Cheshvan

Cheshvan is the eighth month of the Hebrew year, falling in autumn, roughly October to November, and aligned in tradition with the sign of Scorpio. Its length varies between twenty-nine and thirty days, one of two months the calendar adjusts to keep the festivals on their proper days. Cheshvan is notable for having no festivals or fasts at all, the only such month in the Hebrew year; it is sometimes called Mar Cheshvan, bitter Cheshvan, a name also read as a title, drop of Cheshvan, for the rains that begin in the season. The name is glossed with the sense of strength. The Hebrew calendar is lunisolar, kept in step with the solar year by an added leap month. These are the features of the Jewish calendar tradition, in which Cheshvan offers a quiet interval after the crowded month of Tishrei.

Cheshvan, sometimes called Marcheshvan, meaning bitter Cheshvan in later folk etymology, is the only month of the Hebrew calendar to carry no festival, fast or other fixed observance of its own, a genuine gap in the ritual calendar that later tradition read, without scriptural basis, as the source of its "bitter" epithet. Cheshvan is also, together with Kislev the following month, one of the two variable-length months whose day count, 29 or 30 days, is adjusted year to year to make the whole Hebrew year fall into one of three categories, chaserah (deficient), kesidrah (regular) or shlemah (complete), the mechanism by which the fixed calendar keeps festivals from drifting onto forbidden weekdays without altering any of the other, fixed-length months.

The name comes from the Akkadian Arahsamnu, one of the Babylonian month names adopted wholesale into Hebrew usage. The month runs 29 or 30 days according to the year, one of only two whose length varies.

The month names are Babylonian. Twelve of them are the Akkadian month names taken into Hebrew during and after the exile, and the biblical books of the return use them freely while the earlier books generally number the months or use a small set of older Canaanite names. The atlas records the borrowing rather than presenting the names as native, because it is one of the clearest visible marks the exile left on Jewish practice.

The Jewish calendar as now kept is calculated rather than observed. Month lengths are fixed by rule except for Cheshvan and Kislev, which absorb the adjustment and may run 29 or 30 days, and a thirteenth month is added in seven years out of nineteen on a fixed cycle so that Passover stays in the spring. A further set of rules, the postponements, shifts Rosh Hashanah off certain weekdays, which is why the year has six possible lengths rather than two.

Cheshvan is one of the two variable months, running 29 or 30 days according to the length the year requires, and it is also the only month besides Iyar with no festival at all, which has earned it the byname Mar Cheshvan, bitter Cheshvan, in later usage.