**2. Festivals at Set Times**

An important part of calendars in all cultures is the marking of festivals celebrating something of importance at a given time of year. Festivals can celebrate both kinds of time. For example, the Pennsylvania Dutch celebration of Groundhog Day, is tied to the belief that a groundhog knows whether the winter cold will be long or short in a given year, based on whether it sees its shadow or not when it emerges on February 2. This yearly ritual of watching the groundhog is not tied to some event in the past or a commemoration of previous Groundhog Days; rather, it is simply part of the cycle of winters. The Jewish festival of *Tû b e -Š e bat¯* , the New Year for Trees, is essentially the same, as it simply marks the point of midwinter. At the opposite end of the spectrum would be July 4th, which celebrates American independence from England, or the practice of celebrating one's anniversary or birthday.

Sometimes a festival, on its face, may appear to be celebrating something in linear time, while at the same time, be masking a more basic or primal celebration of something in cyclical time (Z. I. Farber 2018, pp. 443–44, 449–50). This masking of a cyclical time festival with a linear time conception (commemorating an important event) seems to underlie what happened with the Israelite festivals found in the Hebrew Bible.

The aim of this paper (in accordance with the aim of the entire issue) is to present an overview of the topic, rather than a detailed and comprehensive argument for a new thesis. Even so, the way the material will be presented should present the reader with a new, overall picture of the development of the Israelite festival calendar. To do this, we will look at the development of the texts, in the light of source and redaction criticism, as well as with comparative models in the ancient Near East. Nevertheless, as the paper is necessarily broad in scope, in order to cover this large topic, many of the specific defenses of given claims and readings will have to rely on works cited in the bibliography where the original research is presented in detail.5
