Autumn New Year’s festival (1)

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Babylonian religious customs appear to have influenced the Jewish ceremonies for the New Year of Tišri. In Israel the ritual was not a royal one, and perhaps this explains why it was not celebrated in the same month as the royal New Year ceremony in Babylon, traditionally held in Nisan. Rather as fates were fixed for the coming year by writing on the Tablet of Destinies and sealing with the Seal of Destinies in Mesopotamian ritual, so the Babylonian Talmud recorded that three books were opened in heaven at the New Year in Tišri upon which were inscribed judgements of the wicked, the righteous, and the intermediate, as all creatures passed before God. In a more general sense, ‘From the beginning of the year sentence is passed as to what shall be up to the end of it.’ The divine presence, shekhinah, proceeded apparently in ten stages through the different parts of the temple before departing, and a later homily written for the New Year festival, perhaps around 700 CE, tells that ‘ these ten days of special grace when the shekhinah is near.’ How early those practices go back in Hebrew ritual is unknown.

The Palestinian Talmud, which mainly took shape early in the fifth century CE, and which carried less authority in Judaism than the Babylonian Talmud, refers to the New Year of Tišri in similar terms:

“Some authorities teach: all of them are judged on Rosh Hashanah, and the [divine] sentence of each one is sealed on Rosh Hashanah. Other authorities teach: all of them are judged on Rosh Hashanah, and the [divine] sentence of each one is sealed on Yom Kippur.”

Since the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, ended the tens days of ceremonies for the New Year, the ritual duty of cleansing or purifying the temple took place on that day. The task was fraught with peril and could be carried out only by the High Priest, mainly by sprinkling and wiping with blood of animals. Comparable is a Seleucid ritual text about the New Year festival in Babylon, which describes how the shrine of Nabû in Bel’s temple was purified on the fifth day with blood: an exorcist rubbed or smeared the room with the carcase of a decapitated sheep. The Akkadian verb used, kuppuru, is cognate with Hebrew kipper.

Bibliography

Stephanie Dalley

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