The Wisdom of the Heavens

BRUCE  LICHT

A typical quartz timepiece is only accurate to within three minutes a year. To achieve a higher degree of precision, one would have to rely on an atomic clock, which was not invented until 1949.(1)  So how is it possible that over 3,300 years ago, the newly freed Jewish slaves from Egypt were able to properly determine the exact length of a lunar month to within one tenth of a second?

The first commandment that was given in the Book of Exodus within the Torah was for the Jews to maintain a lunar calendar.(2)

So there is the lunar calendar cycle, which NASA, with years of research using satellites, telescopes, laser beams, and supercomputers, calculated to be on average 29.530588 days in length.(3)  There is also the annual calendar cycle that is approximately 365 days long.  I say “approximately” because as we know, every four years there is a “leap year” where we add an extra day. However, to be exact, it is less commonly known that every one hundred years, we don’t add a leap year, and every four hundred years, we add a leap year even though we normally would not (and we have to make calculations to “fix” or “true-up” the calendar).(4)  So as you can see, it is not perfectly straightforward, and all these little necessary tweaks were only discovered recently. It wasn’t until a few hundred years ago that we finally had the astronomical prowess to finally determine how to precisely “set” our annual calendar.

It is noteworthy that the Talmud, a document that is thousands of years old, tells us the equation used by the ancient Jews to determine the length of a lunar month down to the millisecond.(5)  It breaks down an hour not into sixty minutes but into 1080 “chalakim,” meaning that each minute is eighteen chalakim long, and it states that a lunar month is exactly 29 and 1/2 days and no less than 793 chalakim. This comes to 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes, and approximately 3.3 seconds, or 29.530594 days(6) (a difference of only 0.000006 days from NASA’s modern-day calculation).  Did they have supernatural knowledge of the natural world? All the other calendars of ancient times were extremely arbitrary and inexact, however, this ancient calendar calculation has withstood scientific scrutiny and the test of time to this day.

How did the Jews comprehend how to compute, organize, sustain, and perpetuate a calendar?  This calculation demands a massive extent of specialized knowledge that goes far beyond an understanding of the cycles of the seasons. They didn’t have the mathematical expertise, the highly sophisticated technical apparatuses, or space exploration vehicles to understand the wisdom of the heavens. How could they have figured this out if they did not have divine assistance?

Contemplating this miraculous achievement is one way of gaining understanding and getting close to God in this world. This is just one of the commandments where we can clearly see the strength and veracity of the proof of God’s existence.