When God delivered Israel from Egyptian slavery, one of the first things he did was change their calendar. It was crucial for Israel to understand that being God’s people meant that everything had to change, including very point of reference for daily life: time. They lived by Pharaoh’s watch in Egypt, but now they would live by God’s watch. As Egypt represented an era marked by the reign of death and slavery, Canaan would be the era marked by rebirth and life. That time was over, and a new time has begun.
The primary markers for Israel’s new calendar was the institution of the Sabbath and the annual Pilgrimage Festivals. To put these into perspective, we have to be mindful of the fact that during the Egyptian slavery, all Israel did was work. Life was endless, grueling, unsatisfying work. It was constant labor. The rising of the sun meant the start of another work day. The day began with work. God would turn this on its head for Israel. God reoriented their days, weeks, and months. Rather than the week being organized around work, it would be organized around rest with the Sabbath and Pilgrimage Festivals (they were required to rest and celebrate!). The Sabbath would be the primary point or organization for the week.
As for the day, rather than the day starting with work, the day would start with rest for Israel. God instructed Israel that their day was to begin at sundown rather than at sunrise. In the same way, their year would begin with the settling in of the cold months of winter (in which there was rest from a farmer’s life) rather than the fading of the winter into Spring. This meant replacing the Egyptian solar calendar (a calendar dictated by the solar cycles) with a lunar calendar (dictated by the lunar cycles). This was to accentuate the otherness of Israel; that Israel was set a part among the nations of the world.
At the same time, the Jewish calendar makes various adjustments overtime in order to keep in-step with the solar calendar of the peoples around them. This meant that Israel’s calendar, being oriented around a different reality (rest and life in their covenant with Yahweh), still remembered the old calendar as an important part of their story. This new calendar unfolding against the old was a constant reminder that the old days of Egypt are gone, and a new day has come. Commenting on the importance Jewish calendar, Irving Greenberg says,
Thus, days and anniversaries and time locations reinforce the Jewish sense of otherness. Since Jews lived amid a gentile majority, in the realm of physical space Jewish identity was ‘deviant.’ By contrast, the calendar provided a framework of Jewish time that enveloped the Jews. It was a ‘total institution’ into which the Jew entered. In this way, personality and identity were reworked in light of Jewish memory and Jewish values. The calendar was a vehicle of Jewish solidarity…This does not mean the march of time in the Jewish community is paced by a totally different beat. Judaism’s message is dialectical–Jews are distinctive yet are part of society. In this spirit, the Hebrew lunar calendar was intercalated so as not to tear loose from the seasons of the solar year…the Jewish calendar was permanently synchronized with the solar one. Thus, the Hebrew calendar remained distinctive yet integrated in the host culture. The Jews walked on the path of their own elected mission even as they remained in step with the general society (Greenberg, 1993, p. 21).
In order to get Israel locked into this new calendar (surely not an easy thing to do!), they had the Sabbath each week. Going hand-in-hand with the Sabbath are the Pilgrimage Festivals. Every year, all the Israelites, no matter where they lived in the Promised Land, were required to journey to Jerusalem (or wherever the Temple was located) to remember and celebrate how God delivered them from Egyptian slavery. It was important to God that they did not forget what he had done for them (as humans with a sin nature, we too easily forget).
The new year is a wonderful time of remembering such things.
