Lunar Sabbath / Shabbat Mathematically Proven False

If an interpretation of the Bible requires you to forget how to count to make it fit, could it really be what God intended in the Torah?

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Overview of Lunar Sabbath Theory

If you are a person who is serious about following God's instructions in the Bible, including the one to rest on the sabbath, you probably by now have heard of the "Lunar Sabbath" or "Lunar Shabat" concept. This theory says that the fixed traditionally Jewish timing for keeping sabbath of Friday sunset through Saturday sunset is a corruption of an "original" Biblically instructed reckoning of Sabbath based on the lunar cycle.

Under this model, the sabbath falls on the 8th, 15th, 22st and 29th day of each lunar month, or at the First Quarter, Full Moon, Last Quarter, and New Moon. The claim is that with this system, God intended that one can just look up in the sky and know when the sabbath is. Hopefully using the sky as your calendar is easier than it sounds, because the lunar sabbath can fall on any day of the week, and with each new lunar month, it falls a day or two later in the week than the last month. As a result, to follow this system one must deal with the difficult, if not impractical situation of having to take a day off from work during the five day work week over 70% of the weeks—on a rotating schedule, no less.

Now ask yourself, what's wrong with this picture? Does anything (or several things) cause you to doubt that this is a system devised by God?

The Fatal Flaw

Let's remind ourselves of the biblical instruction for reckoning the sabbath:

Exodus 20:9-11— 9 Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: 10 But the seventh day is the sabbath of YHWH thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: 11 For in six days YHWH made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore YHWH blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

At first glance, the Lunar Sabbaths on the 8th, 15th, 22nd and 29th, spaced 7 days apart, resemble the biblically prescribed seven day sabbath cycle. However, this resemblance ends once you pass a month boundary. Instead of there being the required six intervening work days between one sabbath and the next, you instead have alternately seven or eight days between the last sabbath of the month on the 29th and the first sabbath of the next month on the 8th. This is of course due to the fact that the lunar cycle averages 29.5 days, instead of the needed 28 days to make this work.

This seems like a fairly obvious death knell to the Lunar Sabbath theory. You may wonder how the Lunar Shabbatniks get past this clear mathematical impasse? They sidestep it by claiming that those one or two extra days at the end of the month while the Moon is dark "do not count because hidden days are 'void' days." In other words, the seven or eight days interval between sabbaths at month boundaries are equated with the required six day interval. If this sounds irrational to you then you are not alone.

The other explanation I have been given, which stunned me even more, was that "Scripture never says that shabbat is a cycle of seven, just that we are to 'accomplish' our work in six days and rest in the seventh. It is never stated that we must go back to work the next day :-)" This comment comes from the author of a book on Lunar Sabbath, an authority, not some beginner. Yet, if God was not describing a seven day cycle, then why does he say things like...

Leviticus 23:15-16— And ye shall count unto you from the morrow after the Sabbath, from the day that ye brought the sheaf of the wave offering; seven Sabbaths shall be complete: Even unto the morrow after the seventh Sabbath shall ye number fifty days...

...which naturally cause every reasonable person to conclude that the sabbath is the last day of a repeating seven day weekly cycle? Is God capricious and prone to playing tricks on us to trip up sincere truth seekers? Why not just tell us, "You shall surely keep one day every quarter of the moon as a sabbath unto me" instead of explicitly describing a repeating seven day weekly cycle for reckoning sabbath? Honestly, the thinking of Lunar Shabbatniks reminds me of another group who also uses contrivances to support their theory. I am talking about the group who, upon seeing a man sitting in a chair, admit that the simple chair must have been designed and created, but insist that the highly complex human sitting in the created chair evolved by accident without a creator.

Obviously, for me, these are irrational nonsolutions to the clear conflict between Lunar Sabbath and the Bible and my discernment requires me to reject the Lunar Shabbat as in conflict with explicit Scripture. If the theory is proven false mathematically just by following it across the month boundary, then it should be rejected. It is not necessary to hear any more of the mountains of support usually presented for the theory, nor should time be wasted doing so. Or is the God of the Bible irrational and does he expect us to use irrational logic to interpret his words? If we wanted to have a god of irrational faith, then we could follow Ra the Sun God and the associated belief that the rays of the Sun impregnated Semiramus, causing her to give birth to Tammuz, who, by the way, was Nimrod her husband reincarnated. Believing 7 or 8 = 6 is no less irrational.

Using Wisdom

And this is exactly the point where most people misstep in evaluating the Lunar Sabbath. They accept (at least momentarily) the irrational math to make it fit a seven day cycle when it's not and keep listening to the rest of the inferred scriptural support offered for it. And there are entire books full of evidence for this error, quite seductive and appealing evidence in fact. This should be no surprise, though. If you have been around long enough, you probably have heard the Bible used to support everything, even homosexuality.

For example, they will claim, "Every single Shabbat in the entire Bible which can be pointed to a specific date, occurred on 8-15-22-29 - EVERY one. Coincidence?" Some even offer $1000 bounties to anyone who can find a case in the Bible that contradicts this claim. But, to do this would be an exercise in futility. Whether it is true or not that all the sabbaths fall on those days, this, once again, is not how to properly determine the timing of sabbath. There are clear scriptures telling us explicitly when it is, and those should be our foundation (along with good, reliable kindergarten level counting from the number one to seven), not circumstantial evidence. And if you somehow did get them to admit this claim is erroneous, they have dozens of other arguments left waiting to be disproved. It's better to learn to spot the key false assumption that all false doctrines have and avoid getting lost in a sea of side issues.

But if you did not immediately spot the fatal flaw in this theory, hopefully you at least recognized how radical it is, and have the wisdom to know to tread carefully before adopting it. For whenever you are presented with something new and radical as God's instructions (like this "Lunar sabbath" is purported to be a restoration of) we need not and should not accept it hastily. We need not fear missing what God might be trying to tell us while waiting until our doubts are addressed properly. We should trust that if God is really trying to correct us on a point, then he will be able to remove all doubt and rationally convince us of it. God is more than able to give us all the reasonable proof we sincerely need to be sure something is of him before we adopt it, is he not? Never doubt that. It is important to pray and wait and, where applicable, watch for two or three witnesses, as a minimum, before doing something so radical and life-changing. However, the kind of, and the quality of the witnesses we accept is important as well. If a teaching requires you suspend good common sense, such as how to count properly, then do not accept it no matter how much "supernatural" or even scriptural confirmation you believe you have received. You can support anything from the Bible to fool people who have not yet acquired well-developed discernment and critical thinking skills (skills that are not stressed in our education systems which reward you mainly for accepting and regurgitating what your teachers tell you).

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Articles on Lunar Sabbath / Shabbat Mathematically Proven False

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