>Today, September 9, 2010, is the first day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. According to the Jewish calendar, this is the year 5771. This brings me to an interesting issue about the Jewish calendar.

Steve Morse is a Jewish computer scientist who has dedicated many years of his life studying the intricacies of the Jewish calendar, since it is both a solar and a lunar calendar. In order to better correlate dates in the Jewish calendar with dates in the Gregorian or Western calendar, Morse wrote a computer program that converts Jewish-calendar dates into Gregorian-calendar dates.

However, as Morse began converting dates from the Jewish calendar into the Gregorian calendar, he encountered a problem with the date of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. In an article explaining the problem Morse faced, the writer wrote:

The Jewish New Year begins on the first day of the month of Tishri. And in the Book of Genesis — the first book of the Torah and the Christian Bible — it says God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, which Jews observe from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, their Sabbath.

Because of this, Morse said, he had naively assumed that creation and the Jewish calendar both began on a Sunday in Tishri 1 in Year 1. Yet the only way other dates converted correctly in his program was if creation, as described in Genesis, started on a Monday, not a Sunday. That would make Sunday the seventh day, or day of rest.

The fact that Morse’s study of the Jewish calendar indicated that Sunday was the seventh day, the day of rest, did not agree with the teachings of the Torah and the Jewish understanding of the Sabbath. So, Morse had to find a solution to this perplexing problem. And he found one.

To discover the solution to this problem, you will have to read the rest of the article here.

Happy Rosh Hashanah

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

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Tags: Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah