Just a few days before Moses led the Hebrews out of Egypt, the Lord spoke to him as follows:

The Lord referred to Nisan, the first month of the Levitical year, by this statement. Then immediately, He began to specify certain dates to be set aside for particular observances. For example, Nisan 10 was designated as the time when a lamb was to be selected for later sacrifice on Nisan 14, designated as the Passover. As it turned out, the Exodus out of Egypt occurred on that very date, and the Bible indicates "coincidentally" that this date also completed exactly 430 years to the day, from the time that the Hebrews had first entered Egypt (Exodus 12.41). This statement alone ought to alert our senses that something very unusual was on-going. While Moses and Pharaoh contested over the release of the Hebrews from captivity, God’s countdown was already in process, and their departure date had already been specified independent of those negotiations. Here is one of the first indications that the Levitical Calendar might give us a perspective on Biblical history quite different from that obtained by a purely secular timetable.

All calendars must be in some way tied to the sun or the moon, those celestial objects by which earthly time is reckoned. Of course, our Gregorian calendar is related to the time it takes for the earth to make one revolution around the sun. This solar year is divided into 12 Solar months that cumulatively approximate that time, but "leap year" adjustments are required every fourth year to more closely maintain that synchronism. Even then, the resulting year of 365.25 days is still 11.232 minutes/year longer than the Solar year, requiring another one day correction every 128 years.

The Levitical calendar is based on the moon rather than the sun, but is also divided into 12 Lunar months, each month beginning with the advent of a New Moon. However, since the Lunar year is only 354 days, the Lunar months must be alternately 29 or 30 days each so as to add up to the right total.

Now it is apparent that a long term problem arises when time is based solely on a Lunar cycle. A Lunar year is 11.25 days shorter than a Solar year, causing the Lunar month to shift with respect to the Solar seasons by a little over a month every three years. If such a drift were allowed to continue, the Lunar month initially associated with summer would become associated with winter in less than 18 years.

The solution is similar to the idea of the "leap-year", but in this case with the addition of an extra month, i.e. Veadar, seven times in 19 years. With these repeated adjustments, the lunar calendar is brought back into close synchronism with the solar calendar every 19 years, and the new moon, which begins the Lunar year in the month of NISAN, always occurs within a month or so of the Solar Equinox in the springtime.

The first key Levitical date is called Passover, and is associated with the Exodus of the Hebrews out of Egypt, but there are other important dates as well. The ones originally set down in the Law of Moses are detailed in (Leviticus 23) and displayed in the chart below. Later, after the Jewish remnant had returned from the Babylonian Exile, two others of special note were added. The first called "Purim" was added at the time of Esther to celebrate the Jews’ victory over wicked Haman who had attempted to destroy them; the second called "Hanukah", i.e. dedication, was added to celebrate the Jews’ cleansing and rededication of the Temple following its desecration by the Syrian king Antiochus Epiphanes during the Intertestament period.

These key feasts and other holy convocation dates are summarized in the following chart. Those in green were initiated at the time of Moses, while Purim and Hanukah began during the Intertestament period.

It is possible to observe some interesting connections between the Old and New Testaments with this brief review:

• Notice that Passover is the key Levitical date for the slaying of the lamb and the Exodus out of Egyptian bondage.
  
  Nor is this date without prophetic significance, for Jesus was also crucified on a Passover almost 1500 years later. Therefore, it is easy to understand why John the Baptist referred to Him in a special way.

Therefore, just as those Old Testament Hebrews were led out of physical bondage by the sacrifice of a lamb on Passover, the New Testament Jews had the opportunity of being led out of spiritual bondage by the sacrifice of the Lamb of God on Passover!

• The Feast of Unleavened Bread was prescribed by the Law as a time of celebration and thankfulness for the fruit of the Land. During that Feast week, "First Fruits" commemorated the barley harvest, being the first fruit of the spring harvest.
  
  Both tradition and a careful accounting of the elapsed days described in the Bible between Jesus’ Palm Sunday entrance into Jerusalem and His crucifixion will reveal that Passover happened to fall on a Friday in that year. Since that had to be Nisan 14 and since the Bible records that He was resurrected on the following Sunday, He was raised from the dead on Nisan 16, "First Fruits". With this fact, a mystical statement made by the Apostle Paul in one of his letters takes on profound prophetic significance.

It would appear that those 3500 year old Levitical harvests that God appointed for the Land, seemingly irrelevant to us in the 20th century, actually may have a poignant meaning in terms of the "harvest of souls".

• In continuance of this thought, Pentecost was also designated by God as the date on which the summer harvest of the Land was to begin.
  
  However, Pentecost was also the New Testament date when the Holy Spirit initially came upon those first century Jews who had trusted Jesus as their Messiah, beginning a spiritual "harvest" of souls, as those early believers were renewed to new spiritual life (Acts 2).

A great deal more could be said of other correspondences between the Old and New Testaments in relation to Levitical dates, but with just these three it becomes evident that the Levitical calendar may prove a worthy topic for prophetic study. Surely that effort will not be frustrated, because it will be discovered later that this very same Levitical Calendar also ties together certain prophetic dates in the Old Testament with major historic events in the 20th century, to reveal their prophetic character.

COMING GLORY

Questions and/or Comments