MONTHS. It is proposed to comprise, under this head, some observations which may be con sidered supplementary to the articles on the sepa rate months, and subordinate to that on the year. For this end it is expedient to distinguish three periods in the Jewish mode of denoting dates by months : the first extending until the Babylonian captivity ; the second until one or two centuries after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans ; and the third from the adoption of the calendar of Rabbi Hillel the younger e., from about the middle of the 4th century of our era) until the pre sent time.
In the first period the months are, as a rule, mentioned by their numerical designation only— as the first month,' the second,' etc. * We have no explicit indication of the number of days in a month, nor of the number of months in a year : the 27th day and the tith month being respec tively the highest mentioned (Gen. viii. 14 ; Deut. i. 3) ; unless 1 Kings iv. 7 be considered to prove that the year had twelve months.-1- Nevertheless, as the two Hebrew terms for lite rally new moon, thence month, from a root signify ing to be new ; and ITV, moon, and thence month— afford some proof that the months were measured by the moon (comp. Ps. civ. 19) ; and, as the fes tivals of the Mosaic law bore a fixed relation to certain epochs of the agricultural year, which were fixed by nature, there is much reason to conclude that the year had twelve lunar months, and that it must have been kept parallel with the sun by some mode of intercalation adequate to, if not identical with, the one afterwards employed.
In the second period, we find, in part, a conti nuation of the previous method, with somewhat more definite statements (for instance, t Chron. xxvii. clearly proves that the year had twelve months), and, in part, the adoption of new names for the months : but the co-existence of both these systems is not easily explained. For, whereas Zechariah, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther, introduce the seven new names—Shebat, Chislev, Adar, Nisan, Elul, Tebeth, and Sivan — all the other canonical books written after the restoration do nothing more than enumerate the months, without any name, in the order of their succession. There
is, moreover, another discrepancy in the usage of the writers of the former class, inasmuch as, while they all generally give the name of the month together with its ordinal adjective, Nehemiah gives the naked names alone. It is on these discrepan cies that Benfey and Stern, who also give a minute statement of the particular deviations, rest one ex ternal support of their theory, that these names of the months are not Aramaic, as is commonly sup posed, but Persian, and adopted during the Cap tivity—for which it may suffice to refer to their Monatsnamen einiger alter fiolker, Berlin 1836. Although only the above-mentioned seven names occur in the 0. T., yet there is no manlier of doubt that the Jews at the same time adopted the entire twelve names, of which the following is a table :— In the same manner as the 0. T. contains no indi cation of the mode of intercalation, when yet it is certain that some mode must have been used, so also it does not mention by what method the com mencement and conclusion of every month were ascertained in either of these periods. According to the Talmud, however, it is certain that, in the second period, the commencement of the month was dated from the time when the earliest visible appearance of the new moon was announced to the Sanhedrim ; that, if this happened on the 3oth day of the current month, that month was considered to have ended on the preceding 29th day, and was called deficient (oil) ; but, if no announcement was made on the 3oth day, that day was reckoned to the current month, which was in that case called full (t6n), and the ensuing day was at once con sidered to be the first of the next month. Further, as the cloudy state of the weather sometimes hin dered the actual sight of the new moon, it was an established rule that no year should contain less than four, and more than eight, full months. It is generally assumed, although without express warrant, that the commencement of the month was determined in the same way in the first period ; but it is very probable, and the Mosaiciestivals of the new moon seem to he some evidence for it.