The Hebrew calendar’s Babylonian secret: How gods and weather named the Jewish months

Jewish holidays are observed according to the Hebrew calendar, and Israeli law requires state institutions to include the Hebrew date on official letters and public notices. Yet most Israelis conduct their daily lives according to the Gregorian calendar, running from January to December. Religious and traditional Jews sometimes lament the dominance of what Israelis commonly call the “foreign” calendar. But how Hebrew is the Hebrew calendar itself? The answer is more complicated than it might seem. The names of the months now regarded as Hebrew were actually adopted from Babylonian culture. Most originated in Akkadian, an ancient Semitic language related to Hebrew. At least one of them poses an especially striking problem from a Jewish perspective: Tammuz was the name of a fertility god worshipped in Mesopotamian religions, including Babylonian and Sumerian traditions. “There’s something amusing about people raising an eyebrow, for example, when children are named July.