July 19, 2011 – Numbers 28

The footnotes talk about Pentecost, at least in terms of the feast and timing described here, as being 15 days after the Passover. But when Christ died and the Holy Spirit descended, that took place on Pentecost, or at least I thought it did, and that was 50 days after Christ rose. If anyone wants to help figure that out or give a clearer understanding, that would be great. Here is a calendar for this year. There are 50 days between the first day of Passover and Pentecost. So, I guess I am just confused about the footnote. Well, let me take all that back, the footnote says fiftieth, not fifteenth.
Apr 7 Nisan 15 Pesach I (First day of Passover)
Apr 8 Nisan 16 Pesach II (Passover)
Apr 9 Nisan 17 Pesach III (Passover)
Apr 10 Nisan 18 Pesach IV (Passover)
Apr 11 Nisan 19 Pesach V (Passover)
Apr 12 Nisan 20 Pesach VI (Passover)
Apr 13 Nisan 21 Pesach VII (Last day of Passover)
Apr 26 Iyar 4 Yom HaAtzmaut (Independence Day)
May 27 Sivan 6 Shavuot (Pentecost)
This makes me want to learn more about our calendar. What would it look like if we just had a Lunar Calendar. How off would you be. I guess I don’t know much about the History of them or how we settled on what we have. Is our calendar close enough to continue going on forever, or will there come a time when we will need to be some year where we will have to add a second Leap Day in order to get back on track. If there is no getting back on track, would seasons start to shift, starting earlier or ending later. I also wonder why they chose 24 hours and 60 minutes. They are not very round numbers. You would have thought those that came up with the Metric system would have come up with a time measurement that was more symmetrical.
There are 86,400 seconds in a day. You could go about it 2 ways. Change the length of a second, make it shorter, and make each minute 50 seconds, each hour 50 minutes, and each day 50 hours. You could go into 100’s and either really speed up seconds or live on two day cycles, which would be interesting. Or you could go 44 seconds to a minute, 44 minutes to an hour, and 44 hours to a day. You are about 20 minutes off doing that, but that is pretty close.