To this calendrical first month our attention is again drawn when we read, in the book of Exodus, of the institution at God’s command of the Hebrew festival, to be held on the 14th and 15th days of the month Abib. This month Abib, it is generally assumed, is the equivalent of the month Nisan, spoken of in some of the later books of the Old Testament. Astronomy and archæology again claim a hearing on this point. The month Nisan, the Semite equivalent of the Accadian month Bar zig-gar (the month of the “sacrifice of righteousness”), we may gather from the evidence of the cuneiform tablets, had been the first month of a calendrical year in Babylon for many centuries--for millenniums, perhaps--before the date of Moses; and therefore archæology would teach us that the children of Israel were being recalled, from strange Egyptian modes of reckoning, to the observance of an ancient and patriarchal year and festival, when they were told that for them Abib was to be the first month of the year, and that on the 14th of that month, “a night to be much observed,” they were to sacrifice of the firstlings of their flock, and were to hold the great festival of the Passover on the fifteenth day. If “Abib,” “Nisan,” and “Bar zig-gar” are names used by various nations to designate one and the same month, Abib could not have been, as has very generally been supposed, a month varying according to the uncertain ripening of agricultural crops, and one taking its name from the _ears of corn_ presented to the priest, and waved before the Lord on some fixed day of that month; but rather it must have been (as we know, from Babylonian sources that Nisan was) a well calculated soli-lunar and sidereal month. Now, if we adopt this view, we must find some alternative derivation for the month name Abib. Nor is it by any means difficult so to do. On the fourteenth night of the first month--Bar zig-gar, Nisan, or Abib--“a night to be much observed,” or rather, according to the marginal reading, “a night of observations”--the bright star Spica, which marks the _ears of corn_ in the Virgin’s hand, rose above the eastern horizon as the sun set in the west, and at midnight must have shone down brilliantly on the Hebrew hosts; for Spica is so bright a star, that even the beams of the full moon riding close at hand could not have obscured its lustre.