heavenly food (manna) in the morning, when the sun is beginning to make everything light. This is commemorated roughly in the middle of the 50-day period between the Exodus and Pentecost. It is a few weeks after Easter, in the middle of the time called “Mid-Pentecost” by the Byzantines, that we become weary of waiting for the coming of the Holy Spirit, and complain to God, who sends us both earthly and heavenly food in due season. I thought that this was a neat little “Easter egg” left in the liturgy, perhaps by some clever churchman in the 7th or 8th century. Then for some reason I kept digging. 

To be continued…