The cycle of 8 years is added above, since it has been stated that the Jews of Alexandria adopted this at one time from the Greeks. This was not so good as the cycle of 11 years would have been, and not to be compared with the combination of the two cycles in that of 19 years ascribed to Meton. The latter cycle was adopted by the Babylonian Jews, and forms the basis of the Jewish calendar in use to-day. CHAPTER VI THE CYCLES OF DANIEL The cycle of 49 years, marked out by the return of the Jubilee, was a useful and practical one. It supplied, in fact, all that the Hebrews, in that age, required for the purposes of their calendar. The Babylonian basic number, 60, would have given--as will be seen from the table in the last chapter--a distinctly less accurate correspondence between the month and the tropical year. There is another way of looking at the regulations for the Jubilee, which brings out a further significant relation. On the 10th day of the first month of any year, the lamb was selected for the Passover. On the 10th day of the seventh month of any year was the great Day of Atonement. From the 10th day of the first month of the first year after a Jubilee to the next blowing of the Jubilee trumpet on the great Day of Atonement, was 600 months, that is 50 complete lunar years. And the same interval necessarily held good between the Passover of that first year and the Feast of Tabernacles of the forty-ninth year. The Passover recalled the deliverance of Israel from the bondage of Egypt; and in like manner, the release to be given to the Hebrew slave at the year of Jubilee was expressly connected with the memory of that national deliverance. "For they are My servants, which I brought forth out of the land of Egypt: they shall not be sold as bondmen." The day of Jubilee fell in the middle of the ecclesiastical year. From the close of the year of Jubilee--that is to say, of the ecclesiastical year in which the freeing, both of the bondmen and of the land, took place--to the next day of Jubilee was 48-1/2 solar years, or--as seen above--600 lunations, or 50 lunar years, so that there can be no doubt that the period was expressly designed to exhibit this cycle, a cycle which shows incidentally a very correct knowledge of the true lengths of the lunation and solar year. This cycle was possessed by no other nation of antiquity; therefore the Hebrews borrowed it from none; and since they did not borrow the cycle, neither could they have borrowed the ritual with which that cycle was interwoven. That the Hebrews possessed this knowledge throws some light upon an incident in the early life of the prophet Daniel.