second month

Where the authorities disagree

Why the second month is called Ziv. The Gemara (Rosh HaShanah 10b-11a) ties this to the machlokes over when the Avos were born. All agree Yitzchak was born in Nissan; Rabbi Eliezer holds Avraham and Yaakov were born in Tishrei, Rabbi Yehoshua in Nissan.

1. The splendor of the trees. Rabbi Eliezer: the month is called Ziv for the radiance of the trees, which begin to blossom then. The Yerushalmi (Rosh HaShanah 1:2) gives a similar reason, that the flora have budded and become recognizable.
2. The splendor of the Avos. Rabbi Yehoshua: Ziv points to the birth of the zivsanei olam, the radiant ones of the world, the Avos. Since on his view they were born in Nissan, Rashi touches on the apparent difficulty: by the time the second month comes around, the fathers born in the month before are already born.

Rabbi Klein's own reading joins them through Rabbi Moshe Shapiro's sense of ziv: Nissan is the month of nissim, the light itself; Iyar is what continues to shine from it and is, after a fashion, a continuation of it, which is why one who missed the korban Pesach in Nissan can bring Pesach Sheini in the second month (Bamidbar 9:11), and why the buds are the tree's radiance without being the trunk. On the same reading the Avos are called the Chariot of Hashem in the sense that they are not Him, but vehicles for the spread of His will through creation at large.

The root of Ziv. The month-name is spelled defective, while the ordinary Aramaic word for radiance in Daniel (2:31, 4:33, 5:6, 5:9-10, 7:28) is consistently spelled plene.

• Radak (Sefer HaShorashim): the root is ז-י-ו, even though the month-name is never written with a yud in Tanach.
• Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim (Cheshek Shlomo): the root is the two-letter ז-ו, which he also takes as the etymon of zavis, a corner, and the month is Ziv because in it the sun somehow turns a corner; Rabbi Klein's own guess is that this may be the entry of the new season of spring.

Where the name Ziv came from. Historians and Bible scholars tend to explain Ziv as the Phoenician and Canaanite name for the second month, simply borrowed into Tanach. Rabbi Klein notes that, even without resorting to that sort of speculation, the word ziv is in any case Biblical, appearing six times in the Aramaic of Daniel in the sense of radiance. Scholars trace the name Iyar to the Akkadian month-name ayyaru, meaning "light," which, he notes, seems awfully close to the Hebrew ohr, also light.

How to spell Iyar in a get. Because the name is not in Tanach there is no settled orthography, and the question is whether it takes two yuds (אייר) or one (איר). The name does appear in the Mishnah (Rosh HaShanah 1:3), but the spelling there is itself disputed: the Kaufmann manuscript, from late eleventh-century Italy and the oldest vowelized manuscript of the Mishnah, and the Parma manuscript both have two yuds, while many other popular editions, Ein Yaakov to Rosh HaShanah 18a among them, have one.

• Maharil (responsa 189), Terumas HaDeshen 233, Rabbi Yaakov Margolis (Seder HaGet 17 and 19), Shulchan Aruch (Even HaEzer 126:23), and Rema (Even HaEzer 126:7) all conclude that one should optimally write two yuds, while acknowledging that some wrote one; Maharil himself brought a proof for one yud from the text of Targum Yonasan he had, and Rabbi Margolis notes that our texts of that Targum always have two.
• Nachalas Shivah rules for two yuds, both from Targum Yonasan to Bamidbar 9:11, which names the second month Iyar with two, and from the allusion he found in Yalkut Chadash in the name of Megaleh Amukos 121, that Iyar can be read as an acronym for Avraham, Yitzchak, Yaakov, and Rochel, who are said to be the Merkavah of Hashem; Beis Shmuel (Even HaEzer 126:20) cites the same.

Rema records that on account of this doubt many batei din have the practice of not writing gittin during Iyar at all (see Aruch HaShulchan, Even HaEzer 126:15).

What Iyar means.

• Sefer HaKushyos, the work of an anonymous talmid of Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg published by Rabbi Y. Y. Stahl, gives two accounts, both from avir, air: the month's air is commonly neither too hot nor too cold, or else the world was left hanging in the air from creation until Israel accepted the Torah in Sivan (Shabbos 88a), so the month before Sivan is named for air. The rabbinic avir is itself borrowed from the Greek aer, which is also the etymon of the English "air."
• Rabbi Yosef Kara (to Melachim I 8:2) and the Maharal (Chiddushei Aggados to Yevamos 62b) tie the name Ziv to that same temperate weather.
• Rabbi Eliezer Hagar of Vizhnitz (Damesek Eliezer to Vayikra 9:22) connects the one-yud spelling to ya'er of Birkas Kohanim (Bamidbar 6:25), an exact anagram of it.