101 Myths of the Bible: how ancient scribes - Conscious Evolution TV

Myths of the Heroes 283
The present story begins with a battle between two groups of twelve warriors, all
of whom die in the struggle. A chase scene follows and another battle occurs. After
this second confrontation, we are told that David’s followers lost “nineteen men” and
the rival camp lost“three hundred and three score men,” i.e., 360 men.
The numbers nineteen and 360 have important calendar connotations, as do, of
course, twelve versus twelve, which often signifies the battle between day and night.
Nineteen signifies a lunar calendar system, whereas 360 represents a solar calendar
system. The appearance of all these numbers in one story about a place where lunar
and solar cults were active seems too unlikely to be a coincidence.
In cultures that used a lunar calendar, such as the Babylonian, Greek, and Hebrew,
a problem arose in keeping track of agricultural cycles. The twelve-month lunar calendar,
alternating twenty-nine and thirty-day months, has only 354 days, causing the
calendar to fall out of synchronization with the true agricultural solar year. Unless an
occasional month was added in from time to time, the lunar calendar became useless
for organizing agricultural practices. So a system for determining when to add an extra
month had to be established. Such systems go back to at least 2400 B.C. in Sumeria.
At some point in time, the Babylonians introduced the idea of a nineteen-year
lunar-solar cycle, known as a lunisolar year, under which the addition of seven extra
months at fixed points in time over nineteen years kept the lunar and solar cycles in
close harmony. In the late Persian period, for example, an extra month was added in
years 3, 6, 8, 11, 14, 17 and 19.
In 432 B.C., a mathematician named Meton worked out a similar nineteen-year
cycle for the Greeks, which served the same purposes as the Babylonian cycle.
The Egyptians also had a lunisolar calendar but theirs was based on a twenty-fiveyear
cycle and it functioned simultaneously with the regular civil solar calendar. Every
twenty-five years, the New Year of both calendars fell on the same day.
The Egyptian solar calendar, on the other hand, consisted of 360 days divided into
twelve thirty-day months with five extra days added on at the end of the year. The
Egyptians also divided the day and night into twelve parts each.
Since the Babylonians used a lunar calendar with 354 days and a lunisolar calendar
with nineteen years, and the Egyptians used a solar calendar with 360 days and a