[PAR35]

Obvious conclusion - the earth circled the sun more quickly back then - the orbit is slowing down.

[Fai Mao]

“Obvious conclusion - the earth circled the sun more quickly back then - the orbit is slowing down.”

Talk about a tough statement prove false!

That’s a good one. The only way to accurately measure would be to launch a satellite that is stationary and time orbits year by year. Except, gravity would cause the satellite to start moving AND the solar system is also revolving around the center of the galaxy so to have a fixed reference you’d need a powered vehicle that could main a relative position in a moving solar system for decades or centuries.

There might be another way to achieve the same measurement but it would have a great deal more uncertainty.

[SunkenCiv]

Or, the Earth spun more slowly on its axis.

I’m not going to turn this into a Catastrophism ping list topic though. :^)

[Fedora]

Scholars believe that the Qumran calendar (following the same calendar described in the Book of Enoch) was using 52 seven-day weeks because that was easier to compute in whole numbers, and they added a week every seven years and two weeks every four Sabbatical years (28-year cycles) to periodically synch the calendar with the solar calendar.

[blueplum]

I don’t think so. There’s probably a missing fragment that deals with the intercalating. Consider the below explanation of the Icelandic calendar of 364 days. The same method could have been used anywhere there were mountains for observation. Within the same link, an interesting aside of Cro-Magnon man working out a 29-day lunar calendar in the caves of Lascaux, proving the 29-day lunar cycle hasn’t changed in a longggg time. (and if the earth’s rotation had slowed that would have affected the lunar cycle, yes?). :

“How did Thorsteinn the Black determine his intercalation? His farm was favorably located in the country to utilize the so-called mountain circle method, that is, to follow the annual motion of sunrise and sunset near the horizon where he would have suitably distant mountains and other reference points in the landscape to make fairly exact observations possible. At high latitudes the points of sunrise and sunset move so fast that this method could easily be used to determine the length of the year to within a day.
“According to this, people started by counting 52 weeks or 364 days in the year. When they realized the insufficiency of this they tried the remedy of intercalating one week every seventh year (sumarauki), thus making the average year 365 days.
http://www.webexhibits.org/calendars/calendar-ancient.html

[trebb]

Or their watches were a bit slow and days were a bit longer....reset when night started looking like day....