The New Moon (Rosh Chodesh)

Sacrifices & Feasts of the Old Testament collection. Monthly observance, sits between the weekly Sabbath and the annual festivals. Torah prescribes the offerings and never states the meaning.

Requirements

• First day of each lunar month, by observation of the new crescent.
• Substantial sacrifices, and this is the striking feature. Two bulls, one ram, seven lambs = a larger burnt offering than the Sabbath's two lambs, equal in scale to a major festival day.
  • Ashley's chart of Num 28-29 shows it sitting well above the weekly Sabbath and matching several annual feast days.
  • Purification offering of a male goat is also notable - the Sabbath has none.
• Trumpets. Num 10:10 requires the silver trumpets over the burnt and fellowship offerings "on the day of your gladness also, and at your appointed feasts and at the beginnings of your months." Purpose is the same as at The Feast of Trumpets: "they shall be a reminder of you before your God."
• No work prohibition in the Torah - unlike every festival in Lev 23.
  • But Amos 8:5 has merchants complaining "when will the new moon be over, that we may sell grain?" > a customary trading restriction had developed by the 8th C.
• Ashley: Num 28-29 moves daily > weekly > monthly > yearly, and the offerings are additive: the new moon offering is besides the continual burnt offering, festival offerings besides the new moon offering where they coincide.

Consecrating the Smaller Units of Time

• Same logic as the Sabbath but at a different interval. Morales's argument that the tabernacle needed appointed times or it would have no telos holds here - sacred space and sacred status require sacred time, layered daily, weekly, monthly, annually, and in 7-year and 50-year cycles.
• The new moon is the one that keeps the month from passing unmarked. Between Sabbaths (too frequent to feel like landmarks) and festivals (too rare), it marks a month with trumpets and a considerable quantity of livestock.

Polemic against the Moon - This is Probably the point

The cult of the moon was widespread in the ancient Near East, and the moon god figures prominently in the mythologies. Orthodox Yahwism strictly forbade the worship of the moon, as it did the veneration of any other heavenly body.

• Daniel I. Block, Ezekiel, Chapters 25-48 (NICOT)

• Sin, the moon god, was the patron deity of Ur and Haran - which is to say of both ends of Abraham's journey.
• Set that beside Gen 1:16, which conspicuously declines to name the sun and moon at all and calls them "the greater light" and "the lesser light" - demoting them from deities to fixtures.
• The new moon festival does the same thing liturgically. On the night the crescent appears, when the surrounding nations are worshipping it, Israel blows trumpets and sacrifices to the God who made it.
• Reframes the observance from calendrical housekeeping into a monthly confession. The moon is not a god, but it belongs TO God.
• Stuart: what English versions routinely render "month" "could often be more precisely rendered 'new moon'" - so Exod 19:1 reads "On the third new moon after the Israelites had gone out of the land of Egypt." He notes Israel arrived at Sinai on a new moon and the tabernacle was erected on one (Exod 40:2), "at the turn of the year as well."

Where It Appears Elsewhere

• Social and religious fixture beyond the sacrificial calendar.
  • David's absence from Saul's table at the new moon feast is a plot point (1 Sam 20:5, 18, 24-27).
  • The Shunammite's husband asks why she's going to the prophet "when it is neither new moon nor Sabbath" (2 Kgs 4:23) - tells us those were the customary days for visiting a man of God.
  • Ps 81:3 calls for the trumpet at the new moon.
• The prophets mention it almost exclusively as hollow religion.
  • Isa 1:13-14 - "Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hates."
  • Hos 2:11 threatens their cessation.
  • Amos 8:5 - merchants counting down the hours until they can get back to cheating people with rigged scales.
• Block: "Like the Sabbaths, with which the new moon festivals are often associated, the new moon celebrations in Israel tended to become routine and perfunctory, leading to the scathing indictments of the prophets (Hos. 2:13; 5:7; Isa. 1:13-14)."
• The new moon was the easiest observance in the calendar to keep - cost nothing personally, required no travel or fasting. Most convenient token of piety available. The prophets noticed.
• Isa 66:23 is the exception, and it's eschatological: "From new moon to new moon, and from Sabbath to Sabbath, all flesh shall come to worship before me." Block reads it as a vision of "a day when all flesh will be engaged in the perpetual worship of Yahweh."
  • Image is unbroken universal worship, not a restored lunar calendar.

Ezekiel Keeps It, and Changes It

Ezekiel's temple vision includes new moon offerings (46:6-7), and Block's comparison shows they don't match the Mosaic prescriptions:

• Block's verdict on the divergence: "His Torah is obviously going its own way."
• This has weight for how Ezek 40-48 should be read, and it cuts against the literalist position. If Ezekiel's temple were a blueprint for a literal future restoration of Mosaic worship, it would be strange for it to alter the quantities, drop the purification offering, and omit the wine.

New Testament Fulfilment

The new moon appears once. Col 2:16-17, in the list Paul relegates to shadow.

• Moo notes the threefold sequence heortē / neomēnia / sabbatōn is a standing OT formula (1 Chr 23:31; 2 Chr 2:3; 31:3; Ezek 45:17; Hos 2:13) - so Paul isn't listing three unrelated items but invoking the whole calendrical apparatus in familiar shorthand.
• Grudem makes the same observation and notes the new moon "was also a time for special offerings" (Num 29:6; Ezra 3:5; Ps 81:3; Isa 1:13).
• That's the whole NT treatment.
• Beale's summary: the redemptive-historical purpose of these observances was to function as a shadow of the coming body, which has arrived, so "the law's preparatory adumbrating function has come to an end."

No Typology

• No NT text identifies Christ with the new moon. No argument built from it.
• The connection sometimes drawn between the moon's monthly renewal and spiritual renewal has no textual basis whatever.

What Can Be Said

• Israel's calendar was designed so no unit of time passed without being handed back to God: the day by the tāmîd, the week by the Sabbath, the month by the new moon, the year by the festivals, the seven-year cycle by the fallow, the lifetime by the Jubilee.
• The new moon was the monthly instance of a total pattern.
• And that pattern hasn't been abolished so much as saturated. Paul's word about not letting anyone judge you over a new moon comes in the same letter as "whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus" (Col 3:17).
  • The old system consecrated time by marking specific points in it. The new covenant consecrates all of it - a harder discipline than watching for a crescent, and a better one.