The High Day of Passover this Spring begins at sunset Thursday eve NOT Wednesday eve as the official Jewish calendar chooses. How can this calendar be wrong? After all, so many Jews and Sabbath-keeping Christians have been following this calendar by tradition for so many centuries. Well, that is the problem -- we have been following TRADITION rather than the Biblically specified way of counting days. The calendar was changed in 150 AD by the head EARTHLY rabbi at the time, Hillel. Jesus/Yashua, the TRUE head Rabbi, though in Heaven rather than on Earth, never authorized this change.
Day One of the Spring (spiritual) calendar begins ON the day that we can see the first sliver of the new moon. I have always gone by an article that appeared in Sky and Telescope magazine in 1985. It discussed the results of a study to find out what is the earliest after new moon that a person could SEE the moon. The result was 13 hours. Translating that for this year (2009), we find that the moment of New Moon is 11:07am CDT on March 26th, 2009 (times calculated for Houston, TX). Adding 13 hours to that puts us at just after midnight later that night. But, we can't SEE the moon at that time as it is still so close to a sun that is toward the other side of the planet! We CAN SEE the moon the next day even before sunset as then it would be, say, 32 hours after the moment of New Moon. So, this day March 27th was the DAY 1 of the New Year and we count to the 15th day to get to the Passover High Day, Thursday/Friday the 9th/10th.
The problem with the Hillel calendar is that Day 1 was changed to fall on the ACTUAL day that the New Moon occurs astronomically. This is why, then, Day 1 by this false calendar was Thursday, March 26th and the Passover by this false count falls on Wed/Thursday of this week. By following this since 1993, I estimated that the Hillel calendar is OFF from the correct count about 85 percent of the time. And, this brings up the second problem with the Hillel calendar.
The Hillel calendar has a very definite POLITICAL component. Whoever does the official counts each year ADJUSTS the days so as to ensure that no Holy Day will ever fall on a Sunday or on any other "christian" holiday such as Easter or Christmas. Christians, does this sound like something that God would do or allow? Yet, ironically, this explains why the Hillel calendar gets it right ocassionally. It does so accidentally!
Now for the final major problem with the Hillel calendar: It only recognizes THREE of the EIGHT Holy Days! It only acknowledges Passover, Rosh haSannah, and Atonement. If the Jewish people, who are not even Christians, were representing God's Fourth Commandment in a TRUE way, why then do they not include the other five Holy Days?
The final irony here is that, this season, a Holy Day actually falls on a Sunday. In fact, it falls on Easter Sunday. It is NOT Easter for that day was a Catholic syncretism of a pagan observance. But the day is actually called The Feast Of Firstfruits. It always falls on a Sunday and was the day in 30 A.D. of Jesus/Yashua's resurrection.
So, this week, we have THREE Sabbaths in a row from sundown Thursday through till sunset Sunday. This is two High Days with a regular weekly Saturday Sabbath in between.
--Keep The Faith,