The calendar in the Bible

I found this on Pinterest. I do not vouch for its accuracy, but it does give you a good rough idea.

The Bible mainly uses an old form of the Hebrew or Jewish calendar, which itself was a knock-off of the Babylonian calendar.

The Bible has bizarrely precise dates. Genesis 7:11, for example, dates the beginning of Noah’s Flood this way:

“In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.”

Or Noah 600.02.17, as I will call it.

Here is the break-down of what that means:

The day: begins at sunset.

• Daylight was divided into 12 hours, the sixth hour being noon. That meant the hour was longer in summer, shorter in winter.
• Night was divided into 3 watches, the Romans divided it into 4 watches. Back then cities had an outer wall guarded by watchmen.

The week: is a period of seven days. A Babylonian invention of the -600s. The seventh day is the Sabbath, a day of rest. It runs from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday. With the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire, Emperor Constantine made the week part of the Western calendar in the year 321.

The month: Like the Islamic calendar, the month begins at the new moon, the first sliver of the crescent moon seen at sunset. That made the month 29 to 30 days long and the year 12 x 29.5 = 354 days. Unlike the Islamic calendar, though, a leap month was added every three years or so (or seven every 19 years) to keep the year roughly in line with the seasons.

Months are most often just numbered – “in second month” and so on. But sometimes they are given names. Those I could find in the King James Bible (with their present-day names and Gregorian equivalent in parentheses):

1. Nisan or Abib or Xanthicus (Nisan, roughly late March, early April)
   
2. Zif  (Iyar, Apr/May)
3. Sivan (Sivan, May/Jun)
4. ??? (Tammuz, Jun/Jul)
5. ??? (Av, Jul/Aug)
6. Elul (Elul, Aug/Sep)
7. Ethanim (Tishri, Sep/Oct)
8. Bul (Cheshvan, Oct/Nov)
9. Chisleu or Casleu (Kislev, Nov/Dec)
10. Tebeth (Tevet, Dec/Jan)
11. Sebat  (Shevat, Jan/Feb)
12. Adar (Adar, Feb/Mar)

So when the Bible says “the first month”, it means Nisan.

The leap month is called Adar II in our day.

Calendar of events:

• Nisan 14th: Passover
• Nisan 15th-21st: Feast of Unleavened Bread
• Ethanim 1st: Blowing of Trumpets (Rosh Hashanah)
• Ethanim 10th: Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur)
• Ethanim 15th-22nd: Feast of Tabernacles or Booths (Succoth)
• Adar 14th-15th: Purim

The cheat sheet for these is found in Leviticus 23. Purim was added in the book of  Esther.

The year: is counted in terms of patriarchs, kings or emperors: “in the first year of Darius the Mede”, blah blah blah.

Bible chronologies: These try to match events in the Bible to years AD and BC (= CE and BCE). They are the work of various self-appointed experts, none of them agreeing. It is not their fault: dates more than 2,500 years ago are hard to nail down to a particular year. The further you go back in time, the shakier and guessier the dates become. The Bible is no different.

– Abagond, 2021

See also:

• Bible
  • Authorized Version – aka the King James Version (KJV)
  • archaic words and meanings in the King James Bible
• Bible chronolgy
• calendar
  • Roman calendar
  • Julian calendar
  • Gregorian calendar
  • Islamic calendar
  • The Meso-American Long Count
  • AD (Anno Domini)