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Japanese December is not in the Bible. Scripture counts its months by number, beginning with the month of Passover, and the weeks we call December fall across two of them: Kislev, the ninth month, and Tevet, the tenth. In the Old Testament of the King James Bible they are spelled Chisleu and Tebeth, and Chisleu is named twice and Tebeth once.
Yet the Bible knows these weeks well, and in the ninth month God promised his people a blessing before they had any harvest to show for it. On “the four and twentieth day of the ninth month,” he told them through the prophet Haggai: “Is the seed yet in the barn? yea, as yet the vine, and the fig tree, and the pomegranate, and the olive tree, hath not brought forth: from this day will I bless you” (Haggai 2:18–19). Nothing had come up yet, and God spoke the blessing first.
Where does the Bible mention Kislev and Tevet?
The first time the King James Bible names one of these months, it finds a man in tears. Nehemiah was “in Shushan the palace” in “the month Chisleu” when men came from Judah with news that “the wall of Jerusalem also is broken down, and the gates thereof are burned with fire.” He tells us what he did next: “And it came to pass, when I heard these words, that I sat down and wept, and mourned certain days, and fasted, and prayed before the God of heaven” (Nehemiah 1:1–4). If this December finds you grieving, Nehemiah has sat where you sit, and he carried his grief to God.
The word of the Lord came to Zechariah “in the fourth day of the ninth month, even in Chisleu” (Zechariah 7:1). And Esther was taken to King Ahasuerus “in the tenth month, which is the month Tebeth,” and he “set the royal crown upon her head” (Esther 2:16–17). So the same weeks of the year hold a man weeping over a broken city and Esther receiving a royal crown. In Catholic and Orthodox Bibles, the books of Maccabees name Kislev six more times, as Casleu.
Why does the Bible call them the ninth and tenth months?
Israel counted its year from the month of its freedom. In Egypt, as he gave them the first Passover, the Lord told Moses and Aaron, “This month shall be unto you the beginning of months: it shall be the first month of the year to you” (Exodus 12:2). Scripture calls it Abib: “Observe the month of Abib, and keep the passover unto the Lord thy God” (Deuteronomy 16:1). The book of Esther gives it its later name: “the first month, that is, the month Nisan” (Esther 3:7). So every month after it carried a number that pointed back to the Passover, and even the ninth and tenth months of winter remembered the night of deliverance. Jews still number the months from Nisan, in the spring, though the new year itself begins at Rosh Hashanah in the autumn, on the first of Tishrei, the seventh month. Counted from Nisan, Kislev is the ninth month and Tevet the tenth.
The Hebrew months follow the moon, and a twelve-month lunar year runs a few days short of the sun’s. To keep the feasts in their seasons, the Jewish calendar adds a whole month in seven years out of every nineteen. That is why Kislev and Tevet move against our calendar from year to year, and why Hanukkah, which falls in Kislev, comes on a different date in our calendar each year. Kislev usually falls in November and December, and Tevet in December and January.
Our own name for the month also counts from the spring. December comes from the Latin decem, “ten,” because it was the “tenth month of the old Roman calendar, which began with March.” When we write December at the top of a Christmas letter, we are writing a number, much as the prophets did.
What happens in the Bible in these winter months?
More often Scripture gives these months only a number, as it does in the ninth month of King Jehoiakim’s fifth year, when a fast was proclaimed in Jerusalem and the scroll of the Lord’s words that Jeremiah had dictated was read to the king. “Now the king sat in the winterhouse in the ninth month: and there was a fire on the hearth burning before him.” Each time Jehudi had read “three or four leaves,” the scroll was cut with a penknife and thrown “into the fire that was on the hearth, until all the roll was consumed in the fire that was on the hearth” (Jeremiah 36:22–23). See the picture Jeremiah gives us: a king warming himself on a winter’s day while God’s word burns in front of him, a few leaves at a time. The Lord’s answer was to tell Jeremiah, “Take thee again another roll, and write in it all the former words that were in the first roll” (Jeremiah 36:28), and Baruch wrote them all again from Jeremiah’s mouth, “and there were added besides unto them many like words” (Jeremiah 36:32). The king burned one scroll, and God gave Jeremiah a fuller one.
Years later, after the exile, the men of Judah gathered at Jerusalem in the same month. “It was the ninth month, on the twentieth day of the month; and all the people sat in the street of the house of God, trembling because of this matter, and for the great rain.” They asked for time, because “it is a time of much rain, and we are not able to stand without” (Ezra 10:9, 13). There are few more human scenes in Scripture: a whole people sitting before God’s house in a downpour, shaking at the matter before them and at the weather, asking if they might go in out of the rain.
On the tenth day of the tenth month, “Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came, he, and all his host, against Jerusalem, and pitched against it” (2 Kings 25:1). Far away among the exiles, Ezekiel was told to mark the day: “Son of man, write thee the name of the day, even of this same day: the king of Babylon set himself against Jerusalem this same day” (Ezekiel 24:2). God had the day of that sorrow written down. In the tenth month, years later, a man who had escaped came to the exiles with the words “The city is smitten” (Ezekiel 33:21). The Jewish calendar still keeps the Tenth of Tevet as a fast for the start of that siege.
Through Zechariah the Lord promised what that fast would become: “The fast of the fourth month, and the fast of the fifth, and the fast of the seventh, and the fast of the tenth, shall be to the house of Judah joy and gladness, and cheerful feasts; therefore love the truth and peace” (Zechariah 8:19). Think what that promise holds. The day the siege of Jerusalem began, a day still kept with fasting, is to become a day of gladness. God means to turn the mourning itself into a feast, and he asks his people only to love the truth and peace while they wait.
And in these same weeks, centuries later, Jesus walked in the temple. “And it was at Jerusalem the feast of the dedication, and it was winter. And Jesus walked in the temple in Solomon’s porch” (John 10:22–23). That feast, Hanukkah, keeps the rededication of the altar, which 1 Maccabees 4:52 dates to the twenty-fifth day of the ninth month, so the Lord himself was in his Father’s house in the winter weeks of Kislev. For whether Jesus kept the feast, see did Jesus celebrate Hanukkah.
Is there a spiritual meaning of December in the Bible?
Scripture gives December no meaning of its own, because no verse names the month. What it gives us is a way to keep any day of the year: whether we mark a day or let it pass, Paul says, we do it “unto the Lord” (Romans 14:6), and December is ours to keep that way.
The meaning Christians find in December comes from what the Church keeps in it. In the Western churches most of the month is Advent, the weeks of waiting for Christ, and Christmas follows on 25 December. Orthodox Christians keep a forty-day Nativity Fast before the feast, and the churches that follow the old Julian calendar keep Christmas on their own 25 December, which falls on our 7 January; both seasons are described in the colours of Advent. The Bible gives no day for the birth of Jesus, and the Church chose 25 December centuries later to keep it. So we spend most of the month waiting, as Haggai’s hearers waited for a harvest they could not yet see.
They received their promise in the ninth month, before the seed was in the barn, and the fast of the tenth month was promised a feast. We come to December the same way, with empty hands, and the word God spoke over those months still stands: “from this day will I bless you” (Haggai 2:19).
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