Friday, April 11, 2014

A different view on Genesis 1

The Sabbath Calendar, I have argued, is a deliberate rejection of the historical luni-solar calendar of the Canaanite-Israelite traditions and, perhaps more importantly, a rejection of the Standard Mesopotamian Calendar. In this light, Genesis 1 provides a narrative charter, a mythic justification for a novel calendar based not solely on the lunar cycle but on septenary cycles that the author maintains are linked to observable solar, lunar, and astral phenomena.—Poetic Astronomy in the Ancient Near East, page 314

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