Do you think the calendars in Moses' day were calculated the same as ours?

Question

If they said Moses lived 900 years...could their "years" have possibly been like "months"? Is there any written proof of their concept of time? Did they call years "years"? (I know they spoke a different language) I just mean..was a year to them the same as a year to us?

Answer 1

There were different calendar systems in place back then.

As far as Moses goes, you must understand that the story was written long after Moses lived and died.  There is probably a heroic angle at work here, mixed with a bit of mysticism.  It's less fact and more symbolism.

Answer 2

No, the calendar was different and remains so today (link below).

Many numbers used in the Bible are symbolic for example 900 could indicate he lived a long time and was wise not that he actually lived 900 years.

Also, try not to forget that the Bible is the most highly edited and most translated book in the entire world it would truly be a miracle if any modern version contained no errors.

The oldest complete of the Bible is in Greek and even in that language there are many words (like three distinct words for love) that translates poorly into English as love.

Psi

Answer 3

Well, most calendars throught the world use the rotation of the earth between a maximum and minimum to give the seasons. This really hasn't changed much in the last 30 million years.

Yes Moses did use a different length of year - His was 365 days long. Ours is 365 1/4.

It is far more likely he and his predecessors were from an ancient bloodline similar to the gods of Egypt - who were similarly considered immortal, but due to breeding, this has deminished to the same as we know today.

Once you go down this path - you end up in one place, and religion as most know it falls apart.

Nobody said everyone lived for 900 years back then - only his bloodline did.

Answer 4

no, not at all. The Julian calandar wasn't introduced until around Jesus's time, and the Gregorian calandar that we use today wasnt introduced until the 1500s.

Its my understanding that there calandar was based on the cycles of the Nile river, which would be very different.

After freeing his people from Egypt, moses spent the rest of his days wandering around in the wilderness. If you recall from the story, he died before they arrived in Isreal. I really don't think they could have possibly had any accurate measure of how much time had passed.

At some point in the past I found information on the old egyption calandar and calculated his age to be closer to 80 in the cycles of that calandar, which makes a lot more sense.

Still it was pretty old considering the life he lived.

Answer 5

The system they used has a name, I forget it though.

It was not like ours.

Answer 6

No! Ours is based on the Gregorian Calender.

Answer 7

The tales of very long lives in the Bible are just copies of similar and even wilder tales in nearby cultures. Read the "Shah Namah" of Persia some time. The calendars were somewaht differnt but not so much that anyone mistook months for years. You are not a fundamentalist if you do not accept the years as literal ones in the Bible. I have seen literature about it. Billy Graham gave me some that says days were days and years were years in the Bible. The evidence i have seen indicates a year was much the same to them. It might be 360, not 365 days, but that means little in trying to apaologize for 900+ year old men.

Answer 8

I suspect the concept of a "year" has drifted from its original meaning.  There are many examples of a word or term either drifting in meaning, drifting in spelling, or both (for example, the term "muckety-muck" came from the Chinook trade language patois term "hayo makamak" that originally meant "plenty to eat"--now, it means an self-important person, more or less; it's certainly spelled VERY different now).

Not having a firm grasp of what a "year" to the Moses-era peoples makes it a bit hard to understand how the standard has changed.  From a physics point of view, both the length of a solar year and the length of a solar day were shorter then than they are now, but not THAT much shorter.   One reason is friction.  The effect of friction with the widely scattered atoms and ions of 'empty' space is tiny...but over thousands of years, it adds up.  In the short amount of time of ten to 50 thousand years that humans have been around, well, I have the gut feeling that the solar year has gotten longer by only 1-3 days, and maybe less.  Similarly, the current solar day is not exactly 24 hours long.  It's actually about 23 hours and 57 minutes and some odd seconds long.  As I remember from high school physics, it will take another 75,000 to 100,000 solar years for the friction of the Earth's oceans against the land masses AND the Moon's gravity on the Earth, not to mention the Earth's gravity on the Moon to slow down it to exactly 24 hours to make one spin.

So, without knowing how the Moses-era folks meant a 'year' was, and how that 'year' was calculated, I think one can't really answer if a 900 year human life-span was really possible.  But, I note that archealogists have estimated the age at the time of death of folk who died during those times in Egyptian mummies and other human remains to be no more than 60 modern years old.  Plus, the calendars used were different, and sometimes were used at the same time, so converting from one calendar to another was complicated.  And if you think about it, anything that is very complicated is very easy to make a mistake in, so maybe it was a math error in doing the calendar conversions that made Moses 900 years old at his time of death.

Answer 9

Maybe but I bet they didn't have pictures af Justin Timberlake on them !

Answer 10

No, basically not the same as ours. First of all in Moses time, the Hebrews may at first be using the Egyptian calendar because they have been slaves to Egypt for a long time. Then over the years, they may have used their own Hebrew Calendar. The ancient Egyptian calendar is lunar (based on the phases of the moon). It has 360 days with 3 seasons, each made up of 4 months with 30 days in each month. The seasons of the Egyptian calendar corresponds with the cycle of the Nile River, called akhet.

The ancient Hebrew calendar is also lunar but is different than what the Egyptians used. In the ancient Hebrew calendar, one month is the period from one new moon to the next. For these calculations, the length of  a month is taken to be 29 days, 12 hours and 793 halakhim (1 hour = 1080 halakhim). The creation and basically the ages of prominent persons and developments were based on Ancient Hebrew Calendar. Both the ancient Egyptian & Hebrew calendar systems were shorter than our Gregorian Calendar.

Over the years man have used only two types of calendar systems: lunar and solar. Lunar is based on the phases of the moon. Muslim calendar and Chinese calendar are both lunar type. The other type, solar is based on the Earth's cycle around the sun. Both the Julian and our present Gregorian calendars are solar type.