This is what some passages of the Talmud[88] seem to teach; but from Old Testament Scriptures, it is not possible to infer these calendrical restrictions with any degree of certainty. On the contrary, there is much in the Scriptures to lead us to an opposite conclusion. [88] _Bible Educator_, edited by Rev. E. H. Plumptre, M.A., vol. iii. pp. 239 and 240. “It may have been with a view to render astrology impossible, that the Jews were forbidden to keep a calendar in the Holy Land, ... as the length of the lunation, or lunar month, is, roughly speaking, twenty-nine days and a half, it is easy to know, from month to month, when to expect the crescent to become visible. Six times in the year the beginning of the month was decided by observation of the new moon.... On two months of the year the determination of the new moon was of such importance, that the witnesses who observed the crescent were authorized to profane the Sabbath by travelling to give information at Jerusalem. These occasions were the months Nisan and Tisri.... The Mishna records that on one occasion as many as forty pairs of witnesses thus arrived on the Sabbath at Lydda. Rabbi Akiba detained them, but was reproved for so doing by Rabbi Gamaliel.... When the evidence was satisfactory, the judges declared the month to be commenced, and a beacon was lighted on Mount Olivet, from which the signal was repeated on mountain after mountain, until the whole country was aglow with fires.” On the very first page of the Bible we read of “the greater and the lesser lights,” and of “the stars also” set in the heavens, to be “for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years.” And scarcely have we turned this first page, when we meet the statement that “in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering.” In the margin the words “in process of time” are rendered “at the end of days.” In considering this passage we seem to be brought into touch with a definitely established year; and at once archæology and astronomy enter into the field of Biblical research, to tell us of a remotely old calendar--astronomic indications would date the origin of this calendar at about 6,000 B.C.--and from this calendar we learn that at “the end of days”--the end of the _dark_ days of the year--there followed a month of “the sacrifice of righteousness”: a sacrifice, we may well suppose, of the firstlings of the flock, as the stars in conjunction with the sun during this first month were imagined by the institutors of the calendar under the form of a lamb or ram ready for sacrifice.