Hebrew Calendar
Tammuz 5793

Tammuz opens like any other summer month and closes as something else entirely. It has no festival and no holy day, and for its first two weeks almost nothing marked at all, twenty-nine days that always land in June and July, at the height of the heat.

Then comes the seventeenth. The 17th of Tammuz is a short one-day fast, and it is also a door: from it onwards run the three weeks known as bein hametzarim, which lead straight to Tisha B'Av in the following month. Tammuz is therefore the one month in the calendar that changes character halfway through: a fortnight of ordinary summer, and then a fortnight that already belongs to mourning.

A Babylonian god's name that stayed in the calendar

Every Hebrew month name in use today has the same origin: they came back from Babylon with the returning exiles. With Tammuz that fact has an edge to it, because Tammuz was originally the name of a Mesopotamian god: a deity of growth who died each summer and returned in the spring.

And the Bible knows this outright. Ezekiel, in the vision where he is led through the gates of the Temple and shown what is going on inside, reaches one gate and reports: "and there sat the women bewailing Tammuz" ¹. It is one of the harshest images in the book, and it is offered there as an example of what had gone wrong. And yet, a few centuries later, that same name is sitting in the Jewish calendar with nobody trying to replace it.

In the Bible itself the month is simply "the fourth month", counting from Nisan, which is still how its fast is identified.

The days of Tammuz, in order

Rosh Chodesh Tammuz (30 Sivan and 1 Tammuz). Two days, because Sivan is always full: the first of the two still belongs to Sivan.

3 Tammuz. The anniversary of the death of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, in 1994. It is not a date in the general calendar, but in the Chabad world it is the central date of the year.

12–13 Tammuz. The "festival of liberation" in Chabad, marking the release of the previous Rebbe from Soviet imprisonment in 1927.

17 Tammuz. A fast from dawn to nightfall, marking the breaching of the walls of Jerusalem and a set of other events that tradition gathered onto one day. This is the date that defines the month.

Bein hametzarim (17 Tammuz – 9 Av). The three weeks that open with the fast and end on Tisha B'Av. They start here and continue into Av: the only stretch of the Hebrew calendar where a period of mourning is spread across two months.

And the 29th of Tammuz closes the month. Av begins the next day, carrying the heavier half of that same period.

The day everything was stacked onto

The first story attached to this date long predates Jerusalem. Moses comes down the mountain holding the two tablets, and at that moment sees what is happening below: "As soon as Moses came near the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, he became enraged; and he hurled the tablets from his hands and shattered them at the foot of the mountain" ².

The Mishnah puts that moment at the head of a list. It opens flatly: "five things happened to our forefathers on the seventeenth of Tammuz", and counts them off: the tablets were broken, the daily offering ceased, the city walls were breached, Apostemos burned a Torah scroll, and an idol was set up in the Sanctuary ³. Five events from different centuries, filed under one date.

That is how the Hebrew calendar works, and here it is especially visible: rather than five separate days of remembrance that nobody would keep, one day was chosen to carry all of them. It became a fast, and the fast became the opening of a period, because once such a day exists, the three weeks that follow it can no longer be ordinary.

Between the straits

The three weeks that open in Tammuz take their name from a verse, and Lamentations supplies it: "all her pursuers overtook her in the narrow places" ⁴. The Hebrew word metzarim means straits: a mountain pass with nowhere to run. The rabbis took the phrase and fixed it as the name of a stretch of time, so that the period is called after a place with no way out of it.

Which reveals something about how the Hebrew calendar is built. It does not deal only in single days; it knows how to build steps. The 17th of Tammuz is a light one-day fast; from the beginning of Av the mourning tightens; Tisha B'Av is the floor. Three stages spread across a full month, so that the hardest day of the year does not arrive abruptly but at the bottom of a measured descent.

And the period has a written ending, too. Zechariah, addressing the returning exiles as the Second Temple was about to be built, listed the four fasts and said something unexpected about them: "the fast of the fourth month, the fast of the fifth month, the fast of the seventh month, and the fast of the tenth month shall become occasions for joy and gladness, happy festivals for the House of Judah" ⁵. The fast of the fourth month is the 17th of Tammuz, the fourth month counting from Nisan. Which means that in the prophecy itself, this day is defined as one meant to change.

Common questions about the month of Tammuz

When is Rosh Chodesh Tammuz?
Rosh Chodesh Tammuz runs for two days, because Sivan always has thirty. The first of the two is still the 30th of Sivan; the second is the 1st of Tammuz. Both count as the new moon. The civil dates shift every year (this year 27-28/6/33), as shown in the grid above.

What month is Tammuz?
The fourth month of the Hebrew calendar counting from Nisan, and the tenth counting from Tishrei. In civil terms it falls across June and July.

How many days are in Tammuz?
Twenty-nine, always. Its length is fixed and does not vary between a full and a deficient year.

What happens in the month of Tammuz?
Rosh Chodesh at the start (27-28/6/33), and the 17th of Tammuz, a fast that opens the three weeks (14/7/33). There is no festival in the month at all. The annual holidays page lists every date of the year.

Is Tammuz the same as the Babylonian god?
The name is the same. The month name reached the Hebrew calendar through the Babylonian one, where it was named for the deity, and the Hebrew Bible itself refers to that worship, disapprovingly, in Ezekiel. The Jewish month carries no trace of the cult; only the name survived.

When does Tammuz end?
On the 29th of Tammuz (26/7/33). Av begins the next day, and Rosh Chodesh Av lasts a single day, because Tammuz is a deficient month.

A Tammuz calendar: the whole month on one page

The grid at the top of this page shows Tammuz as the Hebrew calendar sees it: the large numerals are the days of the Hebrew month, with the corresponding civil date printed beneath each one. You can see at once which civil date the 1st of Tammuz falls on in the year selected, and what weekday the 17th lands on.

It is also the view that shows the month's shape: exactly where the line falls after which the three weeks begin, and how much of the month is already on the other side of it. You can see the two days of Rosh Chodesh Tammuz opening it, the Sabbaths and Torah portions read during it, and the 29th of Tammuz closing it before Av. The button above the grid prints it to a single page, portrait or landscape, without the navigation or this text.

• Every festival and fast of the year in one table, and from there the page for each one with its own dates: Jewish holidays 2026
• The full printable calendar: printable 2026 Jewish calendar with holidays
• For a civil-month view, in which June and July appear separately: Gregorian month calendar

Related pages

• June 2033
• July 2033
• The Hebrew month of Tamuz 5793