Kislev

Kislev is the ninth month of the Hebrew year, falling in early winter, roughly November to December, and aligned in tradition with the sign of Sagittarius. Its length varies between twenty-nine and thirty days, one of two months adjusted to fix the calendar. Kislev holds the beginning of Hanukkah, the festival of lights, which starts on the twenty-fifth and commemorates the rededication of the Temple after the Maccabean revolt, kept by kindling the lamps of the menorah over eight nights as the winter darkness deepens. The Hebrew calendar is lunisolar, its months following the moon while an added leap month keeps them in their seasons. These are the observances of the Jewish calendar tradition, in which Kislev, the darkest turn toward winter, is lit by the growing lights of Hanukkah.

Kislev holds Hanukkah, beginning on the twenty-fifth and running eight days into Tevet, commemorating the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem after the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucid Empire in the second century BCE, an event recorded in the books of Maccabees, which are not part of the Hebrew Bible's canon but were preserved instead in the Greek Septuagint and later Christian Old Testament collections. Kislev is, together with Cheshvan the month before it, one of the calendar's two variable-length months, 29 or 30 days depending on the year, the mechanism the fixed Hebrew calendar uses to keep the overall year's total length within its permitted range without disturbing any of the other ten months' fixed day counts.

The name comes from the Akkadian Kislimu, 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.

Kislev is the second variable month, likewise 29 or 30 days depending on the year, and it contains the beginning of Hanukkah on the twenty-fifth. Because the month's length varies, the festival straddles the turn into Tevet in some years and not in others.