Searching dates

From a calendar date to Hebrew letters

Hebrew writes dates in letters. Each number has a letter form, so the 19th is י"ט, and the month has a name, such as תשרי. Type a date in English and the laboratory converts it with the Hebrew calendar: "September 1, 1983" becomes כ"ג אלול תשמ"ג. Quotation marks are writing marks and not letters, so the search itself uses כג אלול.

A Hebrew day starts at sunset. We convert a calendar date as its daytime date, so the evening before belongs to the next Hebrew day. If you were born at night, check that. Modern Hebrew also writes Gregorian dates with digits, which a letter search cannot read, so the laboratory offers the month name in Hebrew letters in that case.

The day and month forms

The same day can be written many ways. WRR used three forms. McKay and his co-authors list eight regular ones. Here they are for the 19th of Tishri. The prefixes ב ("on" or "in") and ל ("of") attach to the word that follows.

The laboratory offers every form, each labeled. Each one is a separate search. Combined, they make 255 possible sets, which is the figure the critique of the 1994 paper works with.

The 15th and 16th

The usual way to write 15 and 16 is ט"ו and ט"ז, nine plus six and nine plus seven. Hebrew avoids the plain forms י"ה and י"ו, since those letter pairs begin a Divine Name. The plain forms were in occasional use long ago. WRR used both kinds, and MBBK report that the older forms helped the result a lot. We offer both and mark the older ones as such.

Years

Hebrew years are written in letters as well. 5786 is תשפ"ו, usually without the thousands. Written with them it is ה'תשפ"ו. A Gregorian year overlaps two Hebrew years: 1983 runs across תשמ"ג and תשמ"ד. The laboratory lists both, with when each began and ended.

Years are short, which matters. A four-letter year is common. In a text of 300,000 letters, at skips up to 5,000, a term like that may have thousands of sequences. Finding your year tells you very little, and the number beside it will show that.

Months

Month names have choices too. The month before Kislev can be חשון or מרחשון. Adar in a leap year can be written two ways, and so can Iyar. The Tanakh itself uses some older month names, such as איתנים and בול. MBBK ran WRR's test using those biblical names, and the results fell sharply. Choices like these look small and are not.

Searching a date fairly

1. Decide which form you will use before you search. If you have no reason to prefer one, use the plain "day month" form.
2. Remember that a day and month with no year comes around every year. Its letters say nothing about which year you mean.
3. Check the date itself. Sources disagree on many historical dates, and a birth date in Hebrew depends on the hour.
4. Lock the search, then run it. If you try other forms afterward, the trial counter will add them.

Birthdays deserve a word. Your Hebrew birthday is one day and month, and thousands of people share it. A date in the Torah at a small skip says nothing about you in particular. Think of it as a good way to learn the tool.

We do not show dates of current events in our gallery, and no number here says anything about what is to come. If you search a date, you get a count, a chance figure and the positions of the letters.