A Scripture-First Review of the Sun, Moon, Aviv, and Yah’s Appointed Times
Review completed: September 26, 2026
Purpose
We recently changed the dates on our biblical calendar. We did not make this change casually, nor because another religious group told us which calendar to follow.
Our concern is simple: Scripture calls the holy days Yah’s appointed times. If Yah establishes an appointment, we want to appear at the time He appointed.
Our study therefore followed this order:
Scripture first. Creation and observable astronomy second. Ancient writings and historical practice as confirmation. Tradition last.
Our present conclusion is that the strongest working model is a lunisolar calendar: the sun establishes the proper annual season, the renewed moon establishes the months, days begin at evening, and an additional lunar month is used when necessary to keep Passover within the Aviv/spring season.
We regard this as our best-supported present understanding, not a declaration that every unresolved calendar question has been permanently settled.
1. Yah Gave the Heavenly Lights a Calendrical Purpose
Genesis does not assign calendrical responsibility to the sun alone. It says the lights in the heavens were established for signs, appointed seasons, days, and years (Genesis 1:14). Several translations explicitly render the Hebrew moʿadim in this verse as “sacred times” or “appointed times.”
This became an important starting point for us.
The biblical pattern appears to use different parts of creation for different scales of time:
Sun and seasons → annual cycle Moon → monthly cycle Sunset/evening → daily boundary Continuous seven-day count → weekly Sabbath
This is simpler than depending entirely upon an externally calculated civil calendar and fits the idea that Yah placed observable signs in creation.
2. Biblical Months Appear to Be Lunar
The Hebrew word ḥōdeš can mean both “new moon” and “month.” The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew lexicon specifically describes the month as beginning with the new moon and identifies it as a lunar month.
Scripture also treats the beginning of the month as a recognized occasion. David could say, “Tomorrow is the new moon” in 1 Samuel 20:5, showing that the event was both recognizable and predictable.
Exodus 12:2 establishes the Exodus month as Israel’s first month. Passover is then fixed to the fourteenth day of that first month (Leviticus 23:5).
The evidence therefore points strongly toward real lunar months rather than twelve arbitrary numerical blocks unrelated to the physical moon.
What Scripture does not explicitly state is whether the first day begins at astronomical conjunction or first visible crescent.
That distinction required historical confirmation.
3. Why We Currently Use the First Visible Crescent
Astronomical conjunction—the mathematical “new moon”—cannot ordinarily be seen. The moon is positioned too near the sun.
The renewed crescent, however, becomes physically visible shortly afterward.
The U.S. Naval Observatory explains that first crescent visibility normally occurs roughly a day or more after conjunction, depending upon geography and astronomical conditions.
More importantly, historian Sacha Stern’s major Oxford study of the ancient Jewish calendar concludes that Jewish lunar months ordinarily began when the new crescent was first sighted. He finds this reflected in early Jewish literary and inscriptional evidence, including evidence around the first-century period. Calculated conjunction-based month starts appear more clearly in later fixed calendars.
So our reasoning is:
Scripture establishes lunar months.
History nearest the biblical world indicates that lunar renewal was recognized by the visible crescent.
Therefore our present working month boundary is the first reasonably naked-eye-visible renewed crescent.
We do not believe clouds over one individual observer should alter Yah’s calendar. We therefore use astronomical visibility to establish whether the crescent was physically observable under normal clear conditions, with actual sightings serving as confirmation.
4. Month 1 Must Be Aviv
This is one of the clearest commands in the study.
Deuteronomy 16:1 says to observe the month of Aviv and keep Passover in that month.
The word Aviv is not merely an arbitrary month name. Exodus 9:31 actually describes barley itself as aviv—the barley had reached the ear/head stage while flax was budding.
Biblical Month 1 is therefore connected with the spring agricultural season.
Leviticus 23 also ties the festival period to firstfruits and the beginning of harvest.
This means a strictly lunar year of approximately 354 days cannot simply run unchecked. It would move Passover roughly eleven days earlier each solar year and eventually carry the festival completely out of spring.
Some form of lunisolar correction is therefore necessary.
5. The Equinox Is a Marker, Not the Command
We want to make this distinction clear.
Torah does not say:
“Begin the year at the vernal equinox.”
Torah says:
Aviv.
The spring equinox is useful because it gives us an objective astronomical marker for the seasonal transition, but we do not regard the mathematical equinox itself as replacing the biblical concept of Aviv.
Ancient Israel’s calendar was clearly linked with agricultural seasons. Modern scholarship notes that the biblical agricultural calendar required lunar time to remain synchronized with the solar year, although Torah does not preserve an explicit leap-month algorithm.
Our working rule is therefore:
The qualifying first lunar month is the one whose Passover—Day 14—falls within the Aviv/spring season.
We currently do not require Month 1 Day 1 itself to occur after the equinox.
That distinction matters enormously in borderline years.
6. Why We Did Not Adopt a Pure 364-Day “Zadok” Calendar
We began this study taking the Enoch/Jubilees/Qumran calendar very seriously.
That was justified.
Approximately twenty calendrical texts from Qumran attest a 364-day, 52-week calendar, and scholar Jonathan Ben-Dov describes it as the main calendrical framework represented in those sectarian scrolls. He emphasizes, however, that it is more accurately called a schematic-sabbatical year than an actual solar year. The same corpus also tracked lunar phenomena.
The Astronomical Book of 1 Enoch is also ancient; Aramaic astronomical manuscripts from Qumran demonstrate that this material is not a late medieval addition to Enoch.
Jubilees presents the strongest objection to our current conclusion. Jubilees 6 expressly commands a 364-day year and warns that lunar observations can cause Israel to err concerning festivals and seasons.
We do not dismiss that.
However, the 364-day system presents its own unresolved problem: the observable solar year is approximately 365.24 days. An uninterrupted 364-day calendar would drift away from the seasons rapidly. The surviving texts do not provide an uncontested correction mechanism that tells us how to synchronize the schematic 364-day calendar with the physical solar year indefinitely.
Therefore accepting the antiquity and importance of the 364-day priestly tradition does not automatically establish any particular modern Zadok calendar reconstruction.
At present we regard this as the largest unresolved objection to our lunisolar interpretation.
7. Evidence From the Time of Yeshua
Historical evidence does not replace Torah for us. We use it to ask whether our reading resembles what people near Yeshua’s lifetime actually practiced.
Josephus gives unusually clear evidence.
When describing Passover, he says it occurs on the fourteenth day of the lunar month, while simultaneously locating the festival according to the sun’s position in the spring season.
That is essentially a lunisolar model:
Moon → month and numbered day.
Sun → proper annual season.
The Gospels show Yeshua participating in the recognized Passover cycle, although they never give us a technical calendar algorithm. We therefore do not claim that the Gospels themselves explicitly teach crescent observation.
But we also found no compelling evidence that Yeshua was following the fixed Qumran 364-day festival dates instead.
8. The Earliest Christian Evidence Also Matters
The early Christian Passover controversy preserves an important memory.
Polycrates of Ephesus, writing near the end of the second century and preserved by Eusebius, defended observance of Passover on the fourteenth day and associated that practice with figures including John and Philip.
A later but still early witness, Anatolius, explicitly discusses the fourteenth day of the moon occurring after the spring equinox. He also describes the Asian Christian tradition as tracing its practice to John.
We do not treat these church writers as authorities over Scripture, and we remain cautious about later Greek and Hellenistic influence.
Their value is simply this:
The practice they describe is compatible with the lunisolar reading we derived from Scripture.
9. Geography: Which Crescent Counts?
We found no Torah command requiring every believer on earth to use the horizon of Jerusalem.
Israel’s calendar was already functioning in Egypt and Sinai, before Jerusalem became the central sanctuary.
Likewise, using the “first crescent seen anywhere on Earth” would make ancient obedience dependent upon worldwide communication that most people never possessed.
Our present solution is therefore regional and observable.
A household or fellowship uses a stable local geographic reference point. For us, that reference is the Eagle Point / Medford area of southern Oregon.
If the crescent is reasonably naked-eye visible from that region under normal clear conditions, the new month begins at that evening’s sunset.
This is not a scripturally stated mileage radius. It is a practical application of the astronomical visibility region itself.
10. Our Present Calendar Method
Our current reconstruction is therefore:
The solar cycle establishes the Aviv/spring season.
The first qualifying visible crescent establishes Month 1.
Passover is Month 1, Day 14.
If that candidate lunar month would place Passover before the Aviv/spring transition, another lunar month is allowed before Month 1.
Later months continue by lunar renewal.
Days begin at evening/sunset.
For the evening boundary, Leviticus 23:32 explicitly instructs Atonement to be kept “from evening to evening.”
11. Why 2026 Changed Our Calendar
2026 provided an unusually informative borderline case.
For the Medford/Eagle Point region, astronomical conjunction occurred on March 18 at approximately 6:23 p.m. PDT. On March 19 the young moon was about 0.9% illuminated and remained above the horizon until approximately 8:36 p.m., well after sunset.
Actual naked-eye crescent observation was independently reported in the United States on March 19.
The spring equinox occurred the following morning, March 20 at 7:46 a.m. PDT in the Medford area.
The full moon then occurred on April 1, almost exactly where we would expect the middle of this lunar month and the Passover period to occur.
Therefore the March lunar month already placed Passover clearly inside spring.
Under our present understanding, there was no scriptural reason to reject that month and wait another 29–30 days for the April crescent.
This is the central reason our calendar changed.
12. The Seventh Month and the Fall Appointments
The September astronomical new moon occurred on September 10, 2026 local time. Crescent-visibility calculations and observation reports placed the beginning of the next observational month on September 12, and an actual California crescent sighting was reported that evening.
Using sunset September 12 as Month 7, Day 1 gives:
| Appointment | Biblical date | Our 2026 reckoning |
|---|---|---|
| Feast of Trumpets / seventh-month beginning | Month 7, Day 1 | Sunset September 12–13 |
| Day of Atonement | Month 7, Day 10 | Sunset September 21–22 |
| Sukkot / Tabernacles begins | Month 7, Day 15 | Sunset September 26 |
| Seven-day Sukkot period ends | End of Day 21 | Sunset October 3 |
| Eighth-day assembly | Day 22 | Sunset October 3–4 |
Torah explicitly places Atonement on the tenth day of Month 7 and Tabernacles on the fifteenth.
The astronomical full moon occurred in the Medford area on September 26 at 9:49 a.m.
That places the beginning of our Day 15 almost exactly at the full moon, an important astronomical consistency check.
13. What This Means About Our Previous Calendar
This study means we believe our previous calendar placed the fall appointments too late.
That includes the uncomfortable conclusion that, under our revised reckoning, Atonement had already passed before we completed this study.
We are not attempting to rewrite what happened or invent a second Atonement date.
The mistake was not knowingly disregarding an appointment. It arose because we were sincerely trying to determine when the appointment actually occurred and our calendar understanding changed during that process.
Going forward, we believe faithfulness requires acting upon the best evidence we presently have rather than continuing with a date merely because it was already printed on our calendar.
14. What We Are — and Are Not — Claiming
We are saying that our study presently supports a lunisolar biblical calendar more strongly than the calendar we were previously following.
We are saying that 2026’s March lunar cycle qualifies naturally as Month 1 under that model.
We are therefore changing our published calendar accordingly.
We are not saying every detail has been proved beyond dispute.
Jubilees’ explicit 364-day teaching remains the largest unresolved textual objection. The exact biblical definition of the Aviv threshold is also not stated as a modern astronomical formula, and Scripture never gives a sentence explicitly commanding “first visible crescent from your local region.”
Those are reconstructions built from multiple pieces of evidence.
If stronger Scriptural, manuscript, linguistic, astronomical, or historical evidence demonstrates that one of these premises is mistaken, we will correct the calendar again.
We would rather publicly correct ourselves than defend a date simply because it was ours.
Conclusion
Our present understanding can be stated very simply:
Yah created an ordered system in the heavens. The sun keeps the appointed times in their proper annual season; the moon identifies the months; sunset begins the day; and Scripture tells us which numbered days are holy.
For 2026, that leads us to recognize the March lunar month as Month 1 and therefore September 26 at sunset as the beginning of Sukkot in our region.
The purpose of this change is not to create another calendar tradition.
It is the opposite.
We are trying to strip away assumptions and get as close as we presently can to the observable calendar described by Scripture.
Selected Sources
Genesis 1:14; Exodus 9:31; Exodus 12:2; Exodus 13:4; Leviticus 23; Numbers 28; Deuteronomy 16:1; 1 Samuel 20:5.
Sacha Stern, Calendar and Community: A History of the Jewish Calendar, 2nd Century BCE to 10th Century CE, Oxford University Press.
Jonathan Ben-Dov, “Astronomy and Calendars at Qumran”, on the 364-day schematic-sabbatical calendar and its incorporation of lunar phenomena.
James C. VanderKam, translation and commentary on Jubilees, especially Jubilees 6:32–36.
Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 3.10.5, describing Nisan 14 as the fourteenth day of the lunar month in the spring solar season.
Eusebius, Church History 5, preserving Polycrates’ testimony concerning fourteenth-day Passover observance.
Anatolius, Paschal Canon, discussing the fourteenth lunar day and spring equinox.
U.S. Naval Observatory, “Crescent Moon Visibility.”
International Astronomical Center September 2026 crescent observation data.
Timeanddate 2026 lunar phases for Medford and March 2026 solar data.