John the Baptist was taken into the wilderness and lived in a Sukkot Booth, that gets changed into a manger, that Jesus is not born in. I suspect John was born on the Day of Atonement. His teaching has been intercepted and buried when Saul-Paul cut the Jews out of the franchise, inventing anti-Semitism. The Day of Atonement?
Taking another approach, some early fathers such as John Chrysostom asserted that Zechariah heard the angelic annunciation on the Day of Atonement. This assertion is suspect from the outset because it seems to be based on an erroneous claim in Protevangelium of James that Zechariah was in fact the Jewish high priest! Even so, we have seen above that a date on or near the Day of Atonement is a possibility if the course rotation was tied to a fixed beginning point (i.e., the first of Nisan) every year. At any event, all the priestly courses would have been serving the following week during the feast of Tabernacles. With that in mind, let us proceed.
In 4 BC, the Day of Atonement (Tishrei 10) fell on Monday, October 1. The following week was Tabernacles, so Zechariah could not return home to Elizabeth for another two Sabbaths, leaving Jerusalem perhaps Sunday, October 14. This means that even if we cannot prove that Zechariah was serving during the first week of October of 4 BC, he definitely would have been serving—along with the other twenty-three courses—during the second week of October, and would not have gotten home until after that.
Leave a Reply