On The Jewish High Holidays
On The Jewish High Holidays
(DH 9 Oct 2005: High Holidays background info that might interest you)
The Jewish calendar and all the names of the months are an adoption of the Babylonian calendar, plus few additions. Until the Babylonian exile (587 BCE) the month Nisan (with Passover) was our first month, like in Babylon, and Tishrai was the seventh month, like in the Babylonian calendar. There is no Jewish “New Year holiday” in the bible or anywhere else until the Babylonian exile. There is just an unexplained adopted Babylonian holiday in the bible on the start of the seventh biblical Hebrew month.
The Babylonian’s seventh month is of rain arrival, winter equinox, on which life depends in our area as we have rain only about four months per year and the rest of the year is DRY. The name of the 7th month, “Tishrai”, is Babylonian for “beginning, budding, sprouting”. The Babylonians used to celebrate also the spring equinox in Nisan as their New Year with a 12 days celebration, with a “kapparu (Babylonian for cleansing of sins) on the 5th day. Jews turned it into Yom Kippur and moved it to the 10th day following Rosh Hashanah.
The bible already transformed, for obvious reasons and purpose, the Babylonian Nisan equinox holiday to the Passover holiday. Finally, sometime during the Second Temple period the biblical-Babylonian first month Nissan was changed into the Hebrew seventh month and the biblical 7th month Tishrai was changed into the first month thus making the “Head of Year”, Rosh Hashanah, and furnishing a “Jewish religious reason” for celebrating it.
See also
- https://universe-life.com/2012/10/05/whence-the-three-jewish-pilgrimage-holidays/
- https://universe-life.com/2013/08/07/natural-selection-self-replication-gravity/
The Babylonian calendar grasps nature’s self-replication cycle from seed-mass to life-energy and back to seed-mass…
Babylonians (t’shurah, t’murah) and Persians (dat, hence data) grasped life as a gift-reward from god for sacrifices /prayers…
Dov Henis (comments from 22nd century)