The Hebrew Calendar Y6K

by Dr. Irv Bromberg, University of Toronto, Canada

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The Year 6000

A common reaction to my Hebrew calendar studies is a comment like In the Hebrew year 6000 the Messiah is coming and/or the physical world will come to an end (as we know it), so of what relevance is your proposed calendar reform?

Actually, it is that type of comment that is itself irrelevant, to everybody who is alive today, our children, grand-children, great-grand-children, and beyond. Allowing the Talmud standard 25 years per generation, the Hebrew year 6000 is more than 9 generations into the future, so of what relevance is the year 6000 to our generation? Why should we defer taking action or predicate anything we do on the eventual arrival of the year 6000?

The year 6000 will be the last year of the 6th millennium, because the Hebrew year count started from year one. The year 6001 will therefore be the first year of the 7th millennium. The sages of the Talmud debated whether the Messiah will come at the beginning, middle, or end of the 7th millennium. After various sources were considered, it was agreed that nobody knows when he will come. The debate concluded with the statement that all must wait for the Messiah even if he comes only on the last day of the 7th millennium, in other words more than 49 standard generations into the future.

See the Talmud Bavli tractate Sanhedrin, bottom of page 97a, continuing to the top of page 97b. In particular, note that it says there that those who calculate the end of the world will suffer eternal agony in their bones.

Fulfilling a Mitzvah (Commandment)

The first two Torah commandments to the children of Israel were recorded as Guard the month of Aviv (spring) and make a Pesach to the Lord thy God... (Deuteronomy chapter 16 verse 1). Although English translations commonly render the word Pesach as Passover, and that is common usage in modern Hebrew, in the language of the Torah the term Pesach refers specifically to the sacrificial Paschal lamb, whereas the phrase Chag HaMatzot (Feast of Unleavened Bread) is the Torah term for Passover. The slaughter and sacrifice of the Paschal lamb (Korban Pesach) used to take place in the afternoon of the 14th of Nisan, starting ¹/₂ hour after Noon, so this could imply that the calendar leap cycle should keep that moment at the earliest opportunity that is after the equinox, within the constraints of the lunar month structure.

Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (Rambam), also commonly known by his Greek name, (Moses) Maimonides, wrote a book entitled Hilchot Kiddush haChodesh (title translated as Sanctification of the New Month or alternatively as Sanctification of the New Moon) around the Julian year 1178 or Hebrew year 4938, which is one of the treatises in his Mishneh Torah collection (code of Jewish Law). In that book Rambam indicated that the primary criterion for whether to designate a year as a leap year (13 months) was the timing of the spring equinox: a leap month was required if otherwise the equinox would occur after the end of the first day of Passover.

In the present era of the traditional Hebrew calendar, however, in more than 20% of years Passover begins more than a full month after the equinox. As the traditional Hebrew calendar continues to drift later than the equinox, the proportion of years that are more than a month late will relentlessly increase.

For futher information about guarding the month of spring, please see my web page entitled, The Seasonal Drift of the Traditional (Fixed Arithmetic) Hebrew Calendar (הלוח העברי הקבוע).

Cold, Wet Sukkot

Whenever the traditional Hebrew calendar is a month late in the autumn, the festival of Sukkot is cold and rainy (and, in Canada, snowy).

The Rectified Hebrew calendar would eliminate such exceptionally late dates for all Hebrew calendar events and High Holy Days, and would keep this festival close to the autumn harvest dates in Israel.

Beyond the Year 6000

The traditional Hebrew year count (5766 at the time of writing) is based on one specific set of interpretations of a traditional reckoning of the chronology outlined in the Torah (which is not a history book).

There is plenty of evidence that human civilizations originated much earlier than 6000 years ago — the following are just a few examples:

• Satellite imaging of the Sahara has revealed the locations of multiple very ancient civilizations that date back to when Northern Africa was a savanna or tropical forest, with many lakes (click to see multiple YouTube videos and documentaries.
• Jericho, since before 8000 BC.
  • Encyclopaedia Judaica gives the radiocarbon-14 dating of the first wall-enclosed settlement at Jericho as 6850 BCE ±210 years, which corresponds to 6850 − 3760 ≈ 3090 years before the epoch of the traditional Hebrew calendar.
  • A convenient epoch for a rectified Hebrew calendar could therefore be the closest multiple of rectified leap cycles prior to the traditional epoch that fell within the timeframe of the founding of Jerico, or 9 × 353 = 3177 years before the epoch, near the first era when the rectified Hebrew calendar mean year matched the mean northward equinoctial year, as shown in figure #6 with calendars on my Lengths of the Seasons (on Earth) web page.
  • If the constraint of having a 353-year cycle start in the same year as the first 19-year cycle of the traditional Hebrew calendar is removed, then a starting year can be selected that eliminates the need for a delta factor in the rectified Hebrew calendar leap rule, or that uses Δ = ^{(353 − 1)} / ₂ = 176 for a perfectly symmetrical distribution of leap years, which has certain advantages.
• The Natufian culture, since before 10,500 BC, who were the first to cultivate grains in the region of Israel and later founded Jericho.
  • See especially the manuscript The Natufian Culture in the Levant, Threshold to the Origins of Agriculture, by Ofer Bar-Yosef, Evolutionary Anthropology 6, 159-177, 1998 576KB.
• Mehrgarh, since before 7000 BC, an ancient settlement to the west of the Indus Valley, now in western Pakistan.
• A settlement in the Gulf of Cambay off the north-western coast of India, from before 15000 BC, the remains of which are now undersea due to the rising sea level.
• As the most recent ice age came to an end and agriculture became the most dependable food source, early humans spread out along the coastlines and established many coastal settlements, but most are now undersea because of rising sea levels due to post-glacial global warming / climate change.
• Cave and rock paintings found in several places around the world (Europe, Africa, Australia), dating back to before 30,000 BC.

There is plenty of evidence that living things and the Earth itself are much older than 6000 years, a few examples include:

The age of Earth and our solar system is estimated at about 4+¹/₂ billion years:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Earth
• https://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/age.html
• http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-age-of-earth.html

As to the age of our Milky Way Galaxy and for that matter the entire Universe, every day the Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope and similar instrumentation records images of galaxies and quasars that are more than 7 billion light years away, so the Universe must be much older than that, otherwise how could the light have reached us across such vast distances? The following web sites briefly review some of the scientific evidence regarding the age of the Universe, which is currently estimated at about 13.7 billion years:

• https://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/age.html
• https://www.astro.ubc.ca/people/scott/bbage.html
• https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Age_of_the_universe

If the year 6000 since Creation (anno mundi) ever had any true significance, today it no longer matters because the World is already very far past the true count of that year number anyway!

The traditional Hebrew year number is nothing more than an annually incrementing arithmetic value used to regulate its leap cycle and to record events relative to an agreed-upon epoch.

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