The NT stands in great contrast to the OT in its paucity of reference to the ' ne^v moon.' ' New moon ' figures in the OT as a familiar and important season in the time-scheme of Hebrew life (see 1 S 20, 2 K 4^') with some holiday relaxations and customs associated with it. So was it with other peoples from earliest times.
It would be to go beyond our limits to venture on a general treatment of the subject here. For this see, inter alia, the art. ' New Moon ' by I. Abrahams in HDB. Still it may be said that a reference to the moon and its changes naturally and inevitably entered into the first attempts of primitive man to mark jieriods of time. After the immediate and primary distinction between day and night, arising from the regular appearance and disappearance of the sun, the recognition of the month as the period covered by the surprising and ever- fascinating phenomena of the moon's phases marked an important step in advance. And when due study of the procession of the seasons and the attendant solar phenomena led to the measuring of a year, the moon -period lost none of its import- ance. The ancients, however, soon found them- selves confronted with puzzling problems in the effort to relate the months to the years. The fixed idea that every month must begin with the appear- ance of the new moon brought endless difficulties in its train. It took centuries to substitute the calendar month for the lunar month and secure as nearly as possible that the year should comprise twelve montlily periods preserving the same order of succession and a fixed correspondence with the seasons.
We can understand, too, how primitive man must instinctively have made the reappearance of the moon after obscuration an occasion for festal re- joicing. Even now we feel the charm of the first sight of the delicate pale crescent in the sky. And how natural it was that the celebration of the new moon should enter into the religion of nature- worshipping men, to whom the sun and moon were veritable gods and the terms ' King of Day ' and ' Queen of the Night ' more than poetic ex- pressions ! (As to the latter, we must not forget that the moon was regarded amongst some jieople as a masculine deity, as the German der Mond bears witness. Grimm [Teutonic Mythology, ed. Stally- brass, London, 18S2-S8, ii. 704] quotes an old Norse incantation, calling upon ' New Moon, gracious Lord ' [cf. art. ' Moon ' in Chambers's Encyc. vol. vii. (1891)].) Traces of such deification are suffi- ciently present in the OT : see Job 3P"-, 2 K 23=, etc. ; whilst the phrasing of Gn 1'* in the creation- story surely echoes such conceptions of more ancient days.
The incorporation of the New Moon as a festival —both a holy day and a holiday — among Jewish feasts is best explained as the effort of monotheism to take up institutions already long existing, free them from objectionable features, and make them subservient to a worthier faith. Cf. the action taken by the Christian Church in relation to pagan
90
^EW AIUUN
^'ICULAITAKS
festivals {e.g. Yule— Christmas), overlaying them with new religious associations.
AA'lien we consider how conspicuously the Sabbath figures in tlie NT, and what traces we have of such great annual feasts as Passover and Pentecost, it IS singular that, save for a passing reference in Col 2'" and Gal 4"', we have no hint that a monthly festival was still observed in ajiostolic times. We might have concluded but for these passages that the New Moon, so prominent in tlie OT, had fallen into desuetude. But in St. Paul's phrasing in these two passages (especially Col 2™) there re- appears the three-fold classification of Jewish feasts which had become fixed in post-Exilic times (see Ezk 45", ' in the feasts and in the new moons and in the sabbaths ' ; cf. Ezr 3'). The classification plainly rests on the fundamental time-scheme : year, month, week (see also the particularly in- teresting grouping in Jth 8*: 'the eves of the sabbaths, and the sabbaths, and the eves of the new moons, and the new moons, and the feasts and joyful days of the house of Israel '). St. Paul would not have spoken of ' new moon ' and ' months ' were it not that, as we know, the pro- clamation of new moon and the attendant celebra- tions were still regular features of Jewish life. But it is a noticeable fact that whilst the Christian Church developed a system of festivals closely parallel to that of the Jews in some of its out- standing features (Sabbath, Passover, Pentecost), it provided no counterpart to the festival of the New Moon.
In the 4th cent., it is true, we find St. Chryso- stom vigorously denouncing Christians for obser- ving the neomcnia {Horn. 23 : 'in Kalendas ' or ' in eos qui novilunia observant' — quoted by Joseph Bingham, Antiquities, XVI. iv. 17 [Works, new ed., vi. (Oxford, 1855) 226 n.]). He complains of their giving way to intemperance and excess and practising divination in the hope of good luck. The things he condemns, however, were pagan, not Jewish. There is no reason to suppose that St. Paul in deprecating the observance of seasons in this way had the thought of such disorderly practices in his mind. So far as divination, e.g., is concerned, its connexion with the new moon must be of very ancient origin. Babylon had her ' monthly prognosticators ' (Is 47"). Some quaint innocuous superstitions still lingering in folk-lore and connected with the first sight of the new moon, notions of good and bad luck attending thereon, no doubt have descended from some such ancient, far-off source. But Judaism has no trace of such features in the history of its New Moon celebra- tion.