Rex Kramer wrote:[W]hat do I know from Jewish calendars?
OK, gang, here’s your RDA of cultural enrichment about the vagaries and peculiarities of the Jewish calendar.
gnash wrote:I know the names of all Hebrew months (although I don't know them all in order).
The names of the months are, in order:
- Nisan (??????)
Iyar (??????)
Sivan (??????)
Tammuz (????????)
Av (???)
Elul (??????)
Tishri (????????)
Cheshvan (????????)
Kislev (????????)
Tevet (?????)
Sh’vat (??????)
Adar (?????)
(These are, of course, transliterated from another alphabet, so Your Spelling May Vary. Note, in particular, that the
ch in
Cheshvan is pronounced as a guttural, as in German
ach, not an affricate as in English
church.) As I write, the current Jewish date is 3 Elul 5771.
As everyone knows, the calendar is a lunar one, each month beginning and ending at the new moon. As the length of the synodic month (the cycle of the moon’s visible phases) is approximately 29.5 days, the months alternate between 30 days (the odd months Nisan, Sivan, etc.) and 29 days (even months Iyar, Tammuz, etc.). (The strict alternating pattern is occasionally further tweaked to prevent certain holidays from falling on the day immediately before or after the Sabbath, which would require two consecutive days of abstention from labor, but these minutiae need not concern us here.) Many of the major festivals (Passover, Sukkot, Purim) fall on the 14th day of their respective months (Nisan, Tishri, and Adar, respectively), which is, of course, the night of the full moon.
Notice, however, that twelve lunations of 29.5 days (or six months of 30 days and six of 29) comes to only 354 days, or about 11 days short of a solar year. Without further adjustment, the calendar would drift 11 days earlier each year relative to the solar seasons (as indeed does the Islamic calendar, which includes no lunisolar adjustment). So whenever the accumulated solar deficit amounts to more than a full month, causing the new moon at the end of Adar to precede the vernal equinox, an extra, thirteenth month is added, called Adar Sheni or “Second Adar,” to catch up and keep the holidays properly synchronized with the solar seasons. In ancient times this would have been determined by direct observation of the heavens, but nowadays it is governed by a regular cycle of seven such “leap years” in every 19-year interval (in the 3rd, 6th, 8th, 11th, 14th, 17th, and 19th years of the cycle). This is why the Jewish holidays jump around, sometimes falling earlier and sometimes later by the Gregorian civil calendar. (The current year, 5771, happens to be such a leap year, with the High Holy Days falling relatively late: Rosh Hashanah on September 29 and 30 and Yom Kippur on October 8.)
In the Hebrew bible, the months are generally not referred to by name but simply by ordinal number: “the first month,” “the second month,” and so on. The date of Passover, for instance, is specified in Leviticus 23:5 simply as “the fourteenth day of the first month.” A few times, however (Exodus 13:4, 23:15, 34:18; Deuteronomy 16:1), it is referred to as “the month of Aviv.” While this was indeed used in former times as the actual name of the month, it’s not clear whether it is intended as such in the biblical text. According to my
Langenscheidt’s Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew, the straightforward, root meaning of the word
aviv is “ears of barley”; the term “month of Aviv” may simply have meant “the month of barley ears,” or the month in which the ears of grain appear on the barley plant.
You may be wondering at this point why, if Nisan, which falls in the spring around the vernal equinox, is considered the first month, Jews celebrate the New Year and change the year number in the seventh month, Tishri, which comes in the fall. You are not alone; I don’t know of any really good explanation for this. One theory I have seen is that the two Biblical kingdoms, Israel and Judah, used different calendars and the current system attempts to honor both. I don’t know if this is true; it’s just another of those quaint traditional mysteries that we accept on faith.
Just to clear up another possible point of confusion, the reason you may sometimes see the name spelled as
Abib instead of
Aviv is that some letters of the Hebrew alphabet (
bet, kaf, and
pei in modern Hebrew; formerly also
gimel, dalet, and
tav) vary their pronunciation according to the phonetic context. These letters are pronounced hard (“b,” “k,” “p”) when standing at the beginning of a word or phrase or when preceded by a consonant sound, but soft (“v,” guttural “kh,” “f”) when preceded by a vowel. The difference is marked in written Hebrew by a diacritical mark called a
dagesh, a dot in the middle of the letter to indicate the hard pronunciation; you can see a few examples in the Hebrew spellings of the months shown above, for instance in the initial letter
tav in
Tammuz and
Tishri and the initial
kaf in
Kislev. (Remember, of course, that the words read from right to left, so the initial letter is the one in the
rightmost position.) Thus the word
Aviv is spelled
aleph-bet-yod-bet and sometimes transliterated as such
(Abib), but actually spoken with the soft pronunciation,
Aviv. The Ashkenazic (Eastern European) dialect of Hebrew used by the ancestors of most American Jews still preserved the hard/soft distinction for the letter
tav, pronouncing it with an “s” instead of a “t” sound when preceded by a vowel, which is why many of us grew up pronouncing the holidays Shabbes, Sukkos, and Shavuos rather than Shabbat, Sukkot, and Shavuot as in modern Israeli Hebrew. In ancient times the letter
tav was pronounced in soft form as “th,” accounting for the spelling of the word
Sabbath (and sometimes also
Sukkoth and
Shavuoth).
Finally, as to this:
Paucle wrote:Growing up Christian, I recognized Easter as being a holiday that could fall during one of two months; hoping Passover had the same possibility, I went with the month that I knew fit the city part of the question.
This is because the date of Easter is tied to that of Passover, as is clear from passages such as Matthew 26:2, Mark 14:1, Luke 22:1, and John 13:1. Easter is fixed as the Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox, which falls on the 14th of Nisan, the first night of Passover. It therefore varies from year to year in the same way the Jewish holidays do, falling sometimes in March and sometimes in April. But by the
Jewish calendar, Passover always falls in Nisan (or Aviv, if you prefer); it’s only by the
Gregorian calendar that it sometimes changes months.
I trust all this has confused you all even further.
—OldShulChamp