A Jewish New Year For All Human History

January the first will begin the Christian calendar year 2027. Christians know their calendar starts from the birth of Jesus. Muslims know the Muslim calendar begins with the escape of Muhammad from oppression and persecution by the Arabs of Makka to freedom in the town of Medina. Buddhists know that their calendar starts with the enlightenment of Siddhartha under a Bodhi tree. But most Jews would be hard pressed to explain what happened 5,787 years ago to start the Jewish calendar.

By analogy to the Christian, Muslim, or Buddhist calendars one might expect that the Jewish calendar starts with the birth of Abraham (the first Jew), or from the Exodus from Egypt (the trans-formative experience of the Jewish people), or from the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai (the enlightenment of the Jewish people). But the second century Rabbis who made up the calendar Jews currently use, chose to begin with Adam and Eve i.e. the beginning of human civilization.

The word Adam in Hebrew means mankind/Homo Sapiens– the species. The exit of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden marks the transition of humanity from a largely nomadic/neolithic stone age society of hunter-gatherers, to a more advanced metal working bronze age society of farmers and village dwellers.

Or perhaps the Jewish calendar begins with the first pair of wheels. The earliest evidence for wheeled vehicles appears simultaneously in Southwest Asia and Northern Europe, about 35-3700 BCE. In Mesopotamia, that evidence is from images, pictographs representing four-wheeled wagons found inscribed on clay tablets dated to the beginning of the late Uruk period of Mesopotamia. Models of solid wheels, carved from limestone or modeled in clay, have been found in Syria and Turkey, at sites dated approximately a century or two later.

Although long-standing tradition credits the southern Mesopotamian civilization with the invention of wheeled vehicles, today scholars are less certain, as there appears to be a nearly simultaneous record of use throughout the Mediterranean basin. Scholars are divided as to whether this is the result of the rapid dissemination of a single invention or multiple independent innovations.

But more likely the Bible is just focused on the history of humanity. All historical dates that are derived from written records will fit into the Jewish calendar. The earliest writing comes from the same Mesopotamian city of Uruk (Genesis 10:10) and dates to about 55-5600 years ago i.e. the third century of the Jewish calendar. The first dynasty in Egypt arose in the 7th century of the Jewish calendar, and the first stone pyramid in the 10th century.

The famous king Sargon of Akkad (2371-2316 BCE) lived in the 14th century of the Jewish calendar. Abraham was not born until the 21th century of the Jewish calendar. It is only in the generations after Abraham that Biblical history begins to focus on the religious development of one specific group of people.

The earliest written evidence of the Hebrews is the Merneptah Stele, erected in Egypt in 1208 BCE, an Egyptian victory stele erected by Pharaoh Merneptah that tells how he (and his army) defeated the Libyans, and put down uprisings in Canaanite cities, followed by a claim about the destruction of a people called “Israel”.

The Egyptian inscription describes the Israelites as a stateless group of semi-nomadic men and women inhabiting Canaan at a time when Canaan was under Egyptian rule. Pharaoh Merneptah groups them together with several Egyptian-ruled city states in Canaan that were crushed.

The Hebrew’s Exodus from Egypt occurred just a generation or two prior to this 1208 BCE victory stele. Pharoah Merneptah’s totally false claim that Israel had been destroyed is evidence that the Pharaohs were still angry that the Pharaoh of the Exodus had been defeated by the one, imageless, God of the Hebrews.

The Jewish calendar is not only the oldest of the world’s calendars, it is the only one that begins with the beginning of recorded human history. Everything prior to the Jewish calendar is prehistory. On the west bank of the Nile in northern Sudan stand the ruins of an ancient Egyptian town called Soleb. A temple complex there dating to the reign of Pharaoh Amenhotep iii, who reigned sometime in the late 15th to early 14th centuries B.C.E. was built to honor the Pharaoh. Its many pillars bear images of the peoples he claimed to have conquered; and the whole inner chamber was a symbolic representation of Amenhotep’s military conquests. Pictures of his subjugated northern enemies face northward, those of his southern enemies face southward.

The pillars of Soleb not only identify Egypt’s enemies they also provide topographical texts that use four glyphs for the name of a mobile, imageless. pastoralist group of people called the YHV; who lived in Egypt in the late fifteenth century B.C.E

The Egyptians usually exaggerated their conquests, but they didn’t decorate their temples with pictures of fictional adversaries. One pillar at Soleb bears a cartouche (a term for an oval-shaped hieroglyphic inscription) of great biblical significance. It translates to “The land of the shasu of Yahveh. Yahveh” refers to the God of the Hebrews, mentioned over 6,800 times throughout the Hebrew Bible.

This group probably was the Egyptian delta twelve imageless tribes of Jacob Hebrews who were nicknamed by the Egyptians after their invisible God YHVH. The twelve imageless tribes of Jacob Hebrews were located in the north Egypt delta; but one of Soleb’s pillars depicts the people of Megiddo in the Land of Israel which is much more north than the delta.

The term ivri (the Hebrew) first appears in the Torah, when Prophet Abraham is called “the Hebrew: “And it was told to Abram the Hebrew” (Genesis 14:13) And Prophet Joseph uses the name as both a geographical and an socio-ethnic term: “I was kidnapped from the land of the ivrim” (Genesis 40:15), and “The Egyptians could not eat with the ivrim, since that would be an abomination” (Gen. 43:32) The word Hebrew is a linguistic, geographical and ethnic identity term like German [a language], Germany{a country] and Germans [a people].