3 - The Solar Calendar as Pattern of Sacred Time

Summary

And you, command the children of Israel so that they shall guard the years in this number, three hundred and sixty-four days, and it will be a complete year.

… at the end of a full year of three hundred and sixty-four days.

THE divine origin of time, its sacred cyclic pattern attesting to the eternity of the cosmic order, its regular, cyclic rhythms in time with the changes of nature, are described in the Thanksgiving Hymns. The poet describes a full twentyfour-hour day from end to end, from sunrise to sunrise, picturing the regular, eternal beat of divine time underlying the laws of heaven and earth:

Bowing down in prayer I will beg Thy favours

from kets to kets always:

when light emerges from [its dwelling-place]

in the cycles [tekufot] of day as preordained

in accordance with the laws of the Great Light when evening falls

and light departs at the beginning of the dominion of darkness,

at the hour appointed [mo'ed] for night in its cycle, when morning dawns,

and at the end of its return to its dwelling-place before the approach of light;

always at all moladei et, yesodei kets

and the cycle of the appointed times as they are established

by signs [ot] for their entire dominion

established faithfully from God's mouth, by predestination [te'udah] of being

and it will be [for ever] and without end.

Without it nothing is nor shall be,

for the God of knowledge established it

and there is no other beside Him.

The various time-related terms occurring here, in poetic language, represent the basis for the numerical calculation of the cyclic pattern of divine time: kets = recurrent time unit (such as, in the above passage, a twenty-four-hour day); tekufah = cyclic period (relative to the daily and annual course of the sun); mo'ed = divinely appointed time, attesting to God's decree; moladei et, yesodei kets = measurable and countable units of time: day, week, month, year, and the four intercalary days when the sun turns round in the heavens; ot = sign, a visible divine time marker, such as the sun, or a God-given invisible marker, such as the sabbath, attesting to and designating the fixed, divine, cyclic order; te'udah = preordained heavenly statute, destined to exist for ever and attesting to the laws of nature.