Biblical Feast Days Calendar: Dates and Downloads

01The autumn appointed times, September and October 2026

Two things about that table before you print it. It lists the biblical festival spans and principal dates, not every additional festival day observed in the diaspora. Check your congregation's schedule as well.

Every rabbinic date begins the evening before. Yom Kippur 5787 is Monday 21 September, opening at sundown on Sunday the 20th — which is why some calendars publish the 20th and some the 21st, both telling the truth about one fast. The 364-day dates on the left are counted days pinned to the March equinox, and the sacred week runs inside that count rather than alongside the civil week. Day 183 is Week Day 4 whether the wall calendar says Friday or not.

The left column carries markers with no counterpart on the right. Day 274 — Friday 18 December 2026 — opens the fourth and last season of ninety-one days: a marker in the count, not an astronomical claim about the solstice. Day 364, the last counted day of AM 6026, falls on Thursday 18 March 2027. Friday 19 March is not counted at all. It is the Waiting Space, and the sacred week does not run through it. On Saturday 20 March 2027 the equinox re-pins Day 1 and AM 6027 opens. Not a leap day. Not a thirteenth month. Just a pause.

02Spring 2027, where the two printable calendars split

The Passover row compares the fourteenth day, the preparation and sacrifice date, not the first full festival day on the fixed Jewish calendar. Its festival begins that evening, leading into the fifteenth; the Unleavened Bread row gives the biblical seven-day span, while diaspora observance adds a day. Nineteen days separate the two fourteenth-day dates here. In 2026 those dates were within a day of each other — a sheet from one spring cannot be reused for the next.

The reason is a whole extra month. Hebrew year 5787 is a leap year on the nineteen-year cycle, so a second Adar is inserted before Nisan and the spring feasts arrive late, as how the date of Passover is calculated works through. A 364-day year inserts nothing. It runs 52 whole weeks — 364 ÷ 7 = 52, remainder zero — and lets the equinox correct the drift each spring.

Four calendars, four Firstfruits

That Firstfruits row hides the oldest live argument on the page. "The morrow after the sabbath" in Leviticus 23:11 has been read four ways, each dragging the Feast of Weeks fifty days downstream with it:

The weekly-Sabbath reading is associated with Sadducean, Karaite and Samaritan traditions, but their month reckoning need not match the fixed Nisan used in this comparison. The row illustrates the counting rule, not every community's confirmed festival schedule. Those last two rows matter to anyone assuming "364-day" and "what they kept at Qumran" are one answer. They are not. Day 4 takes the Sabbath inside the festival week, putting the wave sheaf on the nineteenth of the first month. The Scrolls communities took the Sabbath after the whole week — the twenty-sixth, with Weeks on the fifteenth of the third month. Same rule, different Sabbath, seven days apart, permanently. Which is older, and whether either was ever kept in Jerusalem, is a question scholars still weigh, and Day 4 does not claim to settle it. So the left-hand column is a 364-day calendar. It is not the Qumran calendar, and this page will not print it as one.

03The third column cannot yet be confirmed

A sighted-moon calendar can publish a projected 2027 column, but not a column of sightings already confirmed. In a barley-and-sighted-moon reckoning, the first crescent after sundown marks the new month, while barley in Israel reaching the state called aviv helps determine the year's opening. These are observations. A useful resource distinguishes its forecast from its later sighting report instead of presenting one as the other.

An observational date can be close to the calculated column without being guaranteed to match it. It can also land a month away: in a year like 5787 an observational community may look at the barley next March and decline the thirteenth month the fixed cycle inserts, putting their Passover in late March 2027 rather than late April. Same feast, same year, a month apart, both congregations doing what they believe they were told. The argument is in sighted moon or calculated calendar.

04Why your download and your congregation disagree

Four things, usually, and it is worth knowing which before you email anybody.

1. A different rule for the month. Calculated, sighted, or 364-day solar. The big one, and most listings never say which they use.
2. A leap month, or none. In a year like 5787 this alone moves the spring feasts by roughly thirty days.
3. Evening reckoning. A sheet printing the sundown a feast begins at shows one day earlier than a sheet printing the daylight date.
4. The omer question. The four readings tabled above.

And a fifth, which ambushes people who thought they had already chosen. Two sheets both carrying "364-day calendar" in the header can disagree by three days with no error anywhere, because one line is missing from both: which March date day 1 was pinned to, and what became of the day or two left over at the end. In Day 4's reckoning that anchor is not a formula. The March equinox is read from a fixed canonical table, year by year, rather than computed or averaged. It falls on 19 March in most leap years, and the table is what governs. Another calendar may choose a different anchor or use a formula. That is not automatically an arithmetic error, but its rule must be named before its dates can be compared with Day 4's.

Was the 364-day year the calendar of the Second Temple? Scholars still weigh that, and Day 4 does not claim to settle it. What is not in dispute is that ancient communities preserved it carefully — Enoch's Astronomical Book, Jubilees, a great many manuscripts from Qumran. That difference is worth a header's worth of care. A PDF titled The Temple Calendar has licensed itself to assert what the evidence does not carry. The 364-day calendar of Enoch, Jubilees and the Qumran scrolls is as much as anyone can print and stay right. Whichever column your fellowship keeps, nobody in the other is being deceived.

05Printing and exporting your biblical feast days calendar

The most useful printable is the one you can check, and any feast sheet worth pinning up answers four questions above the first date. Which rule set these dates. Which two years it covers, sacred and everyday, since AM 6026 and 5787 are not the same span of time. Daylight dates or evening starts. And when it was drawn, against what anchor — a 2024 sheet cannot know a 2027 sighting, and a 364-day sheet that will not name its spring anchor cannot be checked at all. Print this page and you have all four, plus the day-of-year numbers, so any entry can be recounted rather than trusted. That is the test a downloadable feast days calendar PDF usually fails — not because its dates are wrong, but because nothing on the sheet lets you find out.

For the calculated calendar, Hebcal offers iCalendar (`.ics`), CSV and JSON through its downloads and data tools. Its generated calendar data is free to reuse under a Creative Commons licence with attribution. Its site also runs a free Hebrew date converter for one-off lookups. A subscribed feed then does what paper cannot — the feast stops being something you check in April and starts appearing in February, while there is still time to book the day off work. Checked in August 2026. For sighted-moon tools and the wider field, see the best biblical calendar apps.

If the 364-day year is the one you keep, Day 4 — A Witness of Time carries it on iPhone, iPad, Android and web, on the condition that it prints no other reckoning: no rabbinic or sighted-moon list, and no local sunset, so the clock time a feast begins near you comes from elsewhere. Inside that limit, the Feasts screen sets out each appointed time in plain language, the Calendar screen lays everyday and sacred dates side by side with feasts marked, and calendar export sends them into the app you already use. Today's sacred date, today's devotional and the next Sabbath are free with no account — in the example for 25 August 2026, that is day 159 of AM 6026, in the year's second season.

06Common questions

07What to do with this page

Print the sheet, and keep the numbers on it. That is the one thing this page does that a prettier download cannot: the left-hand dates come with year-day markers, and day numbers are checkable by hand. Year-day 4 is a Sabbath. So is day 11, and day 18, and every seventh day after out to 361. Pick any feast above, count sevens from the nearest Sabbath, and you will either land where the table says or find exactly where it went wrong.

You cannot do that with a PDF showing only month names, and a calendar you have counted through once is a different possession from one you downloaded — the appointed times themselves were always meant to be counted to. Whatever the sky is doing this week, there is a feast coming. Go and count how far.