Months of the Jewish Year

Months of the Jewish Year

The "first month" of the Jewish calendar is the month of Nissan, in the spring, when Passover occurs. However, the Jewish New Year is in Tishri, the seventh month, and that is when the year number is increased.

This concept of different starting points for a year is not as strange as it might seem at first glance. The American "new year" starts in January, but the new "school year" starts in September, and many businesses have "fiscal years" that start at various times of the year. Similarly, the Jewish calendar has different starting points for different purposes.

The names of the months of the Jewish calendar were adopted during the time of Ezra, after the return from the Babylonian exile. The names are actually Babylonian month names, brought back to Israel by the returning exiles.

Note that most of the Bible refers to months by number, not by name.

The Jewish calendar has the following months:

Hebrew English Number Length Civil Equivalent

• Nissan 1 --- 30 days --- March-April
• Iyar 2 --- 29 days --- April-May
• Sivan 3 --- 30 days--- May-June
• Tammuz 4--- 29 days--- June-July
• Av 5--- 30 days --- July-August
• Elul 6 --- 29 days --- August-September
• Tishri 7 --- 30 days --- September-October
• Cheshvan 8 --- 29 or 30 days --- October-November
• Kislev 9 --- 30 or 29 days --- November-December
• Tevet 10 --- 29 days --- December-January
• Shevat 11 --- 30 days --- January-February
• Adar I (leap years only)12 --- 30 days --- February-March
• Adar(called Adar Beit in leap years)12 (13 in leap years) ---29 days ---February-March

The length of Cheshvan and Kislev are determined by complex calculations involving the time of day of the full moon of the following year's Tishri and the day of the week that Tishri would occur in the following year. After many years of blissful ignorance, I finally sat down and worked out the mathematics involved, and I have added a page on The Jewish Calendar: A Closer Look, which may be of interest to those who want a deeper understanding or who want to write a Jewish calendar computer program. For the rest of us, there are plenty of easily accessible computer programs that will calculate the Jewish calendar for more than a millennium to come. I have provided some links below. Note that the number of days between Nissan and Tishri is always the same. Because of this, the time from the first major festival (Passover in Nissan) to the last major festival (Sukkot in Tishri) is always the same.

http://www.jewfaq.org/current.htm a current calander and where I found this information.