The text has been quoted that makes the 360 day year the base. I think I quoted two passages that confirm what I've said. One of the most well known authorities was also cited. VanderKam is probably the leading authority in the world on the calendrical statements of the Dead Sea Scrolls. My reliance though is on the passages themselves. Because there is a resemblance in an imitation calendar is no reason to discount the genuine. There is an old English proverb that says 'Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.'

The question is not whether the 360 day year is the base year or not. I’ve established that it is to my satisfaction, but not to your Rosangela and we’ll have to disagree. Moving on, the question that still remains to be answered more fully is whether the base year of the AB Calendar which is 360 days is the same as the 360 day prophetic calendar of scripture. If you can bare with me a bit longer, I’ll post more evidence showing that that question should also be answered ‘Yes’.

The main passages of scripture dealing with the 360 day prophetic year are the ones in Daniel and Revelation. Most Adventists know that the 1260 days are referred to in three ways – as 42 months, 3 and a half years (expressed in the KJV as a “time, times and dividing of a time”) and 1260 days. This leaves us with no doubt that the prophetic month has 30 days and the prophetic year 360 days. But, why would God, who knows all about the cycle of the seasons express prophetic time in this way rather than in some more ‘accurate’ way? According to statements in the AB Calendar, the reason is that the true year in absolute time has 360 days.

It sounds strange doesn’t it to read something like that. But this is what the AB calendar is saying. Notice the following passage from the AB Calendar:
In other words, in the AB Calendar, the lunar year has 354 days. If the sun and stars have an ‘overplus’ of 6 days in a year, the true year must have 360 days. So although the AB Calendar makes the solar year 364 days of calendar time, it clearly says that the four additional days are ‘intercalated’ or added. So, in the AB Calendar, the true solar year is 360 days, but each year four days are included that are considered the markers for the turn of each season. This is more accurate than my earlier statements that the solar year is 364 days. But it is confirmed in the above quote and as if to underscore that they don’t belong to the actual days of the year, in the AB Calendar, for some purposes they are not counted at the turns of the seasons but are included at the end.

This harmonizes precisely with the flood account where the five months in Gen 7 and 8 have exactly 150 days. The seasonal marker days are not included in the flood narrative but are included at the end of the year to keep the year's aligned with the seasons. (See my posts above on the evidence of the 364 day year in the flood account.) But in the case of prophetic time in the Bible, the standard 360 day year is used and the four intercalated days are left out. So there is a direct connection between the three parallel years of the AB Calendar, with prophetic time and solar time being identical, except that in the case of solar time the four intercalated days are added to the calendar.

This raises some interesting questions but I’ll have to leave them for now and sign off.

In my last post I said that the standard for time in the AB Calendar is the 360 prophetic year. Put another way, a true year has 360 days regardless of how many days there are in a solar or lunar year. Or to say it differently again, a true year is not dependant on the relationship of the earth to the sun and/or moon but in fact the converse is true - that is, that the solar and lunar years are fully dependant and directly related to the prophetic year and are measured by this standard. Is there biblical and scientific support for this position? It turns out there is support from both sources. First, the biblical proof:

In Judges 10 we have the record of a day of double length from the usual day. In the heat of battle and at mid-day Joshua called on God in the hearing of the hosts of Israel to make the sun and the moon stand still in order to complete his victory before nightfall over the five kings and their armies that he was pursuing. God heard and granted his request, and the record says that the sun stood still ‘for about a whole day’ while Joshua and his men completed their work. So, we should be asking, what happened when the sun stood still - did time stand still and Joshua and his men completed their work outside of time, or did time continue its onward march regardless of the behaviour of the sun? Clearly, it was the latter. If time had stood still along with the sun, nothing would have been done because time is the only way that change is effected and things are accomplished. So time marches on with or without the motion of the heavenly bodies.

The same is true in the case of Hezekiah and the sun dial. The sun in this case moved back, but time went inexorably forward. From this we see that the sun and moon and earth do not have the final say in measuring time. In Joshua’s case the sun lingered for a ‘day’ at its zenith. How long is that if it is not a solar day? And, what is the true measure of a day? And how did the person writing the account know that about a day had elapsed while the sun was stationary.

Regarding the last question the author likely knew a day had passed because Joshua and his men travelled a distance in their pursuit of the enemy that normally took a day to accomplish.

Regarding the question of what is a true day, I'm suggesting that the true measure of a day is defined by the prophetic day and the true measures of the week, month and year are 7, 30 and 360 prophetic days respectively. According to Christ, there are 12 (prophetic) hours in a (prophetic) day which implies there are 12 prophetic hours in a prophetic night. The truth of the 24 hour prophetic clock was demonstrated by Josiah Litch in about 1833.

Regarding the scientific evidence there is complete agreement in the scientific community that the duration of the orbit of the earth about the sun is changing slightly from year to year - it is slowing if I remember right. (Whether I have the direction of change right is not important. What matters is that the scientists all agree there is a slight change.) Scientist agree this does not mean that time is slowing as well. On the contrary, scientists agree that atomic clocks demonstrate that time moves steadily forward even though the rate of the earth’s rotation from day to day varies by several minutes during the course of each year. Unfortuantely however, the same scientific community with few exceptions also believes in an incomprehensible abstract notion of relative time but this is a quite modern (and misguided) development. In contrast to modern scientists, Isaac Newton firmly and emphatically believed in absolute time. If fact it was so central to his world view that he took special pains to explain himself in his most famous work, the Principia. Here is a small part of what he had to say by way of introduction to the main theses of his work regarding gravity and the laws of mechanics:

Notice the last part of Newton's statement - true, absolute and mathimatical time flows 'equably', or evenly, regardless of external motions such as the movement of the earth relative to the sun or the moon. I suggest that God is able to measure true time, being its creator, and He has even revealed to us the units by which true time is measured - the true, the absolute prophetic day.

The purpose of my last few posts was to show from science and from scripture that the movements of the sun and moon are not the standard of measurement for true time; that true time is measured on the prophetic calendar of the 360 day prophetic year; and that this is also the same standard that is used in the AB Calendar.

If the prophetic day is the standard measurement of time, then what is the purpose of the solar day, the lunar month, the solar year etc? According to Genesis 1:14 the purposes of the sun, moon and stars are seven fold. They are:

• “to divide the day from the night”,
• “the greater light, [the sun, is] to rule the day,”
• “and the lesser light, [the moon, is] to rule the night”
• and, the heavenly bodies are “for signs”
• “for seasons”
• “for days,”
• “and years”.

So, while the prophetic day is the standard measurement of time, it is clear that from the beginning the heavenly bodies have a time keeping function. They are our heavenly clock. But just as the clock on your computer or hanging on your wall does not make the sun move faster if it gains several minutes a day, in the same way, the heavenly bodies do not have any effect on the true passage of time if they stop dead as in Joshua’s long day, or if they accelerate. The old English proverb states: “Time and tide wait for no man.” This is generally true, but in addition, true time not only does not wait for man, it also does not wait for the sun, moon or stars. It obeys one God, the creator. So we see that time flows evenly and I suggest that God gives us the unit and system to measure true time - the prophetic day and the 360 day prophetic calendar.

This brings up another question: What happened to the cycle of the week during Joshua's long day? Clearly, nothing happened, the week remained intact. If that is true, then does that violate the prophetic clock principle by throwing the prophetic clock out of sync with the solar clock? The short answer is no: just as the 365.2422 day solar year does not break the synchronism of the prophetic clock with the solar year, in the same way, the synchronism of the prophetic week is not broken when a longer day suddenly appears as in Joshua's case. Why that is so may be beyond us. It's probably better not to speculate on the mechanism.

Regarding ‘relative time’ and Einstein’s ‘theory of relativity’ I’ve wondered why scientists are quick to interpret his equation of E=mc2 as support for relative time. It seems to me that his energy-mass equation makes the speed of light the constant so that everything is measured in terms of the speed of light. And according to the scientists who all agree that energy never is lost – it only changes form - light's speed is truly a constant in this equation by the conservation of energy principle. If the equation is true, then the speed of light is the standard of measurement.

The equation is based, in fact, on two absolutes and one constant – time and space being the absolutes and the speed of light being the constant. Speed is distance divided by time. In order for there to be distance there has to be absolute space (by definition, relative space is not space unless there is absolute space) and travel over absolute space is done in units of absolute time. So although scientists hold Einstein in higher regard than Newton, it seems to me that Einstein's best known formula supports Newton's original ideas of absolute time, space and motion.

Earlier in the thread I made the argument that there must be a permanent divine calendar that is outside the ceremonial law because if that law is no longer in effect and the ancient Jewish calendar was merely a part of the ceremonial law, then today we have no basis for honouring the Sabbath. But as all Adventists agree, the Sabbath predates the ceremonial law. It was given to man at creation. So there is still today, at a minimum, a divine calendar that tracks the Sabbath.

But the interesting thing to notice about the creation account is that the weekly cycle is not dependant on the movement of the heavenly bodies. Since the sun and moon were created on the fourth day, how were the first three days measured and when did the divine calendar go into effect? Did the divine calendar begin on the first day of creation or on the fourth? Since time on earth started on day one not day four, and since the main lesson we glean from creation is that the handy work of God was completed in the seven days of a literal week, the divine calendar must have been in effect from the first day of creation, not from the fourth.

The record in Genesis states, ‘the evening and the morning were the first [and second and third] day’ so, again, time and time keeping began on day one, not on day four. This is a further argument in favour of absolute time as it shows that while the motions of the heavenly bodies are a reliable source for reckoning time, that true time is completely independent of them. God in his wisdom knew when the first day was over without their help. And being a God of order, we can be sure that His reckoning of the hours of the first three days were exact and not arbitrary. God created time to flow evenly from the beginning and at the end of the creation week, although the sun and moon were created on the fourth day, a full, exact week had passed on the divine calendar.

A divine calendar independent of the sun and moon must have existed at the time of creation otherwise there would be no way of knowing that four days had passed before the creation of the heavenly bodies. Is the AB Calendar this divine calendar? Below I’ll provide another reason to answer this in the affirmative:

Recall that the solar year in the AB Calendar has 364 days composed of 360 regular days and four additional intercalated days. In the creation account there are also four ‘intercalated’ days. The first four days cannot be logged as regular days on the divine calendar because the sun and moon did not exist. So they are intercalated on that calendar, and these are the same four days that are also intercalated on the AB Calendar. This is further evidence that the AB Calendar is indeed this divine calendar.

Someone familiar with the AB Calendar may object to my last post by noting that in the creation account, the four ‘intercalated’ days come first followed by the rest of the year whereas in the AB Calendar the intercalated days come at the end of the year.

In the AB Calendar, based on manuscripts from the Dead Sea Scrolls, it appears to have been customary at Qumran to insert the four intercalated days at the end, but the AB does not require that. It says only that the four days are not reckoned in the year. So inserting them at the end is permissible but only if it is understood that they are not counted as part of the year, and if they are not part of the year, they are not, in fact, at the end or at the beginning. They augment the entire year by four days but no particular segment.