The Three Liturgical

Calenders of Israël

The Jewish calendar, as it is known today, went through a prolonged series of adap-
tations after the Jewish people had returned from the Babylonian exile (beginning 5th cen-
tury BC). It is impossible to trace back all those adaptations and track their evolution
through the ages, although a number of things can be known. Dr. Julian Morgenstern
(1881-1976) did pioneering work in that respect.
Morgenstern was one of the world’s great Bible scholars from the last century.
From 1921 until his retirement in ‘47 he was president of Hebrew Union College in
the U.S. (a so-called reform institute, and thus liberal). He made it part of his life’s
work to investigate the intricacies of the different calendars of Israel. In the course of
his work he discovered much, but there exists still large uncharted territory. This is
what the article is about, being covered in a nutshell.

1 – The Liturgical Calendar in Jesus’ time is not known

There are many people, even well educated, who think that the calendars of Israel and
the counting of days, as are currently in use, have always been that way; in any case did
not change much. How could the Biblical prescriptions have been tampered with!? In
general, people assume that in Jesus’ days the liturgical calendar was roughly the same
as it is known today. But even that is not true. Each attempt – and there have been many
– to calculate backwards the date of crucifixion of Christ, based on the present Jewish
counting of days, are bound to fail. There has even been a scholarly work that tries to
reconstruct a day to day account of Jesus’ public life! I want to stress that the only trust-
worthy method to arrive at the dates of his birth and death has to come from Roman
history. On that premise, the undersigned has made an I might say a successful attempt
 -2-

to discover the year of Jesus’ birth, building on the sublime achievements of the great
Scottish scholar Sir William Ramsay (1851-1939),1) but that is not on the table now.

The usual astronomical calculations to arrive at the year of birth of Christ are of no avail.
Johannes Keppler (1571-1630) tried to find the year of birth on the assumption that the
Star of Bethlehem was an astronomical event. Of course, there was a Star of Bethlehem,
but it could not have been astronomical. How could a star indicate the exact spot of a
craddle! What it was, remains open to speculation, but we do know that it looked like a
star.

Julian Morgenstern published seven studies on this subject in the period between 1924
and 1953, covering 617 pages.2) That was in the HUCA (Hebrew Union College Annual).
These annual reports had scientific value. All HUCA publications can be consulted for
free on JSTOR’s website. Specialized libraries have a reprint of these publications. In
this light it remains puzzling why so few people are aware of these things. This will have
to do with the fact that the Talmud hardly mentions the calendar changes in order to
avoid confusion, but also with the fact that no one has yet understood why it was thought
that those changes were necessary at the time.3)

Calendar I is also called the Canaanitic calendar, because the names of the months (not
their liturgical aspects) are Canaanitic. Calendar II came into use in about 600 before
Christ when they changed those names by numbers. Calendar III is the calendar that
gradually took shape after the Babylonian captivity, and much later names were again
introduced for the different months, this time Babylonian. Though Calender II probably
underwent more changes than only numbers instead of names, we will in this article
concentrate on Calendar III.

2 – The most Important Changes

After the captivity that, according to the prophecy of Daniel, finished 483 years before
the birth of the Messiah, the so-called Great Synagogue came into existence. The Men
of the Great Synagogue, at certain times numbering more than a hundred members, in-
stituted through ordinances the takkanot, the new festive calender of Israel and its related
institutions and customs, which had to be accepted by the people as a natural deve-
lopment and therefore could result only from a slow and gradual process. For the sake of
simplicity and to reinforce the argument, all changes were attributed to Ezra the scribe,
while it can be assumed that in reality his successors were also involved. This is illustra-
ted by a number of specific alterations in the Sacred Text, which from motives of reve-

1) Sir William Mitchell Ramsay: “Was Christ born at Bethlehem? (a study on the
credibility of St Luke)” - Hodder and Stoughton, London # 1905. As well as “The
Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament (based on a
series of lectures - 1913)” - Hodder and Stoughton, London • New York • Toronto # 1915.
2) Julian Morgenstern’s contributions for HUCA on the calendars of Israel are
as follows: “The Three Calendars of Ancient Israel” (1924 & 1926); “The Gates of
Righteousness - about the transferral of New Year’s Day from the tenth to the first of
the seventh month” (1929); “Supplementary Studies in the Calendars of Ancient Israel”
(1935); “The Chanukkah festival and the Calendar of Ancient Israel” (1947 & 1948);
“Two Prophecies from the fourth century B.C. and the evolution of Yom Kippur” (1952-
53). See also: “Two Ancient Israelite Agricultural Festivals” in Jewish Quarterly Review
(new series) 8 (1917) pp. 31-54.
3) In “Proofs of the Life and Death of Jesus” part 3: “Articles on Questions of
Chronology” it is discussed that because of catastrophic events, meted out as a divine
punishment, there was a slight tilting of the axis of the earth, which caused a recession
of the equinoxes by nine days, and this in turn called for an adjustment of the religious
calendar.
 -3-

rence, are sometimes called the corrections of Ezra, although they can be traced back to
the Hellenistic period. What happened in detail is impossible to determine because in
general the events in Judeah under the Persian rule are shrouded in darkness. The Great
Synagogue, forerunner of the Sanhedrin, was no permanent body with regular sessions,
and perpetuated itself until the occupation of Judeah in 332 BC by Alexander the Great.

Let us review the most striking changes. After no more than seventy years of Babylonian
exile the Feast of Tabernacles with its joyous nature was placed after the Rite of Azazel
(scapegoat), which it had previously preceded as it was still observed until some time
after the period of Ezra and Nehemiah, the prophets of the period after the Babylonian
exile. And Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement, replaced the Rite of Azazel with a
ceremony that is clearly very much different. Yom Kippur later merged with the day
named in Lev. 23:24 and Num. 29:1, known in the Bible as Yom Teruah, which means
the day of the blowing (of the Shofar trumpet). Teruah was a simple ceremony that may
have marked the difference between the lunar and solar year, the one being about eleven
days shorter than the other. The changes in the calendar concurrently went, as appears to
be the case, with a few changes in the books of Moses.4)

Under Calendars I and II Israel followed a solar year in which both equinoxes, those of
Eastern and Sukkoth – when day and night are of equal length – played a central part.
Calender III, however, was based on the 19-year Babylonian lunar-solar cycle; the equi-
nox was of no importance any more. Synodic lunar and the solar time are in agreement
almost every 19 years: that is, the moon will be in the same phase on the calendar day
every 19 years. However, the Jewish method does not produce a repetition of dates within
any significant length of time: they more or less repeat after 247 years (13 x 19). The
Jewish liturgical calendar only became final, so it seems, in about the 9th and 10th centu-
ries AD.

As concerns those changes, it is of interest that the term Rosh Ha-Shana (head of the
year) was not applied until at least the 2nd century AD. It was not only the Babylonian
captivity that threw a spanner in the works. Following the destruction of the Temple in
70 AD, causing the practice of animal sacrifice to be stopped, the synagogue liturgy was
enlarged, new traditions were suggested, and emphases were shifted in an attempt to keep
alive the religious practice of a people scattered outside their homeland and tragically
stripped of their Temple, which latter is the only place where animal sacrifice is per-
mitted. It was at this stage that the New Year shifted to the New Moon of the first day of
the seventh month (Tishri). In the pre-exilic time this day was situated on the equinox of
10 Tishri, but as said, this is of no consequence any more.

4) I would like to call your attention to Exodus 23:16 and 34:22, stating: “the Feast
of Ingathering (Sukkoth or Tabernacles) at the end of the year [therefore before the
equinox]”, and also Deuteronomy 31:10: “‘at the end’ of a Sabbath year (7-year period),
at the time of the Feast of Tabernacles [therefore before the equinox]”. Now compare
this with Leviticus 23:34: “the 15th of this 7th month shall be the Feast of Tabernacles
[therefore after the equinox]” and also Numbers 29:12: “on the 15th of the 7th month
you shall have a holy convocation (therefore after the equinox)”. The subsequent
verses in Numbers 29 make clear that this holy convocation is the beginning of the
Feast of Tabernacles. The inconsistencies of these texts [at the same time before and
after the equinox] cannot possibly have been an integral part of Moses’ books.