THE CALENDAR, JEWS AND LEAP YEAR

 

(Author: Gwynne Schrire, Vol. 79, #1, Winter 2024)

 

We do not know what names Adam gave to the objects around him, but as he did not have to keep medical or business appointments, he was unlikely to have thought of giving names to the date. We tend to take so much for granted yet can learn so much history just knowing the origin of the names of months and days – and learning of the Jewish contribution to the calendar by doing so.

The Torah tells us that Hashem made the day and the night and saw that it was good. But it was man and woman who started grouping days and nights together. In the long nights before load shedding, TV, electricity, or even candles, we would sit outside our caves and watch the sky. We saw the stars. We saw the moon. Sometimes it was as big as a melon, sometimes as small as a leaf and sometimes we could not see it at all, but we soon realised that the cycle would repeat. It would take about 28 notches on a stick or 28 stones in a corner of the cave for that to happen.

It was not then realized that this 28-day cycle, this MOONTH or MONTH, was the time that the moon took to revolve around the earth. The day of the rebirth of the new moon was anxiously looked out for, and there were special prayers in shul for the occasion. Many of the festivals in our Jewish calendar fall at the new or full moon, making it easy to walk home from shul in bright moonlight.  Even today, despite calendars that announce the cycles of the moon for years in advance, Cape Town Moslems watch on Signal Hill and the Sea Point beachfront for the new moon to signal the end of Ramadan. If the moon is not sighted, they go home and fast another day.

In ancient days, when the new moon was sighted the head priest or other official would call out or announce that it was now the beginning of a new month. The word CALL OUT gave us the origin of the word CALENDAR, and the day that was called out, was the first day of the month in the ancient Roman calendar. This first day was called the CALEND. The practical Romans later used the word calendar for an account book because it was useful for showing when the accounts fell due.  

As societies developed, people needed to record as well as to observe the beginning of the month especially if they wanted the accounts or taxes to be paid or the goods to be delivered at a definite time. You wanted to know that, for example, you could expect your son’s bride to be delivered at the third new moon, and that would be when your messenger should be dispatched to the large olive tree to await the bridal party. If you sent him a day too late there might be veriebels that would last a generation. You needed to know that your doctor’s appointment would be next Tuesday, not the day after tomorrow, and certainly not approximately today. Merchants, money lenders and servants of the ruler began to keep listings of the beginning of each month, their own little calendars to make things easier for themselves and from these early account books of the Romans our calendar developed.

Apart from observing the growth and decline of the moon in the sky each month early man also noticed that there were regular cycles of seasons. There were hot months, and wet months, and cold months. Other events also returned in regular cycles like the migration of the animals they hunted, the appearance of fruits or vegetables and in Egypt the regular flooding of the Nile, in other words they noticed that there was a regularity to the seasons. This we now know is due to the rotation of the tilted earth around the sun which creates the year, and on which depended what was the most important feature in their lives, their food supply.

The first society we know about that kept astronomical records of their observations of the changing phases of the moon and probably the days were the Sumerians. Their priests had to administer the land on behalf of the gods, and this meant that they had to know when to plough, when to sow the irrigated fields of wheat, and of course when to appease the gods so that they would send rain.

About 5000 years ago Sumerian priests made observations in cuneiform on tablets and worked out a calendar. They divided the year into 12 lunar months of 30 days each. The Sumerians were conquered by the Akkadians who were conquered in turn by the Babylonians who were conquered by the Assyrians. The Babylonians conquered Jerusalem in 597 BCE and exiled many Jews. It must always be remembered that people are influenced by the cultures and customs of the people living around them and the Babylonians took the Sumerian calendar with them along with many words from the Akkadian language spoken centuries earlier.

Living in Babylonia, Jews adopted the Babylonian names for months, just as Jews living in Christian Europe adopted the Western names for days and months. For example, the Hebrew month Ziv meaning light or glow, was soon substituted for the Babylonian month Iyyar. The Hebrew names that we use for months were therefore originally Babylonian – Tishri, Heshvan, Kislev, Tevet, Shevat, Adar, Nisan, Iyyar, Sivan, Tammuz, Av, Elul.

TISHRI comes from the Akkadian word tašrītu meaning “beginning” because spring falls in Tishri the beginning of the Akkadian agricultural cycle. SHEVAT comes from the Akkadian Šabātu meaning “strike” because of heavy rains struck during that month. It is first found in Zechariah (1:7). ADAR comes from the name of Adarammelech who in 681 BCE killed his father the Assyrian king Sennacherib. This event is mentioned in II Kings 19:37 which records that one day when Sennacherib was worshiping in the temple of his god Nisrok, his sons Adarammelech and Sharezer stabbed him with their swords. Sharezer did not get his own month, unlike equally bloodthirsty Romans in some of the English months mentioned later. 

NISAN comes not from the Japanese car, but from the Sumerian nisag “first fruits” and is found in the Book of Esther. IYYAR comes from the Akkadian ayari – ‘rosette, blossom’, and SIVAN from the Akkadian for “season” or time”. TAMMUZ comes from the Babylonian god Dumuzid, god of shepherds and fertility and the name is found in the Book of Ezekiel (8:14–15).

We prefer to believe that the month of AV comes from the Hebrew word for father, but, like everything else, it has much older roots, and is the Akkadian Abū,  meaning either “reed” or the name of the Mesopotamian god Abu. Oh dear, here the monotheistic Hebrews are once again perpetuating the name of a Mesopotamian god, this time not of shepherds but of plants, snakes and the underworld. ELUL comes from the Akkadian word Elūlu, for “harvest”.

In the same way that the bureaucracy of the Akkadian empire influenced the language of the people it conquered, so too did the Romans, from whom most of the Christian world took their names for months. In the same way that the monotheistic Jews adopted the months of the heathen host society, so too did monotheistic Christian Europe when they adopted the names of Roman and Nordic gods for their months and days.

Like the Akkadians, the Romans started their year in spring, the time of rebirth and of sowing. Unfortunately, because the winter with the rain and shortage of food was over, this was also an auspicious time to start wars, so the first month of the year was named after the god of war – Mars. Not only was Mars the god of war he was also the god of death and was linked with the fertility of the soil. This made him an excellent choice for a god to protect the fields and homes and start the year off appropriately. Hence, the Roman year started in MARCH. Next comes APRIL from the Latin for “to open” as this was the season when the countryside in Italy would blossom and bud like the Akkadian Iyyar. In MAY plants were growing, and Maia was the goddess of increase to whom sacrifices were offered on May Day, the first of May, later Workers’ Day. The next month honored Juno, the queen of the heavens, who typified womanhood, the goddess of marriage, JUNE brides and marriages made in heaven.

Human arrogance then interfered in the chain of gods, an indication of the fickleness of loyalty. Mark Antony named JULY after Julius Caesar whose birthday fell in this month and having done his duty to the memory of his leader, then went on to assassinate him, much like Adarammelech. When Julius’s nephew Augustus Caesar came to the throne, he felt he was as important as his uncle. After all he had just put an end to a civil war and deserved some recognition for his triumphs. So, he named the next month AUGUST after himself.

The Romans had not run out of gods nor out of emperors. They had plenty of both, as some emperors only lasted a few months, but months are finite and if every Caesar and god wanted their own months, they would run out of them or else have to institute a confusing system of renaming them with each change of ruler. Thus, they started numbering them instead.  Starting the year with March meant that the seventh month would be SEPTEMBER, the eighth OCTOBER, the ninth NOVEMBER and the tenth DECEMBER, as those are the numbers 7, 8, 9 and 10. The Roman calendar thus consisted of ten months.

But what of the gap from midwinter December till spring in March? Well, the ground was dormant, it was winter, no one bothered about this period. In 713 B.C.E. Numa Pompilus the second king of Rome decided that the winter months should also be counted so he called the next one JANUARY in honour of Janus the Roman god of the beginning of things and the patron of births. He was a two-faced god, one face looked forward to the future the other back to the past. He was also the god of doors, the door to the past and the door to the future. It seemed inappropriate to have the god of the beginnings near the end of the year, so ever logical, the Romans moved the beginning of the year from March up to January. However, they were not logical enough to change the names of the months so that October the eighth month now became the tenth month and December the tenth month as in decade or decimal now became the twelfth.

Why twelfth? Well, Numa Pompilus also added FEBRUARY. A month which encompasses the Roman festival of atonement, the ritual cleansing, hence the word February from februare, to cleanse. On this day barren women were beaten with thongs cut from the hide of two goats sacrificed on this day, to purify them and make them fertile – sounds like a dreadful ordeal, particularly as the blame might have rested on the husband.

Humans also decided to divide up the months into weeks. These could have been divided into weeks of almost any number of days – four, five, ten or even fourteen days. Seven is the most peculiar number to divide things by but it was a magical number, brought luck and stood for completeness.

It was the Hebrews who first decided to divide the month into weeks of seven days – our contribution to the mess that was to become the calendar. As Hashem created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, it seemed right that the week should have seven days.  The days were called 1^st day, 2^nd day, 3^rd day etc., thus, Yom Rishon, Yom Sheni, Yom Shishi, culminating in Sabbath Day, Yom Shabbat. The week included our greatest contribution to mankind’s health and welfare, our revolutionary concept – Yom SHABBAT – the day of rest, the day to shlof and mend one’s body and soul.

Babylonian astrologers accepted the Hebrew system of seven as seven days were roughly a quarter of the lunar month of the Babylonians. Furthermore, they believed that the universe and the life of man were governed by seven planets and the heavenly body in charge of the first hour of a particular day controlled the day as a whole. Hence, they linked each day to a planet. Much as is the case today, people placed their trust in the astrologers rather than in the scientists. They probably read their daily horoscope before deciding whether it was safe to get up and go to the market. There was a day for Saturn, for the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus.

SATURDAY was Saturn’s Day, the Roman god who had taken the place of the Greek god of time and who was supposed to have eaten up all his children except three. People born under his star were unlucky as they were born under an evil omen. SUNDAY is the day of sun which controls all events. The sun always shines on Sunday. MONDAY is Moon Day. The moon always shines on moon day.

The seven-day week is the Hebrew contribution to the calendar. The church adopted the seven-day cycle from the Jews. It was only in the 4^th Century that the Church fathers decided that the Jewish Shabbat was unfair competition, so they made the first day, Sunday, their Sabbath.

The idea of a week moved from the Middle East to Rome, then up through Europe where some of the names got replaced by Nordic equivalents, so some days are planet days, and some Teutonic deity days. TUESDAY was named after Tiw the Scandinavian god of war – he was a Norse hero who had lost his hand in a fight. WEDNESDAY was Woden’s Day. Woden or Odin was the god of storms who welcomed brave warriors to Valhalla. Woden’s kingdom included wisdom, poetry and agriculture. As a god of storms Wednesday might be stormy, a windy day unlike a sunny Sunday. And the thunder comes on Thursday, which is THOR’S DAY, god of thunder and Woden’s son. Thor was strong, brutal and greedy. He was famous for his hammer which created lightning, for the thunder from his belt of strength and for his iron glove which he used to help throw his hammer.

As a sop for the feminists, they then threw in a woman. FRIDAY is Frigga’s Day.  She was Woden’s wife and chief goddess and patroness of love, marriage and fertility. Originally a moon goddess she travelled in a chariot drawn by two cats. She wore her beautiful hair in long plaits so in her honour the Northern Europeans ate plaited bread on Frigga’s day. When the Ashkenazi Jews started moving north a thousand years ago, they got used to having plaited bread on Frigga’s day, which we now call kitkah or challah.

Years, like week, are cyclical and where we start or finish a year is completely arbitrary. Although the seven-day week is a Jewish invention, Jews and Christians have a different calendar. We celebrate new year in spring, in September or October, they at midwinter, on 1 January. We mark time by the moon, they by the sun. Our day starts when their day ends. Our week begins when theirs end. What they call fashionably late, we call Jewish time.

This year our New Year, Rosh Hashanah, falls on 2 October. The Chinese celebrated their New Year on 10 February, New Year for the Hindus was on 9 April and for the Muslims it was 6 July. The British New Year has only been celebrated on 1 January since 1752. Europeans used to celebrate New Years Day on 25 March. The French moved it to 1 January in 1564 with the English doing so 88 years later.

We are so self-centered; we often fail to realise that not every culture has chosen the same way to mark off the calendar. A gentile speaker at a Jewish senior’s event late in 1999, tried to reassure her audience that they need not be worried about fears that the world would come to an end at the millennia, the year 2000. Her audience looked blank. Why should they worry about an arbitrarily imposed Christian date? To the Jewish audience 1 January 2000 was only 23 Tevet 5760. We celebrated the second millennium 3 700 years before. To Moslems the year 2000 was only the year 1421, and the Hindu pass that milestone 57 years after 2000. To them it will be the year 2057.

At first years were not counted continuously or numerically but dated from an event. People would say things like, ‘My child was born in the year of the flood/the year after the comet/ ten years after the earthquake/in the sixth years of the king’s rule/my grandfather was born on the fifth candle of Chanukah.

Jars found on Masada used the Roman system of dating. A wine jar was dated in the year of Consul Sentius Saturninus – 19 B.C.E. to us. The coins and letters found by Yigael Yadin in the Cave of Letters into which the followers of Bar Kochba fled after their unsuccessful war again the Romans (132-135 C.E.) had different ways to identify the year. Some coins were marked Year One of the Redemption of Israel, Year Two of the Freedom of Israel. Some were marked Bar Kochba Prince of Israel. Documents Yadin found used the Roman system.

One document was dated 8 Elul (=10 September) in the 23^rd year of Rabael, King of the Nabateans. Another was signed on 3 Kislev in the 28^th year of Rabael (=18 December 99 C.E.). One was dated 24 Tammuz in the consulship of Lucius Catilius Severus for the second time, and Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, in the third year of Imperatur Caesar Traianus Hadrianus Augustus (=13 July 120 C.E.) That was all very well if you knew who King Rabael or Lucius Catilius Severus was, but what if you did not?

A permanent base date was needed. In (our modern) year 358 C.E., Hillel II decided to make the creation of the world the base date, making this year to the Jewish community the year 5784. Unaware of the calculations of Hillel II, Bishop Ussher worked out that the world was created on 22 October 4004 B.C. The Greeks counted from the first Olympic Games in 776 B.C.E., the Romans from the foundation of Rome in 753 B.C.E. until Julius Caesar started the Julian calendar counting from 46 B.C.E. In the year 530 C.E. Christians decided to count from Jesus’ birthday, which a monk called Dionysius Exiguus decided was in the 28^th year of the reign of Emperor Augustus (he of the 8^th month). His birth year was skipped out, 1 BC coming just before 1 AD with no year 0 in between. It took time for his idea to be adopted. In England this system of dating was only adopted by the Synod of Whitby in the year that became 664 C.E.

That dealt with the years. What about the months? Our way of calculating the date is largely the way worked out by the Sumerian astronomers but their astronomical calculations have given us problems that still trouble us. They believed it took the moon 28 days to complete its cycle. Wrong. It takes 29 1/2 days, so the year should have twelve and a half months. They thought that the year was 365 days long. Wrong again. It takes the earth 365¼ days to revolve around the sun. The fact that the Hebrews decided to divide the week up into units of seven days created another problem, one that was out of step both with the lunar month and with the solar year.

The Sumerian calendar with its months of 30 days soon got out of step with the sun and the moon, and the winter months moved to the middle of summer. We do not know how they managed to adjust their calendar, but we know how the Babylonians did it. In a letter written in 1700 B.C.E., Emperor Hammurabi said he ordered the insertion of an extra month whenever the priest pointed out that the year had a deficiency. The deficiencies were undoubtedly due to the capriciousness of the gods – but adding extra months was the best humans could do to keep up with them. To make up for their god’s deficiencies, the Babylonians alternated 30-day months with 29-day months and threw in an extra 30-day month every three years or so and the Hebrew system, which dates back to the Babylonian system of reconciling the lunar and solar cycles, followed. Thus, Jews have 12 lunar months with seven extra months added every 19 years.

A thousand years later the Greek priests discovered through observation that the gods were not really so capricious, and that every 19 years the sun and moon were in the same cycle to each other and that there were 235 months in 19 years. Now they could work out an exact calendar in which extra months would be placed in seven specified years within the 19-year cycle. This is called the Metonic cycle, after the Greek who brought the system to Greece from Babylonia. However, each Greek city state kept their own calendar in their own way, so it never really worked properly. When Rome took over after 84 B.C.E., however, administrative uniformity and efficiency became the norm.

The Roman calendar came from the Egyptians via the Sumerians, and the Egyptian priests were more accurate observers than the Babylonian ones. They stopped bothering about  reconciling the solar and lunar cycles and settled on an unvarying 365-day year. The year was divided into 12 months of 30 days each but an extra five days were added every year. These extra days were holidays honoring the god Sothis – Sirius, the bright star which appeared in the sky about the time the Nile flood began in mid-July.

When the Greek Ptolemies ruled Egypt, they realized that the calendar still had some hiccups. Accordingly, Ptolemy Eugertes suggested that a leap day be added every four years. However, the Egyptian priests were conservative, like most priests (and some rabbis). Having been measuring time for 2500 years, they knew better, after all, and protested. Ptolemy did not want to cause trouble with the priestly faction, so his reforms were quashed, and it took another two centuries for a stronger ruler to institute the change. This was Julius Caesar. The Romans were excellent engineers but had not cared much for pure science and their priests had been rather amateurish in their efforts to keep the calendar. Nor had their politicians helped. They would add extra days to lengthen their own terms of office or shorten that of their opponents!

But while dallying with Cleopatra in Egypt, he had come to admire the orderliness of her calendar and had met Sosigenes, the Greek Egyptian astronomer. On Sosigenes’ advice Caesar ordered that the year 46 B.C.E. would have 445 days. There would be 23 extra days, at the end of February and 67 days between the months of November and December. The Romans called it the Year of Confusion. But at least the year was back in step with the seasons and Caesar decreed that to keep it that way the month of February was to have an extra day every fourth year.

For the next 16 centuries the European world kept this Julian calendar. However, although the Julian calendar was much more accurate than its predecessors, there was a gain of one day every 128 years. By the 16^th Century the year was thus 13 days behind the sun. It did not worry ordinary people, but it pushed some of the holy days into the wrong season. In 1562 Pope Gregory decided to shorten the following year by 16 days and ordered that three leap days be removed every four centuries. The Gregorian calendar will now be accurate to within one day in every 3.323 years. Two years later the French adopted his calendar and the English followed two centuries later. There was rioting in England when this happened, and 3 September became 14 September 1752. Many insisted that they had lost 11 days out of their lives.

In 1930, a practical woman called Elizabeth Achelis invented a more practical calendar. She divided the year into four equal quarters of 91 days and 13 weeks each, and at the end of the year there is an extra day, called December the W, or Worlds Day, which does not fit into the week but falls after Saturday and before Sunday. In Leap Year there is another non weekday called Leap Year Day which falls after June. The United Nations discussed adopting Elizabeth’s calendar worldwide, but Seventh Day Adventists and Jews were against it because if we shalt do no work on the seventh day, World’s Day as an extra day that falls outside the week would confuse the calculation of the seventh day. These religious objections, plus the usual conservatism and reluctance to make changes, has kept our calendar the same illogical muddle it has been since the Babylonian astronomers first put it together.

Because February has more days in leap years, leap year is regarded as a topsy turvy year – even beans are  supposed to grow topsy turvy in leap year. In English law February 29 was not counted and had no status. It was LEAPT OVER, which is why it was called Leap Year. Certain traditions grew up about Leap Year. Because leap year corrected the discrepancy  between the calendar and the season, it was decided that  women should have the opportunity of correcting temporarily a state of affairs that was one sided and unjust and were given the opportunity of proposing marriage to their reluctant swains.

This is supposed to be the result of a Royal Act passed in parliament in 1288 by Queen Margaret of Scotland. This decreed  that in leap year any woman could propose to any man she liked. He could only refuse if he were already engaged, otherwise he had to accept, or be fined one pound or less in cases of hardship. From the Scots the rule was adopted in Genoa, Florence and France.

However, although this act has been often quoted, thorough investigation has shown that the act is fictitious. Myth or not, the canny Scottish men guarded themselves from being taken unawares and stipulated that the women had to indicate her intention by wearing a scarlet petticoat with a clearly visible hem. This gave bachelors a sporting chance of escaping. If they saw a woman with a scarlet petticoat coming down the street, the Scottish men could take to their skirts and run. If the man refused the young lady’s advances, the rejected lady had the right to claim a new dress of pure silk to cover that petticoat.

This concession was supposed to have been negotiated by St Patrick. Apparently in the days before celibacy was imposed, St Bridget told him that a mutiny had broken out in her nunnery as the ladies claimed the right of popping the question, which seems a strange thing for nuns to want to do. Anyhow St Patrick said that he would allow them to do so every seventh year. Remember it was the Jews who made the number seven special.

St Bridget then threw her arms around St Patrick’ neck and said

“Arrach, Patrick jewel, I dare not go back to my  girls with such a proposal. Make it one year in four.”

St Patrick replied: “Bridget darling, squeeze me that way again and I’ll give you leap year, the longest of the lot.”

So Bridget gave him a squeeze and straight away asked him to marry her himself.

St Patrick could not do this so he gave her a nice kiss and a silk gown instead.

 

• Gwynne Schrire, a veteran contributor to Jewish Affairs and a long-serving member of its editorial board, is a former Deputy Director of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies – Cape Council. She has authored, co-written and edited over twenty books on aspects of South African Jewish and Western Cape history.