What About the Lunar Sabbath?.In the last decade several persons have approached me with data that they understood to promote lunar Sabbath calculation. This new and fascinating theory suggests that the seven day week was reset after each new moon. (And as a result, the Sabbath would always fall on the 8th, 15th, 22nd, and 29th of a given lunar monthi.) A large electronic advertising campaign promoting this view has been conducted continuously for years. And the result is that many persons now keep a Sabbath that happens, generally, on neither Saturday nor Sunday. I say “generally” because they keep their Sabbath on a different day of our calendar each month. Practically, this means that while there are seven days from Sabbath to Sabbath in the calendars of the whole planet, it isn’t always so for the believers in this theory. They have eight or nine days between the 29th Sabbath and the next 8th Sabbath. That is because they have one or two “new moon” days added in between “weeks” each month. !What is the actual purpose of the Sabbath?How was the Sabbath determined in the Bible? First, let me summarize the nature of evidence that I have seen so far as given in support of the idea. It is suggested that Sabbath falls on the 15th of three Biblical months in a row (the three months beginning with the Exodus from Egypt). As moon cycles are only 29.5 days long, the Sabbath could not fall three times in a row on the must be a valid calendar. And if the calendar is right for calculating feast-day dates, it must be right for calculating Sabbath dates as Sabbaths are among the feasts. It is asserted that ancient authorities trace the seven-day week to Babylonian sources and that the Jews anciently kept the Sabbath on a lunar basis. This Jewish habit was changed by the Roman power and is the reason that Jews currently honor Saturday as found on the Gregorian calendar. Circumstantial evidence, it is asserted, points to Lunar Sabbaths in the time of Joshua, Solomon, and Hezekiah, and Paul. The New Moons do not count as “working days” and so there are still 6 working days in each weekly cycle in the new moon calendar. While other thoughts have appeared here and there in lunar documentation, these are the ones that appear repeatedly in the documents I have read. What appears in not one of the documents is a “thus saith the Lord”
