Today we live in a 365-day year solar calendar with leap years to keep it aligned with the sun. In prophetic and narrative accounts the Bible consistently reckons the year as 360 days. Whether it is in Genesis or the book of Revelation’s “times, a time and a half a time,” forty months or 1260 days, the year is still reckoned as 360 days. It is an idealized time that requires a reset. This I argue is a revelation of our broken world. The sabbath resets and the calendar resets tell us about the need for redemption. 

The new year is here. It is a time when people reflect on the past year, make resolutions, and make plans for what lies ahead. We celebrate, we count down, we look forward to a fresh beginning. And we should—there is something deeply human about marking time and hoping for renewal.

Yet for many, once the music stops, another realization sets in. The new year is also the season of income tax declarations, car license plate renewals, registrations and other bureaucratic requirements. We suddenly realize we are not free, but we are living under Big Brother’s boot.

The New Year celebration often makes me feel as though we are living in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World—a society in which dictatorship wears the appearance of democracy and slaves learn to love their servitude. This is the worst kind of slavery: when a man does not even know he is a slave and instead celebrates his own enslavement.

But this is not new. Slavery has taken many forms throughout history. When Mary and Joseph traveled to Bethlehem, they did so not for a holiday, but to comply with a census—an imperial summons that was, in effect, a demand to be counted, assessed, and taxed. Even the birth of Christ took place under the shadow of rulers who claimed authority over time, territory, and people.

The contrast is striking. We celebrate the new year as if time were ours to command, yet Scripture reminds us that time has rulers—and that we often live under them. This raises a deeper question: whose time are we really living in? Imperial time, measured by decrees and demands—or God’s time, ordered by the sun and moon and leading ultimately to the eternal Sabbath?

One of the questions that has always troubled me is why January 1st is the new year in the first place. As a merchant mariner—having studied and practiced celestial navigation and the movements of the heavenly bodies, January 1st has always struck me as strangely arbitrary[i]. It marks neither the beginning of winter nor the renewal of spring. The vernal equinox on March 21st, when the sun crosses the equator into the northern hemisphere and signals the return of life, would seem a far more natural beginning of the year. In fact, the older Roman calendar followed this logic and began in March. We still carry traces of that older calendar in our language: September means “seventh,” October “eighth,” November “ninth,” and December “tenth.” How, then, did January 1st come to stand at the head of the year?

It began when the Roman Empire needed to administer an empire. The Julian calendar was, as the name implies, created by Julius Caesar, Rome’s first dictator for life. He wanted to rule time instead of being ruled by time. Biblically, however, time was governed by the heavens as it says in Genesis 1:16.

And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars.

Time was not to be controlled by man. When Daniel speaks about the ruler of the fourth beast, he says in Daniel 7:25:

He shall speak words against the Most High, and shall wear out the saints of the Most High, and shall think to change the times and the law; and they shall be given into his hand for a time, times, and half a time.

When Daniel spoke to Nebuchadnezzar about the true God, he said in Daniel 2:20-21.

Daniel answered and said: “Blessed be the name of God forever and ever, to whom belong wisdom and might. He changes times and seasons; he removes kings and sets up kings; he gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to those who have understanding;

Here Daniel reveals who has authority to change times and seasons. We are under that authority not over it. God rules time, not man. He has given us two visible governors—the sun and the moon. The stars are not rulers but signs.

Even though Julius Caesar reformed the calendar by decree, he failed to account for the extra 11 minutes in the true length of the solar year. That small error accumulated over centuries, eventually requiring a major correction in the 16th century—when Pope Gregory XIII instituted the Gregorian reform. Whether it is Julian or Papal—it is still a Roman imperial reckoning of time.

The Biblical Calendar

The Bible uses a luni-solar calendar that seeks to honor the two governing lights God established—the sun and the moon (Gen. 1:14–18). These two cycles cannot be perfectly synchronized without periodic adjustment, and a calendar that requires periodic adjustment is not defective. It is descriptive of what is. The lack of perfection tells us something is broken. Time is broken and needs to be fixed. If the fall brought death and decay, is it any wonder that time itself would manifest this brokenness. That we are under time and not over it is a result of the fall. All mankind is under a sentence of death. The clock is ticking.

The periodic adjustment is required because the solar year is about 365.24 days, while a lunar year—twelve lunar months—is only about 354 days. The Hebrew calendar adjusts for this by inserting an intercalary month when needed, keeping the lunar months in step with the solar seasons. It is not perfect, but that is the point. Life itself needs adjustment, and the process is often messy just like the calendar. The adjustment of the calendar is a reset, and likewise our salvation too is often framed as a reset. We go from chaos, sin, and death that is reset to a new creation, new obedience and eternal life.

In its earlier practice, this intercalation was guided by observation of the seasons and by communal, pastoral judgment rather than by a fixed biblical rule. Scripture prescribes the feasts and their seasons, but not a formal calendrical mechanism for maintaining alignment. The Bible did not teach a regulative principle of calendar adjustment. Only later—especially in the Second Temple period—did rabbinic authorities begin to systematize and standardize the process.

Just as Rome was consolidating power through administrative standardization, so too were Israel’s religious elites consolidating authority through religious standardization. What begins with order often becomes control; what begins with control soon becomes centralized power. By the time of Jesus, both empire and the Jewish religious establishment had learned to rule not only land and labor, but time itself.

The Ideal Solar Year

The commonly referenced 360-day year is not a natural astronomical year but a schematic or ideal year, rooted in ancient astronomical and mathematical practice[ii]. It is what mathematicians call a highly composite number which means it is highly divisible. One of the great revelations God has given to man is the movements of the heavenly bodies. All ancient cultures studied the heavens, and many worshiped the astral bodies as gods. Psalm 19 says that the heavens declare the glory of God, yet man in his corruption turns away from that revelation.

To organize the heavens in a mathematical and orderly way without fractions the ancients used the highly composite number 360. They divided the heavens into 12 by 30-degree segments. The number twelve is mathematically rich: it is divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6, making it exceptionally practical for measurement and division. The 12 divisions are known as the Zodiac that follows the ecliptic which is the path the sun makes in the heavens relative to the stars. The constellations that reside in those 12 divisions are called the signs of the Zodiac[iii].

Multiples of twelve amplify this usefulness. Sixty (12 × 5) is divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30, which is why ancient cultures adopted the sexagesimal (base-60) system for time and angles. Thirty-six (3 × 12) is divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, and 18, further reinforcing its utility.

We still rely on this system today. A circle has 360 degrees; a compass has 360 degrees, navigation uses 90 degrees of latitude and 180 degrees of longitude; and time itself is structured around base-60 divisions (60 seconds, 60 minutes). These conventions preserve ancient numerical grammar that prioritizes divisibility, order, and harmony rather than absolute synchronization.

This is, of course, conjecture, but is it possible that before the Fall the solar–lunar calendar was not in need of adjustment? If the Fall brought decay, disorder, and death—and was, in a sense, a kind of creation in reverse, a return to the chaos at the beginning—then perhaps the calendar too was subjected to this disorder. In Hebrew, the word for chaos is tohu va-bohu; thus, our present calendar may represent this condition of chaos. The various resets, then, become necessary because of the Fall. Scripture’s constant reference to a 360-day year may therefore mark a promise of the eventual healing of time itself. The Scripture then uses Edenic time instead of fallen time. The resets are reminders of the fall and a promise of restoration by a Redeemer.

The Weekly Cycle

Having seen why the Bible and many ancient cultures used the ideal year instead of the actual solar year, it is now time to look at the weekly cycle. Every culture organizes time based on a week of 7 days, but this arrangement has no astronomical significance. Four weeks make up 28 days, which is not quite a lunar month.

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[i] I was trained in celestial navigation—an ancient navigational science that determines position by observing the sun, moon, and stars. In the course of that training, I learned to use the sextant to take angular measurements of celestial bodies and then calculate a line of position. With several observations, it was possible to get a triangulated position on a chart. Sometimes in the practice of celestial navigation with the right atmospheric conditions a position can be obtained that is the same as the satellite GPS system. Such knowledge was once common but has been largely neglected today. Yet in an unexpected way this knowledge is returning, as a simple cell phone can display the ecliptic and the movements of the heavens. This reminds us that this ancient grammar of the skies is not lost but just neglected.

[ii] The mathematical prominence of numbers such as 60 and 360 is not arbitrary or merely symbolic; it reflects patterns that appear throughout the natural world. Both are highly composite numbers, meaning they possess an unusually large number of divisors, which makes them especially suited for measurement, proportion, and harmony. This is why ancient cultures consistently used base-60 systems for time, angles, and navigation—and why these systems remain in use today.

Nature itself exhibits similar ordered patterns. Snowflakes form with sixfold symmetry; musical harmony is structured around numerical ratios; crystalline forms, orbital motions, and wave patterns all display recurring mathematical regularities. What is sometimes called sacred geometry is simply the recognition that creation bears an intelligible order that can be described mathematically. To observe this is not to endorse mysticism or astrology, but to affirm with Scripture that “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps. 19:1). The use of numbers such as 60 and 360 in biblical and ancient thought therefore reflects not superstition, but an intuitive awareness that the world itself is structured by proportion, rhythm, and design.

[iii] A Note on the Zodiac: The Zodiac is of ancient origin, and the Bible itself speaks of the constellations (Job 38:31–32). Very early on, however, what began as simple observation of the heavens was transformed into superstition—the belief that human lives are governed by the stars. That development stands in clear tension with Scripture, which teaches that God alone rules over human history.