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Friday, August 20, 2004

PHILOLOGOS DISCUSSES JEWISH CALENDARS THROUGH THE AGES in "A Yearly Conundrum" (The Forward). Excerpts:
Readers Ze'ev Orzech and Seth Cohen have written separately to inquire about the names of the months in the Hebrew calendar. . . .

Although both Mr. Orzech and Mr. Cohen have confused certain things, they do, between them, mention all four of the different Hebrew calendars known to us historically, i.e., 1) an ancient, lunar, prebiblical calendar, known only from a stone tablet found in an excavation near Tel Gezer halfway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, that indeed dates to about 1000 B.C.E.; 2) a second lunar calendar, the one used by the Bible, which generally refers to the months of the year only by number (e.g., "the first month," "the second month," etc.), but also calls four of them by name; 3) the Hebrew calendar we use today, which is also lunar and was brought back to Palestine by the Babylonian exiles returning in 538 BCE after the Babylonian empire was destroyed by the Persian King Cyrus; 4) a solar calendar used by some Palestinian Jews (including the sectarians of the Dead Sea Scrolls) who refused to recognize the Babylonian calendar in the last centuries before the Common Era.

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