Iyar

Iyar is the second month of the Hebrew year, falling in spring, roughly April to May, and aligned in tradition with the sign of Taurus. It counts twenty-nine days. Iyar falls within the counting of the Omer, the forty-nine days between Passover and Shavuot, a period of semi-mourning broken by Lag BaOmer, the thirty-third day, kept with bonfires and celebration. In modern times the month also holds Israeli Independence Day, Yom Ha'atzmaut, and the preceding memorial day. The name Iyar, adopted in the Babylonian period, is associated with blossoming and light. The Hebrew calendar is lunisolar, its months following the moon while an added month in leap years keeps the festivals in their seasons. These are the observances of the Jewish calendar tradition, in which Iyar bridges the spring festivals of redemption and revelation.

Iyar's name, like most of the twelve ordinary Hebrew month names, derives from Akkadian by way of Babylonian usage adopted during and after the exile, and the month is counted in tradition through the Sefirat HaOmer, the forty-nine-day counting of the omer that runs from the second day of Passover in Nisan to the festival of Shavuot in Sivan, so that most of Iyar falls within this counted period. Iyar contains no major biblical festival of its own, but it carries two modern Israeli civil observances added in the twentieth century, Yom HaAtzmaut, Israel's Independence Day, and, on the fourteenth, Pesach Sheni, a "second Passover" the Torah itself provides in Numbers 9 for those unable to bring the paschal offering at its proper time in Nisan.

The name comes from the Akkadian Ayaru, one of the Babylonian month names adopted wholesale into Hebrew usage. The month runs a fixed 29 days in every year.

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.

Iyar falls entirely within the counting of the Omer, the fifty days told from Passover to Shavuot, so the month is bracketed by two festivals without containing either. It is one of the two months, with Cheshvan, that carry no biblically ordained festival at all.