“The Origins of the Jewish Calendar,” Interview with Lilly Gelman, Moment Magazine, Summer 2020 Issue, pp. 53, 93 (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Jewish/Nephite Lunar Calendar
1997
Nephite record keepers were very meticulous in monitoring the passage of time. Lehi’s departure from Jerusalem in the reign of Zedekiah marks the beginning of one formal reckoning of time. The prophesied 600-year window to the birth of Christ could well have been measured in lunar years. Lehi must have drawn on familiar Israelite calendrical practices to establish his calendar. Lehi’s descendants likely used twelve lunar months for their calendar without adding an occasional thirteenth month to adjust for the length of a solar year, which would solve the chronological problem of dating Lehi’s departure 600 years before the birth of Christ. Title
THE ANCIENT ISRAELITE CALENDAR
Trinity Journal, 2022
This essay asks what kind of calendar would have been used by ancient Israel from the time of its inception in the second millennium BC through the Second Temple period and explores the extent to which it was still utilized in the early centuries of the Common Era. Days, months, and years are the building blocks of calendars; understanding how divisions were made between them is crucial. How did the Israelites distinguish between the end of one month and the beginning of the next? What phenomenon signalled the end of their day? And what criterion determined when the twelfth lunar month fell too short of the solar year, thus requiring the insertion of a thirteenth month?
Chapter Thirteen. Theory, Practice, And Polemic In Ancient Jewish Calendars
Legal Fictions
Although a solar year is implicitly acknowledged by the need to maintain the festivals in their proper ''seasons,'' as James VanderKam (Calendars, 8) states, ''[N]o scriptural statements assert the role of the sun's course in defining a year. Despite its greater size, it seems to be the lesser light in the Bible.'' 4 The translation is from The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. James H.
Living With a Lunar Calendar in Mesopotamia and China
in J. Ben-Dov, W. Horowitz and J. M. Steele (eds.), Living the Lunar Calendar (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2012), 373-387
True lunar calendars which base the beginning of the month on the observation of a particular phase of the moon (generally the first sighting of the new moon crescent) are subject to an inherent uncertainty in the length of each month caused by unpredictable variations in atmospheric conditions, cloud cover, and the eyesight of the observer. These factors prevent members of a community who use a lunar calendar knowing in advance the precise number of days between an event in one month and a planned event in the next month. In addition, different observers may first see the new moon crescent on different nights (sometimes because of false sighting of an expected new moon, a phenomenon well attested among historical and modern observers from many cultures), 1 leading to the possibility of two individuals using calendars which are out of sync by one or more days. For a true lunar calendar to operate effectively within a community, therefore, it is necessary for there to be an agreed 'observation' of the new moon crescent, either arising from a consensus of the members of that community or, more commonly, an observation made by an individual or small group charged with the authority to proclaim the beginning of a new month. 2 But although this process leads to an 'official' calendar, used by all members of a particular community, it still does not solve the problem of lack of foreknowledge of the length of any particular month. Furthermore, whilst it is possible to agree on when an observation of the moon has defined the beginning of a new month within a small community-for example a town or, conceivably, a city-communicating that information to a larger community-a country, for example, or even an empire-is nearly impossible and so it is difficulty to ensure that everyone in that large community has a calendar which is exactly in sync with everyone else's.
Murphey’s “Reconstructed Jewish Calendar of the Late Second Temple Period” was posted in March of 2023 on Academia.edu. The key finding which allowed the Jewish Calendar to be reconstituted was the salvaging of the Jewish Calendar’s unique 19-year Metonic Cycle from descriptions found in the Talmud. Confirmation of the identified Metonic Cycle was further substantiated with several proofs. However, the original presentation of the Reconstructed Jewish Calendar did not employ an astronomically rigorous method to determine the first day of each Jewish month. Specifically, a fixed time of 23 hours for the moon’s transition to the Jew’s so-called “horned moon” phase was assumed. This approximation failed to account for the fact that the moon’s orbit is not perfectly circular, but eccentric, such that the actual time for this transition varies. By leveraging recently composed astronomical calculations, the original Reconstructed Jewish Calendar can now boast accuracy to the specific day, along with its associated weekday. This results in the new “Refined Reconstructed Jewish Calendar of the Late Second Temple Period.”