By Tom Brennan
It’s New Years! But I thought it was 2014 not 5775.
The calendar of the Western world has been changed so many times it’s a wonder any of us make it to work on time. The best example is that scholars place the birth of Jesus/Yeshua (from Whom we now base our understanding of chronology) at 3-4 BC or BCE. In simple terms He was born 3 or 4 years before Himself. The Jewish calendar in use today is fundamentally a product of the traumatic re-building period of the Jewish culture after the exile in Babylon. Because the reading of Genesis begins time with night, the general consensus of the sages and rabbis was that the new day begins at sunset.
So why is it the year 5775 ? The Hebrew calendar enumerates the years from Creation by adding up the ages of the descendants of Adam and Eve and backwards equals the 5,775 years from the creation. There is often serious discussion of what constituted a day (24 hours, sunset to sunset, “a year is as a thousand years” and many other serious arguments but the general acceptance of the formula is mostly common.) We can safely omit the Darwinian contradictions about the earth being 4 billion years old as not part of our discussion.
In ancient times the year and dates were expressed in the year of reign of the king. In the Near East this means correlating the years of reign of a number of empires which coexisted chronologically. Egypt, the Hittites, later the Babylonians and Assyrians enumerated the years of reign of their rulers. There was considered to be a list of the Pharaohs from the historian Manetho but he constructed it from many now forgotten sources and it is by no means complete. Many dates in the Bible set the times from the Exodus. The Exodus has had some close examination as to time and the Pharaoh who “let the people go” (perhaps Ramses II). So we get some fairly well documented dates to work around.
The calendar used by the Israelites is a mix of lunar and solar, the period of the Babylonian exile was a critical point in what was lost from the Temple’s culture and what was restored. A new aleph-bet was one result and so was the Talmud or “oral law”. The Israelites began the new day at sunset, as opposed to sunrise. This in itself has always led Christians to wonder about the three days in the tomb before the resurrection (although some current thinkers consider that Yeshua may have followed the Essene’ calendar which observed Passover a day early that year and perhaps the writers of the Gospels assumed that everyone knew that).
Fixing of certain dates and having an actual numerical New Year have other significance as well. Scripture gives exact days of the month when certain feasts are to be observed, also the year of Jubilee and the years of letting the land lie fallow are others. The year of Jubilee is a wonderful feature of the Book of Leviticus where every 50 years, land is returned to original families, debts forgiven and servants and slaves are freed. Just imagine what this would mean if we observed a year of jubilee in today’s world: no poverty, no debt for long terms and freedom for those held in contracts and obligations which have enslaved them to debt holders and those who buy those debts at pennies on the dollar.
Today many authors and scholars have adopted the terms CE (for Common Era) and BCE (Before Common Era) when publishing items which they hope will attract the interest of non-Christian readers. All generally agree that this is no disrespect to Christians who use AD and BC. When we realize the constant shift and re-calculation of dates in the progression of calendars from Caesar’s to today’s we can see justification. We really don’t know what day it is.
No matter what year it is the Jewish New Year celebrates the Creation, our relationship with our Creator and offers us a chance to re-think how we can renew our commitment to live in His ways. No matter what, this is something we can all agree upon and share. Happy New Year, 5775!
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