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Counting in the Hebrew

Idiom

In order to clearly understand the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and
the events that occurred during the last week He spent on planet earth, we
need to know how to correctly count the events that forged this momentous
time in history. If we try to pinpoint these events according to the method of
counting we use today, we arrive at nothing but error and mass confusion. The
KEY to eradicating this error and confusion lies in the way the 1st century
Jews counted time, and the fact that their system of arithmetic knew nothing of
the number "0"!

Jim Sorenson
John D. Keyser

In 1 Corinthians 5:7 we read:

Therefore purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you truly are
unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us.

In this passage we clearly see that Christ is the Passover. Now, what exactly does this pas-
sage mean? It means that in the process of becoming that final and perfect Passover, every rule,
every law that God gave in respect to the Passover Lamb -- from its selection to its death -- was
obeyed by Jesus the Christ to the very letter of the law.

But before we can comprehend this, and the chronology involved, we need to clearly un-
derstand the Old Testament scriptures concerned with the Passover lamb. And, most importantly,
we also need to understand how to count as THOSE WHO WROTE THE BIBLE counted. We
need to go back to our Hebrew roots, if you please. While most Americans would count six days
before the Passover as Nisan 8, a 1st-century Jew would have counted six days before Passover as
Nisan 9. To understand HOW to count as the authors of the Bible counted, let's look at the way a
child's age is counted -- in both American and Hebrew idiom.

Counting in Hebrew and Western Idiom

In American (read Western) culture a child is not considered to be one year old until he has
reached his first birthday. But in reality, that child is in his FIRST YEAR from his birth up to his
first birthday. He is then in his second year immediately following his first birthday. The term " a
son of one year" in the Hebrew language is used to describe a child from birth to his first birthday.

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