the eighth month

Where the authorities disagree

What Bul means. The Yerushalmi (Rosh Hashanah 1:2, and Targum Yonasan to Melachim I 6:38) gives three at once: novel, the leaves fall; bul, the earth turns to wet clods with the first rains; bolel, one must mix fodder indoors because nothing is left in the field. Rabbi Yeshayah of Trani (the Rid, to Melachim I 6:38) and Ibn Saruk (who traces the name to the biliteral ב-ל): from yevul, produce, the month when the crop is already gathered in. Pappenheim, elaborating on that same biliteral root: from bilui, wearing out, the eighth month falling in the autumn, when the plants and leaves grow worn and withered. The Pri Megadim, Rabbi Yosef Teomim-Frankel (1727-1792), on Radak's gloss of bul eitz (Yeshayahu 44:19) as a branch: the eighth month branches off from Tishrei. Rabbi Aharon Marcus (1843-1916) reads bul eitz as an unusually thick tree and makes bul extraordinary increase, hence mabul for excess water and Bul for the surplus of grain and produce in a man's house and storehouses after the harvest; Dr. Alexander Kohut (1842-1894) in Aruch HaShalem offers a similar understanding. Ibn Janach (Sefer HaShorashim): from balul, mixing, rainfall being a liquid into which things are mixed. Radak (to Melachim I 6:38 and in his Sefer HaShorashim): from mabul itself, the month opening the rainy season, as in Midrash Tanchuma (Noach §11), that until Shlomo built the Mikdash rain with the potential to become a flood would fall on the world forty days a year, and once it was built that forty-day rain was done away with, as though the mem had been taken off mabul to leave Bul. (In modern Hebrew bul means "exactly," which seems to be a borrowing of the English "bull's eye," and also "stamp," borrowed from Arabic.)

Whether mar is a separate element of Marcheshvan. Before the Babylonian inscriptions were found there was much speculation in traditional sources about the name, some sages taking the mar as separate. Those who parse it: Rabbi Yechiel Michel Epstein (1829-1907) in the Aruch HaShulchan, who speculates that mar means switch, as in temurah, for Yeravam's switching the seventh month for the eighth, and works as a double entendre with the bitterness his act brought on the Jewish People afterward, though he concludes that we cannot expound the month-names this way, the more so where halachah turns on it (his case: writing Mar Cheshvan as two words in a get; and see Pischei Teshuvah, Even HaEzer §126:12, on a get that says Cheshvan rather than Marcheshvan); and Rabbi Chizkiyahu Medini of Hebron (1834-1904), who records that in some communities there is a custom not to make weddings in Marcheshvan, because mar at the head of the name means bitter and the name is therefore a bad omen. Against them, the Pri Chadash (Even HaEzer §126) takes mar as drops of rain (Yeshayahu 40:15), or as the bitterness of a month with no yom tov, or of the passing of the Imahos, Sarah and Rachel, on none of which is there reason to refrain from weddings; on that basis Rabbi Betzalel Stern (1911-1988) concludes mar is not even Hebrew and is no omen for anything. Rabbi Shmuel ben David Halevi (1625-1681) in the Nachalas Shivah first offers that mar is a term of importance, like the honorific Mar of Mar Zutra and amar Mar, and like modern Hebrew "mister," since the date on which Marcheshvan begins is important for reckoning the whole year's calendar, but he too ultimately rejects the approach and concludes that Marcheshvan is one proper name whose mar is not to be interpreted on its own. Rabbi Chaim Dov Lieman of Kiryat Sefer (Otzar Peninim §28) defends the wedding custom from Rashi to Bereishis Rabbah 48:9, who held the month-names were not taken verbatim from the Babylonian calendar but revealed through nevuah, so that expounding the mar is entirely in place. The column leaves the two sides standing. For translation the Bottom line follows the Nachalas Shivah and Rabbi Betzalel Stern.

What Cheshvan means, for those who parse it. Rav Hirsch (1808-1880) drops the mar and reads Cheshvan from ח-ש-ה, quiet: the hush after the crowded month of Tishrei, which gives a man room to look inward and think over all that passed in the yom tov season. The Sefer HaKushyos, by an anonymous talmid of Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg (1215-1293), published by Rabbi Y. Y. Stahl: from ר-ח-ש, stirring, bubbling, murmuring, which somehow relates to the month in which the first Mikdash was completed, or else from ש-ו-ה, evened out, the month somehow being "equalized in its rains" (the column reports both without seeing the connection). The Christian Hebraist and philologist Johannes Buxtorf (1564-1629) likewise presumes ר-ח-ש, citing marcheshes, the deep pan in which fried things sizzle (Vayikra 2:7), as something liquid, and ties that to the month that opens the rainy season. Rabbi Zecharia HaRofeh, a fifteenth-century Yemenite sage (Midrash HaChefetz to Shemos 12:2): the Aramaic israchish, a happening or occurrence, since one of the most monumental occurrences in human history, the completion of the first Mikdash, happened in it. Rabbi Yisrael Friedman of Ruzhin (1796-1850): our lips are still rocheshes from the tefillos of the month before.

Where the name came from. The Yerushalmi and Ramban (to Shemos 12:2) hold the names in use today came up from Bavel, a different nomenclature having been in use before the exile. It seems the original names mirrored the months the Canaanites used: on the sarcophagus of the Tyrian (Canaanite) king Ashmunezer II the king refers to the month Bul. Old Assyrian and Babylonian inscriptions name the eighth month Arahsamna (Akkadian warahsamna), which scholars parse as arah, cognate with the Hebrew yerach, month, plus samna, cognate with shemonah, eight, so that the name means "eighth month"; the column reports this as the most widely accepted etymology of Marcheshvan. Rabbi Dr. Ernest Klein follows it, explaining that the mem of the Babylonian form turned into a vav, much as Hebrew argaman becomes Aramaic argavan, and Rabbi Dr. Ari Zivotofsky notes in support that Yemenite Jews pronounce the name Marach-Shwan rather than Mar-Cheshvan. But the scholar Avraham Epstein (1841-1918) questions the theory, since no other month in the Babylonian calendar is named ordinally, all of them being named for a pagan deity; he suggests instead that Arahsamna, and so Marcheshvan, was named for the Canaanite moon-god Yarikh (cognate with yerach) together with the Tyrian deity Eshmun, who may himself have been named for being eighth in birth order, depending on which version of the myth one takes. Rabbi Shaul Goldman suggests instead a link to shemen and the olive pressing. The Maharal's system joins the last two: seven is a complete unit and stands for nature, eight is the new beginning past a completed cycle and stands for what is above nature, and shemonah bears on shemen because oil rises above water, the most instrumental element of natural life, as the supernatural rises above the natural; so whether Marcheshvan goes with shemonah or with shemen, the two ideas hold together.

A last loose end the column reports and cannot close: the Hebrew Wikipedia says that several medieval Ashkenazi manuscripts call the month simply "Shvan," and it was not able to learn more by press time.