WINCHESTER, California – The Book of Genesis is quite clear: God created time during the chaos of creation, measured by the motions of the moon and sun, equivalent to a lunisolar calendar. The Torah refers to days, months, and years quite often, but presents a calendar only once, in parasha Noaḥ, Genesis 7 and 8.
Can you recall the names of the months mentioned in the Torah? If you said something like Tishri, Adar, or Nisan, you’re wrong. Try again. Can you recall the names of the days of the week recorded in the Torah? Probably not. The Torah does not give names to days of the week, or to months of the year, they are all numbered. There are two exceptions, although they more like tags then names. The Torah calls the seventh day Yom HaShabbat, the day of rest, and labels the (Jewish) month in which spring occurs Ḥodesh HaAviv.
The Torah does not specify the number of days in a month or how to measure a year’s length, but in recounting the long lives of the antediluvian leaders and patriarchs, the Book of Genesis shows it clearly understands the meaning these words.
Calendars come in three forms: solar, lunar, and lunisolar—the Jewish calendar. Ancient civilizations had little difficulty fixing the length of a lunar month, about 291/2 days. Since calendars only operate with a whole number of days, lunar-calendar months alternate between 29 and 30 days. These same civilizations had much difficulty measuring the length of a solar year. Some had a 360-day solar year, others a 364-day year and still others a 365-day year. Rome, as late as the eighth century BCE, well after Noah’s time, still lacked an understanding of the true length of a solar year. Legend says Romulus, the first king of Rome, about the year 753 BCE, introduced a ten-month, 304-day calendar.
Which calendar did Noah use and can we assign dates to the described flood events? Let’s look at Noah’s calendar, mostly adhering to the version found in Genesis 8 because of its detailed timeline. Chapters and verses are in parentheses.
- It happened in the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month that all the waters of the great deep burst… and it rained on the earth for forty days and forty nights (7:11-12).
- Now the springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavens had been closed, and the rain stopped falling from the sky. The waters then receded steadily from the earth. At the end of a hundred and fifty days the waters had gone down, and on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat (8:2-4).
- The waters continued to recede until the tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains became visible (8:5).
- After forty days, Noah opened the window of the ark… And he sent out a raven, which flew back and forth, but returned. (8:6-7).
- Then he sent out a dove to see if the waters had receded from the surface of the ground, but the dove could not find a resting place on the earth and also returned (8:8-9).
- He waited seven days and again sent out the dove. The dove returned near evening with an olive branch in its bill. Noah knew the waters were receding from the earth (8:10-11).
- Noah waited seven more days, after which he sent out the dove, but it did not return (8-12).
- And it happened that on the six hundred and first year of Noah’s life, on the first of the first month the waters began to dry from the earth.… Noah saw that the land was drying (8:13).
- And on the twenty-seventh day of the second month, the earth was dry. (8:14).
Noah’s chronology names months by number, as in the Jewish tradition, rather than by a secular name, so months must be lunar months, right? A number of scholars and theologians believe the Noahide calendar is a solar calendar, pointing to verses 3 and 4 as proof.
3The waters than receded steadily from the earth. At the end of one hundred fifty days the waters diminished. 4and the ark came to rest in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month on the mountains of Ararat.
They presume verses 3 and 4 address the same event, the diminished waters and the resting Ark happening on the same day. There are five months between the seventeenth of the second month and the seventeenth of the seventh month. 150 days divided by 5 months is the same as five 30-day months, an impossible feat for a lunar calendar, but accurate in a 360-day solar calendar. Five lunar months have only 148 days. So they conclude months in the Noahide calendar must be solar-calendar months.
Are they right?
People holding this idea understand the message, not the medium. If these months are solar months than part of verse 4 is superfluous, as verses 3 and 4 say the same thing: 150 days equals 5 solar months. The Torah is never superfluous. On the contrary, the Torah is parsimonious with its wording; sometimes painfully so. Verse 4 must be offering something new, something not found in verse 3.
Verse 4 is telling us five months are not 150 days. If the months are lunar months, then 150 days after the rain starts falling is the nineteenth of the seventh month, the day the waters diminish. Five months, or 148 days after the rain begins to fall is the seventeenth of the seventh month, the day the Ark rests on the mountains of Ararat. Verse 3 counts 150 lunar-calendar days; verse 4 measures 5 lunar-calendar months. Two different verses, two different measurements, two different events, but one calendar—the lunar calendar. Verses 3 and 4 should be understood as:
3The waters than receded steadily from the earth. At the end of one hundred fifty [lunar-calendar] days [on the nineteenth of the seventh month] the waters diminished. 4and the ark came to rest in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month [two days earlier] on the mountains of Ararat.
Before assigning dates to these events, we need to determine which month is the “second month,” the month in which the flood story begins. The Torah records the “second month” on only two occasions. They are both, unfortunately, in parasha Noaḥ, and this story gives no referencing events to identify it. Perhaps we can get the answer by identifying the first month. There are two contenders (using modern Jewish-calendar names), Nisan and Tishri.
The Torah refers to Nisan as the “first month of months” (Ex. 12:2), but not the “first month”. Rabbi Mendel Adelman points out that the month of Tishri is the obvious choice for the first month of the year because the Book of Exodus (23:16 and 34:22) refers to Sukkot, a holiday falling in Tishri, as “the feast of the ingathering at the turn of the year.”Also, blowing the shofar on Yom Kippur accompanies the announcement to free slaves in the Jubilee year (Ex. 25:11). “It is much more understandable to blow on that day if it is only ten days into the new year. If it is six months and ten days in, it seems a little late.”
Our civil calendar has analogous situations. School years, for example, start in September, followed by October, November, and so on. September is the first month of the school months, January is the first month of the year. The second month of the school months is October; the second month of the year is February, and so forth.
We are not alone in our conundrum. In the second century, Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua debated the same question in the Talmud (Rosh Hashanah 12a), which concluded:
The Sages taught in a baraita [an early tradition not incorporated into the Talmud]: The Jewish Sages count the years from Creation and the flood in accordance with the opinion of Rabbi Eliezer, from Tishri, and they calculate the cycles of the sun and the moon in accordance with the opinion of Rabbi Yehoshua, from Nisan.
When the Torah says, “It happened in the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month,” it means the second month of the year, not the second month of months. Ḥeshvan is the second month of the year.
Tishri, as the first month, holds 30 days; Ḥeshvan, 29 days; Kislev, 30 days; and so on, alternating 29 and 30 days for all twelve months, making the year 354 days long. To more meaningfully correlate the Noahide calendar with the modern Jewish calendar, we’ll employ present-day names for Jewish months.
- The rain begins on 17 Ḥeshvan and stops on 27 Kislev, forty days later.
- The waters recede for 110 days (40 + 110 = 150), bringing us to 19 Nisan. However, two days earlier, on 17 Nisan, the Ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.
- The waters continue to recede and mountain tops become visible on 1 Tammuz, 71 days later.
- After 40 more days, on 12 Av, Noah sends out a raven, but it returns.
- On the same day, Noah sends out a dove, and it too returns.
- After 7 days, Noah again sends out the dove. The dove returns with an olive branch. It is now 19 Av.
- Seven days later, on 26 Av, Noah releases the dove again, but it does not return.
- Only on 1 Tishri, 34 days later, in Noah’s 601st year of life, 309 days after the first raindrops of the Great Flood fell, did Noah stand on the Ark’s deck, seeing the land drying out.
- However, not until 27 Ḥeshvan, 56 days later, is the land dry.
Verse 8:14 (#9, above) gives additional insight into the Noahide calendar. There are 365 days, the length of a solar year, between 17 Heshvan in one year and 27 Heshvan in the next. The Noahide calendar is saying from to start to finish, the Great Flood lasted one solar year.
354 days + 11 days equals 365 days. 354 days comprise the length of a lunar-calendar year and 11 days are needed to align lunar and solar calendars. Noah’s calendar is a lunisolar calendar, a traditional Jewish calendar, describing a solar year in Noah’s life, the year of the Great Flood, within a lunar-calendar framework, and confirming what Alexander Philip wrote a century ago, “Of calendars still operative the Jewish can claim the most ancient unbroken lineage.”
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Fred Reiss, Ed.D. is a retired public and Hebrew school teacher and administrator. He is the author of several books on the Jewish calendar, including, The Jewish Calendar: History and Inner Workings, 3rd Edition. He may be contacted via fred.reiss@sdjewishworld.com.