The Calendar: When Did We Begin Counting from Creation?

Following the death of Alexander the Great and the split of his kingdom, Judea found itself under Ptolemaic rule (based in Egypt). This changed when that territory was conquered by the Seleucid kingdom.

Paul J. Kosmin, Time and its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire (Harvard University Press 2018).

We find this mostly in coins. Very rarely also the consular year—the official Roman method of counting years—as in the Jewish, Aramaic marriage contract from Antinoopolis (Egypt) of 417 CE: Sirat et al. (1986). There was also the era of Provincia Arabia (in southern Palestine) and other local eras. Some have argued for a long era of Simon or Hyrcanus I, still in use in the 1st cent. B.C.E.

Sacha Stern, “The Jewish Aramaic tombstones from Zoar,” Journal of Jewish Studies 68 (2017): 158–179.

The word is unknown and most likely a scribal error for בירח. In context, the author must mean “month.”

See יששכר שטרן [Sacha Stern], “מצבות חדשות מצוער: אוסף מוסיוף” [New Tombstones from Zoar: (Moussaieff Collection)], Tarbiz 68 (2000): 177–185 [pp. 179–180]. See also, idem, “The Jewish Aramaic Tombstones from Zoar,” Journal of Jewish Studies 68 (2017): 158–179.

James C. VanderKam, The Book of Jubilees, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalum 511; Scriptore Aethiopici 88 (Peeters, 1989), 115. As Vanderkam notes in his commentary, this date does not agree with other dates in the book, implying that scribes made errors in transcription, likely because they were not calculating the dates themselves to avoid errors.

Alden A. Mosshammer, The Easter Computus and the Origins of the Christian Era (Oxford University Press, 2008).

j. Rosh Hashanah 1:1 (56b) and b. Rosh Hashanah 10b-12a.

Chaim Milikowsky, סדר עולם: מהדורה מדעית, פירוש ומבוא [Seder Olam: Critical Edition, Commentary and Introduction] (Yad Ben Zvi, 2013), 1.219.

In Jewish sources, it is first attested in the Babylonian Talmud (Avodah Zarah 9b) but was not yet an established dating method in practice.

This inscription appears between the central door and the central mosaic carpet.

Sacha Stern, “Fictitious chronologies and calendar cycles in late antique and medieval Judaism,” in Il tempo nell'alto medioevo, Fondazione Centro Italiano di Studi Sull'alto Medioevo (CISAM) 70 (2024): 1079–1113.

Cambridge University Library T-S 8G7.1: Sacha Stern Calendar and community: a history of the Jewish calendar, second century BCE-tenth century CE, (Oxford University Press 2001), 277-283.

At the end of the previous line are the letters לש which is the beginning of the next word לשטרות repeated on the next line.

Cairo Genizah: Cambridge University Library T-S C2.17. See Eve Krakowski and Sacha Stern, “The ‘Oldest Dated Document of the Cairo Genizah’ (Halper 331): The Seleucid Era and Sectarian Jewish Calendars,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 31.3 (2021): 617–634.

The era from the exile of Jehoiachin was not new: it had been adopted in the tenth century by the Karaites in Ramle, in imitation of 2 Kings 25:27.

St Petersburg ms, Russian National Library Evr. I B19a.

Oxford ms, Bodleian Pococke 262, folio 262v, Alexander Gordin, “How to avoid some pitfalls while interpreting dates in Hebrew manuscripts,” Revue des Etudes Juives 178 (2019): pp.159–184 [p. 179].

The first column, called קביעות, is not an era but the characteristics of the annual calendar.

Oxford ms, Bodleian Huntingdon 465, folios 29v-48r.

Moshe David (Umberto) Cassuto, “הכתובות העבריות של המאה התשיעית בונוסה” ]The Hebrew Inscriptions of 9^th century Venosa], Qedem 2 (1945): 99–120.

According to b. Avodah Zarah (9a-b), to convert from the Seleucid era to the Creation era, 48 years must be added to the Seleucid year (this is not the whole calculation, as the centuries and millennia still need to be converted, by adding another 3400 to the Seleucid year).

The 14 hours are counted from Thursday evening 6:00pm our time.

So according to Tosafot on Rosh ha-Shanah 8a. See Stern “Fictitious chronologies and calendar cycles.”

This is explicit, for example, in London Ms British Library Or. 10588.5. See Gordin “How to avoid some pitfalls.”

The explanations they ventured are too numerous and too complex to be surveyed here. Elsewhere I intend to propose that the era of Creation was brought back by one year to make it start at the beginning of a 19-year cycle (of the fixed rabbinic calendar) – but this proposal requires extensive discussion and evaluation.

This is a reference to the description of the world in Genesis 1 before God began creating.

Oxford Ms Bodleian Opp. 317, fol. 89v (cols. 1-2) and fol. 93v (col. 2). The calendar treatise of R. Jacob b. Samson is still unpublished, and only preserved in this fragmentary manuscript.