Over-Interpreting the Bible

When does the Jewish year begin? The answer seems obvious: Everyone knows it’s Rosh Hashanah, whose name literally means “first of the year.” Yet if you read the Bible, it becomes clear that God himself had a different idea. In Exodus 12, God addresses Moses and Aaron directly, telling them that Nisan, the month of the Exodus from Egypt, “shall mark for you the beginning of the months; it shall be the first of the months of the year for you.” (Though the Bible does not actually use the word “Nisan”: the names of the months as we know them are Babylonian and date from the Babylonian exile in the 6th century B.C.E.) It makes perfect sense that Nisan, which marks the beginning of Jewish freedom and includes the most important Jewish holiday, Passover, would be the month chosen to begin the year. And as we read earlier in the Daf Yomi cycle, in Tractate Shekalim, it was in Nisan that the Temple authorities marked the new year for the purposes of collecting tithes. Why, then, do we celebrate Rosh Hashanah on the first of Tishrei, six months later?

This question, which has long puzzled me, receives a kind of answer in the first chapter of Tractate Rosh Hashanah, which we began reading this past week. The first mishna in the tractate explains that there are, in fact, four different days in the Jewish calendar that can be said to mark the New Year. The first of Nisan, the rabbis explain, is “the New Year for kings.” Official documents, as the Gemara goes on to clarify, were usually dated in Talmudic times by the regnal year of the king: A promissory note, for instance, might come due in the ninth year of the reign of King So-and-So. For these purposes, a year is considered to start on the first of Nisan, just as God instructs in the Bible. A corollary of this rule is that, if a king starts reigning even one day before Nisan starts—if he takes the throne on the 29th of Adar—that one day counts as the first year of his reign, and the coming of Nisan marks the beginning of the second year.