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Genesis 2:3
For millennia, most of the world has been using a week of seven days. These seven days continuously repeat in their accustomed order week after week after week. The first day of the week invariably follows the seventh day of the previous week with enduring regularity. That is how it has always been. Some people who keep the Sabbath are attempting to change that, believing that we have been wrong all along on how to determine the weekly Sabbath. They call this Sabbath the “lunar Sabbath,” so designated based on its relationship to the new moon, which is the marker for the start of Hebrew months. In their conception, our lunar Sabbaths occur during each Hebrew month, incrementally at intervals of seven days from the new moon. Hence, lunar Sabbaths fall on the 8th, 15th, 22nd and 29th days of each Hebrew month. (Instead, some lunar Sabbatarians observe the 7th, 14th, 21st and 28th days of each Hebrew month.) The lunar month, designated in the Hebrew calendar from new moon to new moon, is 29.5 days long. Since a calendar cannot divide days in half, in practice, some Hebrew months last 29 days, others last 30 days. (Lunar Sabbatarians express divided convictions concerning the way the “extra” days are handled. Not all of them treat them in the same way.) These extra day(s) in the lunar month mean that the lunar Sabbath falls on a different day of the week from lunar month to lunar month. The lunar Sabbath will fall on the same day of the week only four consecutive times before the end of the lunar month arrives and the lunar Sabbath is “reset” based on the next new moon. For example, it may fall on a Thursday in one Hebrew month, but on a Sunday in another lunar month, since the lunar Sabbath is reset after the passage of 29 or 30 days, that is, reset with the coming of another new moon. (The “mathematical” way of looking at this is that seven, the number of days in a week, does not divide evenly into either 29 or 30.) The weekly Sabbath observed by the Jews and by the churches of God is called the “seventh-day Sabbath.” It is so named because it is the seventh day of a recurring seven-day cycle that came into existence at the end of Creation Week, when God pronounced the seventh day as holy (Genesis 2:3). He taught the seventh-day Sabbath to the children of Israel just after they left Egypt by controlling the way manna fell during the week, as related in Exodus 16. It fell every day except on the seventh-day Sabbath. The Sabbath became enshrined in the Hebrew calendar. The Jews have been observing that recurring seventh day ever since that time. The primary difference between the seventh-day Sabbath and the lunar Sabbath is this: The seventh-day Sabbath does not “reset” with the coming of each lunar month. The lunar month is irrelevant to determining the arrival of the seventh-day Sabbath, which is based simply on a recurring seven-day cycle. Hence, the seventh-day Sabbath always falls on the same day of the seven-day week. It falls on a day the Jews call Sabbath, which the Romans named Saturday.
Charles Whitaker
The Lunar Sabbath or the Seventh-Day Sabbath: Which?
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