Language Studies

Hebrew Thoughts

shânâh - שָׁנָה (Strong's #8138)
Year

The Jewish new year is known as Rosh Ha-Shanah, literally "head of the year". The word for "year", שָׁנָה shânâh (Strong's #8141, x875), comes from the similarly spelt root verb שָׁנָה shânâh (Strong's #8138, x22) "to repeat or change" clearly from the idea of that which changes or repeats itself (although there may be two distinct Hebrew roots here: [1] change, [2] repeat). Indeed the verb is used negatively of God to describe his immutability, the fact that he does not change (Malachi 3:6). The idea of repetition from שָׁנָה shânâh may be seasonal, as Genesis 1:14 points out, but the Jewish idea of the year was not a cyclical repeating pattern without hope of change and ancient Greeks, Romans and many Indian philosophies believed.

Even in Latin annus properly means "circle" and Cicero wrote of the "return of the sun" and the year coming "full circle":

"Human beings commonly measure the year by the return of the sun, a single star. But when all the stars together shall have returned to the same place where they started out, and, after long intervals, shall have assumed identical positions across the entire sky, then the revolving Year can truly be said to have come full circle ... For as in olden days the sun appeared to abandon humanity and to be eclipsed at the time when the soul of Romulus gained entrance to the sacred places of the sky, whenever the sun shall have been eclipsed once more in the same location in space and time, then and only then, with all the constellations and the stars having been recalled to the starting point, should you deem the Year to have been fulfilled." (Cicero, On the Republic, Book 6: The Dream of Scipio)

The early Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras saw history as one great year in which at the end of a cycle, the sun, moon and other stars would return to their original places and all the people would be reborn and start their lives over again and literally, history would repeat itself, there would be no escape from the cycle.

Some things were regarded as "repeating" themselves year by year such as the seasons. Giving of one's tithed increase was to be done "yearly", literally שָׁנָה שָׁנָה shânâh shânâh in the Hebrew of Deuteronomy 14:22. However, Deuteronomy 15:20 refers to the annual eating of the dedicated firstborn livestock as שָׁנָה בְשָׁנָה shânâh beshânâh, "year by-year".

A year could be used less literally as sometimes the word "day" is, as in the parallelism between "day of recompense" and "year of redemption" in Isaiah 63:4. Day and year are both used here as "time of..." rather than as a literal units of reckoning. Similarly, we read of the famous proclamation of "the year of God's favour" in Isaiah 61:2, again paralleled with a "day of vengeance/recompense". These idioms draw on the imagery of a year of release of slaves (Leviticus 25:10-11; Ezekiel 46:17) or debts (Deuteronomy 15:1; 31:10) and the idea of vengeance is that of a comeuppance or dealing with the oppressors of former years. So year on year there is always the possibility of newness and change and indeed eventually of "year of jubilee" (Leviticus 25:13) when all things are restored.

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