Month

A month is the calendar unit by which Scripture reckons worship, harvest, and prophetic time: a named or numbered division of the year that fixes the date of festivals, dates events in royal reigns, and measures longer spans in visions.

The text ties Israel's central observance to a particular month. Deuteronomy 16:1 commands, "Observe the month of Abib, and keep the Passover to Yahweh your God; for in the month of Abib Yahweh your God brought you out of Egypt by night." Exodus 12 fills out what happens in that month: seven days of unleavened bread with yeast put away from the houses (Exodus 12:15), and the night of judgment when the blood on the lintel and doorposts marked the houses so that the destroyer was not allowed in (Exodus 12:13, 12:23). One way to read this is that the month is not merely a date but the container of the memorial — the annual rehearing of the exodus is anchored to the same month in which it happened.

Scripture designates months in more than one way. Some are named from the agricultural year: Abib (Deuteronomy 16:1) is, as a matter of Hebrew vocabulary, a word for fresh ears of grain, pointing to the barley harvest, so the month is identified by what ripens in it. Others carry names from the Babylonian calendar that came into use after the exile; Ezra 6:15 is an established historical example, dating the completion of the second temple to "the third day of the month Adar, which was in the sixth year of the reign of Darius the king." Still others are simply numbered — Zechariah 7:5 speaks of fasting and mourning "in the fifth and in the seventh month," without the text explaining in that passage what gave rise to those fasts. And months also function as a measured span: Revelation 11:2 gives the holy city over to be trodden by the nations "for forty-two months."

Christian traditions differ on how months are reckoned and therefore on when the calendar's great feasts fall. Historically, the churches of Asia Minor kept Pascha on the fourteenth day of the first month, on the Jewish reckoning, while other churches kept it on the following Sunday; the Council of Nicaea in 325 decided for the Sunday, and that settlement underlies the later divergence between Western and Eastern reckonings. Many Orthodox churches still use the Julian calendar for fixed feasts while others follow the Gregorian, so the same feast can fall on different dates. Interpreters also divide over the symbolic time periods: some read the forty-two months of Revelation 11:2 as a literal three and a half years, others as a symbolic figure for a limited period of trial.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.