New Year
Published in On the Way to the Postmodern: Old Testament Essays 1967-1998, Volume 1 (JSOTSup, 292; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), pp. 426-35New Year is taken to mean here both New Year's day and the season of New Year. The date of New Year in Israel naturally depended on the calendar employed from time to time. It is clear that in postbiblical times a festival of New Year was in existence; the character of that festival is well attested in the rabbinic sources. But the nature and even the existence of such a festival in pre-exilic times remains hypothetical.
1. In the Ancient Near East
Most Near Eastern civilizations observed New Year celebrations.
a. Babylonia
In Babylon a New Year festival (the Akªtu festival) was celebrated in the spring, on Nisan 1-11. A ritual text for days 2-4 survives (ANET, pp. 331-34), but it is not comprehensive since it concerns only the role of the leading priest. Moreover it is not always reliable evidence for Babylonian practice of Israelite times, since it comes from the Seleucid period (third and second centuries bce). However, from it and other references to the festival, we know that the celebration included the following: recitation of the Babylonian Creation Epic to the statue of Marduk; puriÞcation of the temple; ceremony of renewal of the king's authority-including a ritual humiliation of the king; procession to the Akªtu house outside the city; probably a ritual drama there depicting Marduk's primordial victory over Tiamat, the chaos monster; upon return to the city, a ritual marriage (hieros gamos) of Marduk in the temple Esagila. It is doubtful that the king played the role of the god in these ceremonies, as is sometimes claimed, and it is almost certainly incorrect that the festival included a celebration of Marduk's death and resurrection. Elsewhere in Babylonia there is evidence also of autumn Akªtu festivals.b. Assyria
The celebrations were similar to those at Babylon, with some exceptions: the festival lasted about twenty days; there is no evidence of a ritual humiliation of the king; and a sacred banquet of the gods (tåkultu) may have been a feature of the rites. References also exist to Akªtu festivals in other months of the year, so it is unwise to regard all the details of Akªtu rituals as proper to New Year celebrations.c. Egypt
New Year rituals are best known from the late (second-century bce) inscriptions of the temple of Edfu. Prominent among the rituals was the bringing forth of the statue of Horus from his temple to be exposed to the rays of the sun, a reuniting of the soul of the god with his body.d. Canaan
The autumn harvest festival played an important, and probably the most important, role in the religious life of the Canaanites. But it has not yet been convincingly shown that the Canaanites celebrated that festival as a festival of New Year. It is far from certain that the Baal myth, telling of the building of a temple for Baal as a symbol of his kingship and of his resurrection and victory over Mot, the god of death, has a special connection with the autumn festival or with a celebration of New Year.
2. In Israel and Judah
a. The Date of New Year
The prevailing view distinguishes-often tacitly-the regnal New Year and the liturgical or agricultural New Year. The regnal New Year, by which the reigns of kings were reckoned, is usually believed to have begun in the month of Nisan (spring) in Israel, and in Tishri (autumn) in Judah throughout the greater part of the monarchical period. Many think, however, that the Assyrian spring calendar was adopted by Judah in the eighth or seventh century bce. The liturgical year corresponded more closely to the cycle of the agricultural year, which is thought to have begun in the autumn. None of the above statements has gone unchallenged, however.
i. The Regnal New Year. (a) Solomon's temple was begun in the second month of his fourth year and completed in the eighth month of his eleventh year (1 Kgs 6.1, 37-38), but 1 Kgs 6.38 also says that he spent seven years in building it. If the usual inclusive manner of counting is employed-whereby the fractions of years at beginning and end are counted as full years-'seven years' makes sense only if his regnal years were reckoned from Tishri, the seventh month, while the years during which the work was carried out were reckoned from Nisan. However, it seems that the 'seven years' are not inclusive, since they form part of a total of Solomon's reign (see 1 Kgs 9.10; 11.42), and inclusive reckoning is not employed when adding Þgures. Moreover, the 'seven years' may be a schematic and symbolic Þgure.
(b) In the account of Josiah's reforms (2 Kgs 2223), the discovery of the book of the law occurred 'in the eighteenth year' of Josiah (22.3), while the Passover that concluded his reforms also occurred 'in the eighteenth year' (23.23). On Nisan reckoning, all the events of these chapters must have occurred in the improbably short time of two weeks; a Tishri reckoning allows six months. Yet it is clear from 2 Chronicles 34 that not all the events of 2 Kings 2223 occurred in the eighteenth year, and again the Þgures seem to be too schematic for sure chronological inferences to be drawn.
(c) Jeremiah wrote prophecies in a scroll in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, and had them read in the temple in the Þfth year, in the ninth month (Jer. 36.1, 9). Clearly the months are numbered from the spring, for the ninth month is wintry (cf. 36.22). But if the regnal year was reckoned from the spring, Jeremiah must have waited at least nine months for the public reading of his scroll. It might seem more likely that a Tishri reckoning was in force, involving an interval of only three months. But even so, why did Baruch not read the scroll on the fast day in the seventh month? If a three-month interval is hard to explain, a nine-month interval is perhaps no less likely.
ii. The Agricultural and Religious New Year. (a) The autumn Festival of Ingathering occurred, according to the ancient festival calendars, at the 'going out (tax) or the 'turn' (hpwqt) of the year (Exod. 23.16; 34.22). Whether these terms signify not only that the agricultural year ended with the last harvest festival but also that the next year began immediately thereafter, as is usually assumed, is open to question. For the correlative of the 'going out' of the year is the 'return' (hbwvt) of the year in the spring (2 Sam. 11.1; 1 Kgs 20.22, 26; 1 Chron. 20.1), and the 'turn' of the year probably means simply the transition from summer to winter, for it is used also for the vernal transition from winter to summer (2 Chron. 36.10).
(b) The Gezer calendar, which lists the chief agricultural activities of the year, begins in the autumn. But it is noteworthy that it begins with two months of 'ingathering', which is the Þnal element in the Israelite festival calendars (Exod. 23.14-17; 34.18-23). So if the Gezer calendar represents the beginning of the agricultural year, it is out of step with the Israelite religious year. It is more probable, however, that the Gezer calendar, written rather crudely as it is, has no normative status for establishing the time of the year Israelite peasants regarded as the beginning of the year.
(c) The festival calendars (Exod. 23.14-17; 34.18-23) stress that the Festival of Unleavened Bread is to be kept in the month Abib (later called Nisan). It is hard to see why the month of observance should be mentioned in the case of this festival alone unless the month has some special signiÞcance, for example, as the Þrst month. Exod. 12.2, indeed, speciÞcally requires Israel to count Abib as the Þrst month of the year, but many scholars regard this passage as postexilic and therefore of no evidential value for the pre-exilic period. Others believe that premonarchic Israel observed a spring New Year. What is clear, however, is that the festival calendars enumerate three chief festivals beginning in the spring, which would be strange if pre-exilic Israel usually began its religious New Year at the time of the autumn festival. But because the current view is that Israel reckoned at least its religious New Year from the autumn, it is now necessary to examine the evidence for that view.b. A New Year's Day?
Tishri 1, the Þrst day of the 'seventh' month-months always being numbered from the spring-is often thought to have been regarded as New Year's day in pre-exilic Israel, as it was in postbiblical times. Though the Þrst day of every month, the New Moon day, was a religious festival (cf. Hos. 2.11 [Heb. 13]; Amos 8.5), the Þrst day of the seventh month was observed with more impressive ritual (Lev. 23.23-25; Num. 29.1-6). Work was forbidden, a cultic assembly was held, and sacriÞces additional to those prescribed for the other new moon days were offered. These Priestly texts probably embody pre-exilic practice, though many scholars still believe they were Þrst reduced to writing in the exilic or postexilic period. But there is no suggestion that the signiÞcance of this day lay in its being the New Year's day; it was rather that it introduced the month of two most solemn observations, the day of Atonement on the tenth, and the Festival of Tabernacles on the Þfteenth to the twenty-Þrst or twenty-second.
Tishri 1 was also the date of Ezra's reading of the Law (Neh. 8.2), but since that was a unique occasion, it is somewhat speculative to infer that the day was chosen because it was New Year's day.
The term 'beginning of the year' (hnvh var) occurs only in Ezek. 40.1, where it probably designates not New Year's day, but the season of the year. Comparison of the chronology with the Babylonian Chronicles shows that a spring date is here intended.c. A New Year Festival?
If no New Year's day is attested, may there have been celebrations for the season of New Year? Those who have identiÞed a New Year festival in pre-exilic Israel have by no means claimed that they had discovered a hitherto unknown festival additional to the well-attested festivals of the liturgical year-Passover, Weeks, and Booths. They have rather insisted that the New Year celebrations are only one aspect (albeit, for most scholars of this opinion, the most important aspect) of the regular autumn Festival of Ingathering, or, in one or two opinions, of the spring Festival of Passover. They are therefore freed of the necessity of demonstrating the existence of the festival; they have only to show that the rituals and ideology of the festival signify that it bore the character of New Year celebrations. Here the New Year rituals of the ancient Near East are given greater or less weight by different scholars, and the degree to which an Israelite festival may have modiÞed non-Israelite practices is variously assessed. An Israelite New Year festival has been understood in various ways.
i. A Festival of Yahweh's Enthronement. This view, propounded principally by Mowinckel and accepted in many circles of biblical scholarship, holds that the New Year festival was primarily a celebration of an enthronement of Yahweh. Many of the Psalms, especially those concerned speciÞcally with Yahweh's kingship (e.g. Pss. 47, 93, 96, 97, 99), are assigned to the liturgy of this festival. The frequent phrase °lm hwhy in these psalms would mean: 'Yahweh has become king' (in the cultic ritual just performed). This need not mean that Yahweh ever ceased to be king; indeed Ps. 93.2 afÞrms that the kingship that Yahweh has just now entered upon has been his 'from of old'. Crucial to this understanding is the conception of cult as creative drama, which not only brings reality into being, but also is a representation of primordial reality. Thus the enthronement of Yahweh that is celebrated and made a present reality at the New Year festival is his entering upon kingship at the time of creation, when he stilled the unruly waters of chaos (cf., e.g., Ps. 93.3-4). The New Year is therefore the time when Yahweh re-creates and makes all things new. The most prominent ritual of the festival was a procession of the ark, re-enacting the ark's removal to Jerusalem by David and dramatizing Yahweh's entry into his palace. Other features of the ritual included the reconsecration of the temple (cf. Ps. 93.5) and the communal acclamation of Yahweh as king (Ps. 47.1-2 [Heb. 2-3]).
Some have emphasized rather more strongly the dramatic character of the ritual and have found it possible to reconstruct from a number of psalms a liturgical cycle such as would have been employed at the festival. Thus Johnson Þnds evidence for a ritual battle between the forces of light, led by the Davidic king, and the forces of darkness, chaos, and death. Ps. 89.38-35 [Heb. 39-46] presents then the ritual humiliation and defeat of the king, Psalm 101 his protestation of loyalty and righteousness, Psalm 18 his thanksgiving after deliverance from the forces of death, and Psalms 2 and 110 his re-enthronement as the climax of the ritual drama. The outcome of the drama portrays at the same time Yahweh's primordial defeat of chaos and darkness and his own enthronement as king.
Nevertheless, while Yahweh's kingship was undoubtedly celebrated in the cult-quite possibly by means of ritual and dramatic actions-there is no clear link between celebration of Yahweh's kingship and the autumn Festival of Ingathering. One late postexilic text (Zech. 14.16) indeed mentions both together, but even if their conjunction is more than accidental, it does not prove that in the pre-exilic period the festival was largely concerned with that theme. Some have argued that the psalms of Yahweh's kingship were more probably used as sabbath psalms than as psalms for the autumn festival (Snaith), but perhaps it would be wiser to acknowledge that we do not know the occasion on which such psalms were sung, or indeed whether they were intended for one particular occasion. It can also be persuasively argued that the phrase °lm hwhy does not mean 'Yahweh has become king', but rather 'It is Yahweh who is king', focusing attention on the fact that it is Yahweh, and not Baal nor even the human king, who fully deserves that title.
ii. A Typical Near Eastern New Year Festival. This view, not so inþuential as that previously mentioned, is associated chieþy with adherents of the myth and ritual school (e.g. Engnell and Hooke). They believed it possible to identify traces in the Old Testament of a New Year festival identical in many respects to those of the rest of the ancient Near East. In addition to the elements of the re-enthronement of Yahweh and the ritual battle, the liturgy of the festival will have included: a period of chaos in which law and order are abolished and roles are reversed, with the king being humiliated and deposed and the god depicted as descending into the underworld; the cultic portrayal of the god in his death and resurrection by the king; a celebration of the hieros gamos, 'sacred marriage', by the king and his consort, symbolizing and creating fertility and prosperity; the Þxing of the destinies for the ensuing year; and the recitation of creation myths as a means of ensuring the renewal of creation. A variant upon this view portrays the king in the role of the resurrected sun-god on New Year's day, the autumn equinox.
Two principal objections can be raised against this hypothesis:
(a) The ritual pattern it invokes is much more fragmentary than has been claimed. Recent studies in Near Eastern religions emphasize the differences in ritual and belief between cultures, and the scarcity of information about the rituals and especially about their signiÞcance. Hence there is no Þxed Near Eastern pattern from which gaps in our knowledge about Israelite religion can be Þlled. The question remains whether New Year observances in the Near East exhibit sufÞcient unity to enable us to reconstruct such observances in Israel-when little speciÞc Old Testament evidence exists.
(b) The relation between mythological texts and rituals is complex. Myth is not simply the spoken accompaniment of ritual. Near Eastern myths are often essentially literary productions, with only distant connections to particular ritual acts. Even when they were recited during a ritual-as was the case with the Babylonian Creation Epic-the ritual activities cannot be safely reconstructed from the myths. Equally hazardous are inferences about Israelite festivals based on Old Testament Psalm texts.
iii. An Agricultural New Year Festival. The autumn festival, whatever else it was, was primarily a harvest festival. In the earliest Old Testament references, it is called the 'feast of ingathering' (Exod. 34.22; 23.16). It has been argued-notably by Snaith-that a festival that marks the end of one agricultural year will also mark the beginning of the next. While it commemorates the blessings of the past, it must also invoke blessings for the coming year. In that sense the autumn festival in Israel will have had the character of a festival of the New Year. Principal among its concerns will have been anxiety for the coming of the rains, especially the Early Rain, which is expected in October, that is, within a few weeks of the autumn festival. It is not surprising that prayers for rain Þgure in the later Jewish liturgy for New Year (see §3 below).
Though there is no direct biblical evidence for such an element in the celebration of the autumn festival, it is quite probable that the major festival of the year did not pass without prayers for the future, and, to be more speciÞc, for the ensuing new agricultural year. Whether that probability constitutes sufÞcient grounds for calling the Festival of Ingathering or Booths a New Year festival is, however, open to doubt-especially because the biblical sources never refer to the festival in such terms.
It may be concluded that even if pre-exilic Israel and Judah did reckon their liturgical year from the autumn-and that it is by no means self-evident, as we have seen above-the evidence that they celebrated the autumn festival as a New Year festival is far from compelling, however attractive and imaginative some of the resultant interpretations of Old Testament texts may be.
3. In Postbiblical Judaism
For reasons as yet unclear, the beginning of the year, reckoned from the spring by the early postexilic community, came to be celebrated in the autumn in Judaism. The sounding of the ram's horn (rpwv) Þgured prominently in the ritual of the festival, held on Tishri 1-2, while the liturgy emphasized the themes of judgment, God's kingship, and creation.
Nisan 1 continued to be recognized as New Year's day for the reckoning of the reigns of Jewish kings and for festivals. Thus, although the calendar year began with Tishri 1, Passover was regarded as the Þrst festival of the year. Of minor signiÞcance were the New Year's days on Elul 1 and Shebat 1, for the tithing of cattle and for trees respectively.Bibliography
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