Jewish Calendar Demystified (2007)
stevemorse.org
stevemorse.org
Some resources for those who are interested:
libhdate (Jewish date + cal alternative for Linux) https://sourceforge.net/p/libhdate/wiki/Home/
hebcal (RSS, CSV, Google/Apple/etc calendar integration) https://www.hebcal.com/
On my android phone I used KLCK and KWGT with the hebcal RSS feed above to create a lockscreen and homescreen Jewish calendar widget. On my laptop I run Sway+Waybar and created a custom waybar module with libhdate. It's not perfect but it's working for now!
Well, Roman Imperialism. The sheer reach of the Roman Empire is the reason why it became a de facto standard, difficult to displace. The month names are still Roman, and the days of the week are pagan gods.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Ti...
That the years are structured around the death of Christ... Eh? Hard to say. I believe that was retro-fitted, and probably was more centered around Augustus's rise to power and Rome moving from a republic to an empire. Or maybe not, I haven't read the relevant wikipedia page for that.
EDIT: I meant to say that the Julian calendar did not always use BC/AC but adopted it some time prior to the invention of the Gregorian calendar.
The motivation was to stop the drift of the whole Christian festival calendar towards later and later days in the year. We have some confusion about Easter in contemporary accounts of the reform, but the date of Easter when calculated as the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox is independant of any calendar system. This would have implied that all other festivals, based on the Julian Calendar, would have caught up and then overtaken Easter (and caught up again, etc.).
> and to ensure that people around the world were celebrating it at the same time.
This was definitely not the intention. All people in the Protestant/Catholic/Orthodox "realm" were already using uniformely the Julian Calendar. Differences of the Easter date were due to different algorithms for its calculation. In practice, on the contrary, it led to more differences, because the reform was not accepted for a long time in many parts of the Christian world, even in Catholic ones.
> While you are definitely right that the Gregorian calendar stems from Roman culture, one cannot deny that its revisions were religiously motivated and funded.
Well, the flaws of the Julian System had a consequence for the Christian festival calendar. But to correct this flaw was also a very reasonable thing to attempt. We are in in age were astronomy (and astrology) become a very popular science.
> Further, that its history and global adoption is intertwined with the spread of Christianity around the world.
This is not true. For example in what become later the British empire the Julian Calendar was in use until 1752. So for many areas the adoption come long after Christianity took roots. And then it was implemented in areas that never become widely Christian, such as India.
> With its global adoption cultures all around the world have lost their connection to their own calendars and practices.
Most did not loose connection. It become rather dual use.
> As for the BC/AC part I believe it was always part of the Gregorian calendar? The Julian calendar also used BC/AC. :)
> EDIT: I meant to say that the Julian calendar did not always use BC/AC but adopted it some time prior to the invention of the Gregorian calendar.
"BC/AC" is wrong, it is: "BC/AD" ("Before Christ" and "Anno Domine" = "In the year of the Lord").
The Gregorian Calendar strictly speaking applies only to dates after AD 1583. If you extent it backwards (avoiding the date gap in 1583), it is called the "proleptic Gregorian Calendar". There exist different version of it. For example ISO 8601 uses a proleptic Gregorian Calender with a year zero.
Besides first appearances in the late 15th century, Julian Calendar BC dates started to be widely used only much later than the Gregorian reforms. When writing about ancient history, authors used AUC dates ("Ab urbe condita" = "From the founding of the City [Rome]" = 753 BC) or dated from the (suppost) beginning of the world, thus avoiding negative numbers.
But much before that, Jewish-Christians were not exactly friendly to Romans/"pagans", and vice versa. To put it lightly. Clash of civilizations: completely different values.
I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news but ancient Israel was also a kingdom/empire.
You are just migrating from the conventions from empire to the conventions from another one.
If imperialism is bad there might be non-imperial calendar alternatives you may enjoy more, like the French Republican calendar.
If you dislike Ancient Rome, you may also consider not using the Latin alphabet.
Most of the atrocities you mention took place during a time when literacy rate was really low, masses took place in Latin and absolutely nobody understood what was going on. Copies of the Bible were extremely expensive and for over 1000 years there was not even paper to print them. Most of the people involved in those acts of violence had no idea what actual Christianity even meant because their only connection to Christianity was attending a church on Sunday where the entire thing was in Latin.
Jesus was an extremely tolerant guy and his message was one of tolerance and forgiveness, which is extremely unusual for a monotheistic belief system.
Another thing to take into consideration is that it is the successor of Christian imperialism mostly what helped found modern Israel and is helping protect Israel today. So perhaps it may be a good idea to relax those views a bit.
And keeping track of calendars was part of their job!!
>The Pontifices were in charge of the Roman calendar and determined when intercalary months needed to be added to synchronize the calendar to the seasons. Since the Pontifices were often politicians, and because a Roman magistrate's term of office corresponded with a calendar year, this power was prone to abuse: a Pontifex could lengthen a year in which he or one of his political allies was in office, or refuse to lengthen one in which his opponents were in power. A Pontifex with other political responsibilities, especially away from Rome, might also have been simply distracted from his calendrical duties as chief priest. This caused the calendar to become out of step with the seasons; for example, Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon in January 49 BC actually took place in mid-autumn.
Under his authority as pontifex maximus, Julius Caesar introduced the calendar reform that created the Julian calendar, with a fault of less than a day per century, and which remained the standard till the Gregorian reform in the 16th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontifex_maximus#Roman_Republi...
While the Julian calendar was clearly more secular, The motivation for the adjustments in the Gregorian calendar was to re-align Easter to a historically accurate date and to ensure that people around the world were celebrating it at the same time. While you are definitely right that the Gregorian calendar stems from Roman culture, one cannot deny that its revisions were religiously motivated and funded. Further, that its history and global adoption is intertwined with the spread of Christianity around the world. With its global adoption cultures all around the world have lost their connection to their own calendars and practices.
i.e.: the death of an ethnic Jew
> Christian fundamentalism as a excuse to colonize people all over the world and commit atrocities.
Monotheistic belief systems are not tolerant of people that believe in other deities.
This "fundamentalism" can be found in every monotheistic belief system, especially as you start going back in history.
History is full of examples of Christian kingdom/empires/countries waging war against each other.
World history of full of conflicts in single every region of the world, including regions with negligible Christian presence.
> however, unlike most religions proselytizing is a feature (not a bug) of Christianity
D'varim 13, 7-10
Just wondering about Jewish timezones and keeping server times if days get longer and shorter at different places based on both latitude and longitude ;-)
But keeping track of the hours themselves was a bit hard, so usually people only referred to three major hours of the day: Terce, around mid-morning; Sext, at noon; and None, around mid-afternoon.
So yes, the hours of the day were absolutely dependent on the latitude (along with the day of the year).
Didn’t every culture basically use a lunar calendar before the Gregorian calendar? I remember reading that the oldest lunar calendar was found in Scotland or something.
Totally relate to your comments about being closer to nature when being aware of the moon cycle. It’s like we’re living in a clock and we’re using the gears to keep time instead of the hour hand.
makes me wish more of pre-Christian European culture had persisted.
Actually this month that we are entering, also known as Kartik, named after the constellation Krttika, where the moon is full, is a very holy month in the Indian calendar and contains the special Diwali festival on the amavasya or new moon night.
then again, everything we see is majoritarily 2 dimensional (with a whisper or soft hint of depth)
* the Earth's rotational period ("day")
* the Moon's orbital period ("month")
* the Earth's orbital period ("year")
not being integer multiples of each other at all! Despite that, we naturally want to keep time in terms of each of these -- as you said, they're all such extremely noticeable periodic phenomena. According to GNU units, the day is
24 hr = 86400 s
29 days + 12 hours + 44 minutes + 2.8 seconds = 2551442.8 s
365.242198781 day = 31556926 s
That may sound complicated to remember, but consider how we figure out how long a month is in the Gregorian calendar. There are 30 days in the 4th, 6th, 9th, and 11th months and 28 days in the 2nd month (except for leap years). At least with the old lunisolar calendar you can figure out where you are in a month just by looking at the moon.
Steve Morse should have asked Rabbi/Professor/Mathematician/Cosmologist Shlomo Sternberg, Mathematician/Cosmologist (Born 1936), for help in the 1970s or 1980s.
He also proved swordfish is kosher.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breed_Street_Shul
> The Boyle Heights section of Los Angeles, located east of downtown, was home to the city's most populous Jewish community from 1910 to 1950. The area around Breed Street Shul became a center for the Jewish community.
It is considered to be one of the oldest if not the oldest, and most accurate in the world by UNESCO.
There is a website that rebuild it from the ancient documents describing it, and it is compared head to head with the Gregorian calendar, you can also find the code on github, it is cool.
According to it we live in year 7527-th :)
Link to the calendar - https://bgkalendar.com/index.php?lang=en
In terms of changing the calendar rules, I doubt that there would be any chance of pan-Jewish consensus for quite a few more millennia, that is, not until the dates of major festivals get significantly more out of whack than they are now.
It could be as easy as creating a Mastodon instance to find out.
The missing years are also interesting:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_years_(Jewish_calend...
I've enjoyed thinking of the latter as like a movie sequel. "Adar II: The Revenge of Adar".
Apparently all of these forms are common.