How the Palestinian Barley Harvest Set the Judgment Date BY DONALD E. CA SEB OLT
their particular method of calculating the proper date of Yom Kippur. Fagal and Pfandl conceded that even Karaite Jews in the Holy Land (assuming there were any) may have celebrated Yom Kippur in September and not October of 1844. Concerning the month discrepancy between the two groups of Jews, Fagal wrote: “Te discrepancy, then, does not mean that the October date was wrong, even if *no* Jews observed it that year, for it is in harmony with the older and more authentic tradition.”2
Old Testament Harvests Ancient calendars, including the Jewish calendar, were structured by agricultural considerations. In most agrarian societies, people planted and harvested crops at the most propitious time of the year and thanked the gods responsible for a successful harvest by holding a celebration. Barley cultivated in Egypt (Exod. 9:31) and Palestine (Lev. 27:16; Deut. 8:8) was sometimes used as food for horses (1 Kings 4:28) or made into bread (2 Kings 4:42; Judg. 7:13) that was oſten eaten by poorer people. Because it was the first crop harvested in Palestine, typically in the middle of April at the time of the Passover (2 Sam. 21:9; Ruth 1:22), Yahweh had ordered that a sheaf of ripe barley was to be waved before the Lord (Lev. 23:10- 12) at that time. It was important for calendars to remain in sync with the
Samuel S. Snow proposed the method that Millerites ultimately used to set October 22, 1844, as the date for Jesus’ second coming.
In 2003, this question was posted on the Ellen G. White Estate website: “I have been studying the feast days and using the sources available. I have noticed that the feast day of Yom Kippur, or Day of Atonement, did not fall in October 1844. In fact, it was on September 23rd. Why are the Adventists so much set on October 22, 1844 when the month is wrong?”1 William Fagal, then-director of the Ellen G. White Estate
branch office at Andrews University, and Gerhard Pfandl, now- retired associate director of the Biblical Research Institute, responded online. Tey reviewed the Old Testament origins of the Day of Atonement as well as the history of the Karaite Jews, the oldest surviving alternative to rabbinic Judaism, and
seasons, which was accomplished in one of two ways. Te first, which we are accustomed to seeing in our Gregorian calendar, is to insert an intercalary day every fourth (leap) year. Julian and Gregorian calendars are both examples of solar calendars, based on the number of days that Earth takes to orbit the Sun. Te Jewish calendar, however, is based on lunar cycles and uses an intercalary month to synchronize with the seasons, when needed. In a lunar calendar, one month equals the amount of time it takes for the moon to make one complete revolution around Earth. Te Karaite Jews began their months when the new crescent
moon was first visible, which could vary, because cloud cover sometimes obscured the new moon. Tey were supposed to rely on actual empirical observations of both the moon and the ripening barley, determined by when a “sheaf of ripe barley” would be available (Lev. 23:10-12). If Jews could make direct observations of Palestinian barley and the new crescent moon, they could comply with God’s divine commands for commemorating seasonally determined celebrations. But how could they obey God’s commands once Jews were
exiled to the far corners of the world? Even if the local remnant of Palestinian Jews knew the precise date, this information could not be communicated in a timely fashion to the Diaspora.
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