It’s New Year in Sumeria

Changing the Year, Long Ago

Standard of Ur, Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata, Wikimedia Commons

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At first sight the Jewish New Year, which falls this weekend, has nothing in common with New Year’s Day as we know it. The secular New Year is a time of celebration, of partying, of  counting down the seconds to midnight. It is a season of good cheer, of lustily singing Auld Lang Syne, even though few of us know, or even care, what the words of the song mean.

The Jewish New Year, in contrast, is a sober event. It is a time for reflection and introspection, a time to repair our relationships with each other, a season of prayer and repentance. Yes, there is a sweet dimension to it, symbolised with honey, and there are a few mystical, food-based, rituals that have been popularised and used as augurs of renewal, but they hardly compare to the fireworks, the excitement and festivities of New Year’s Eve. Hand on heart, we can’t really say the Jewish New Year is fun. Not that it’s miserable either, that’s not the idea, but it is serious and reflective. It is a religious event, not a secular one.

And yet, despite their differences, the two New Years do have something in common. They were both influenced by the ancient Babylonian New Year festival of Akitu. It’s where the idea of New Year resolutions comes from. The nature of the resolutions we make in the secular and Jewish new years are different but the underlying idea is the same. We resolve to do things differently in the future.

The Akitu festival was celebrated across Mesopotamia, the region largely occupied today by Iraq. It marked the anniversary of the world’s creation and its purpose was to maintain the relationship between the gods and people. Its timing and rituals varied from region to region. In Babylon Akitu was held at the first new moon of spring, in Sumeria at the onset of autumn. The gods would come from their temples and, together with the priests and the king, they would  hold a summit where the fate of the coming year would be determined. The people would make pledges to repay their debts and return what wasn’t theirs; the king would atone for the people, beseeching the gods to forgive them. The gods would consent and reappoint the king to his throne. Then they would go home to their respective temples.

Originally the Roman calendar, like the Babylonian, was based on the moon not the sun. Its New Year fell in the spring. It wasn’t until 153 BCE that January 1^st became the date of the Roman New Year, probably because the month was devoted to the god Janus. He had two heads, one looking forward, the other looking backward. An appropriate god for a new year.

The Roman historian Herodian describes a ritual introduced by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, more commonly known as Elagabalus. He only reigned for four years, from 218 to 222 CE, leaving a legacy of decadence and scandal behind him. One of his innovations was a yearly ceremony where he placed an image of the sun-god into a chariot and ran backwards in front of it, facing the god and holding the horses’ reins. He looked up into the face of the god as he ran. It was a ritual he had copied from the Akitu festival.

The evidence for Babylonian influence over the Roman calendar is scanty but Rome inherited their tradition of making pledges. Romans would offer sacrifices to Janus and make pledges to him, to each other and to the state. They would also exchange gifts. They had moved on from the Babylonians’ fearful propitiation of the gods; the Roman New Year was a celebration in which other people were as important as deities. It was the beginning of a process that would culminate in the modern-day practice of making resolutions with no mandatory religious associations.

The influence of Babylonian customs on the Jewish New year is much more evident. Jews lived in Babylon from 587 BCE, when Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem and took them into exile and the Jewish calendar is heavily dependent on the Babylonian. Even the names of the Hebrew months are Babylonian; before the exile they were simply referred to by number.

Although the Jewish New Year is one of the most important events in the Jewish calendar today, there is no explicit mention of it in the Bible. The date on which it is now observed is specified in the Bible as a ‘day of remembrance’ and a ‘day of blowing horns (or shouting)’ but there is no indication that this is to be a new year. In fact it is not at all clear from the Bible what the day is supposed to be. And the date is given as the ‘first day of the seventh month’; hardly a formula to indicates that the year is changing..

The earliest formal reference to the Jewish New Year appeared around the year 200 CE, about the time that Elagabalus was running backwards in front of the sun-god’s chariot. It is introduced as one of four new years that occur during the year (analogous I suppose to today’s tax year, academic year, calendar year etc).

The Mishnah, the law code in which the Jewish New Year is first mentioned, discusses the festival’s rituals, prayers and practices. It gives so much detail that it’s quite apparent that the New Year commemoration had been around for quite a while, even if wasn’t mentioned anywhere and its earliest days were lost in the folds of time. The Mishnah states that the New Year, Rosh Hashanah in Hebrew, is to be celebrated on the first day of the seventh month the same day that the Bible had specified as one of remembrance and blowing horns. It explains what constitutes a valid horn and how the remembrance is to be carried out. But it doesn’t take much thought to recognise that the Mishnah is imposing rituals upon a date specified centuries earlier by the Bible. It is not the case that the Bible always intended these rituals to be carried out, but just didn’t mention them.

The Mishnah does write about these practices being carried out in the past but the history doesn’t go back all that far. It is notable that the Christian Bible, whose earliest books are around 150-180 years before the Mishnah, does not mention the Jewish New Year, though it does mention the biblical festivals. This suggests that the idea of the Jewish New Year evolved late, and evolved slowly.

Neither the Romans nor the Jews acknowledged the debt their New Year owed to Babylon. Perhaps the Romans didn’t need to. Other than pledges there is not a lot of evidence that they took very much from Babylon at all. And far from acknowledging its debt to Babylon, Judaism did its best to conceal it. Unlike the Babylonian New Year which fell in spring, Judaism relocated it to the autumn, There was a biblical sanction for this, after all the bible hadn’t given a name to the day of remembrance and of blowing of horns so there was no reason why it couldn’t be designated as New Year. There was also a cultural sanction because as we have seen the Sumerians celebrated their new year in the autumn.

The shifting of New Year from spring to autumn didn’t pass without a quarrel though. Just like the Babylonians, Jews considered the New Year to be the anniversary of the creation of the world. The Talmud preserves an argument between two rabbis, Eliezer and Joshua. One said the world was created in spring, the other said it was created in autumn. They were effectively arguing about when the New Year should be celebrated. Eliezer, who maintained that it was created in autumn, prevailed. A more severe character than his colleague Joshua, he could not countenance the idea that Judaism owed anything to pagan Babylon.

Joshua didn’t win that argument, but his more flexible rationalism won out in the end. Years later, in another quarrel between the two men, Eliezer was so intransigent that his colleagues refused to put up with it. They ostracised him and reversed many of his earlier rulings.

But they didn’t move the date of the New Year back to the spring. That would have been a step too far.