Friday, October 21, 2022
the moon is a more useful calendar than the sun
I don't know why, but I was thinking of some of the rather 'aged' people in old testament. The ones where they live to ridiculous ages. Noah for instance lived to 950 years old, according the Bible History web site.
It made me think how useless the sun is for counting time. You can do hours and years approximately, and but days you have to separately count. But actually it is pretty useless as a source of information.
But the moon is a much better instrument of time, with not only lunar months, which you can count, and years, in the same way as with the sun, but also you have a pretty good guess at the number of the day within the lunar month: Using the phases of the moon, of course. Indeed the you would be mad to pay too much attention to the sun, if you have a decent moon to look at. This would be true of any planetary system.
No wonder some major religions do things on a lunar calendar basis. Easter etc.
It would seem totally reasonable to think that one might count long periods in terms of lunar months, rather than years. So my thought is that when recording any number, people often assume that the reader knows what units are, and do not specify it. Is it that Noah is actually not 950 years old, but rather 950 lunar months old
950/c13 is roughly 73 years old. Which seems to me to be a reasonably good age to live to in those days.
You could argue that the ancients knew perfectly well what they were recording, and that the 950 is the correct figure for Noah's age. It is just that people just forgot about the unit change.
I remember the company I worked for managed to do a double exchange rate conversion for one country when consolidating accounts. And on another occasion, they got the currency units a factor of 1000 out. These were for small businesses, and it hardly altered the grand total.
I suppose the real issue with the lunar clock is that one needs to have rather a lot of leap days, or leap months around to keep the seasons in a sensible place in the calendar. Actually I don't know how Islam manages this, or even how they count years.
martin
