The Nineteen Months of the Badí' Calendar

A retelling based on the Kitáb-i-Aqdas of Bahá'u'lláh and its Notes, with the month names as given in J. E. Esslemont's Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era and a detail from The Dawn-Breakers. Passages in quotation marks are quoted from those books.

The Báb, Esslemont writes, "signalized the importance of the dispensation which He came to herald, by inaugurating a new calendar." It abandoned the lunar month and followed the solar year, and it counted its years from 1844, the year of the Báb's declaration.

The year of this calendar, now called the Badí' calendar, has nineteen months of nineteen days each, which makes 361 days. The Báb named the months after attributes of God. In Esslemont's translation they are Splendour, Glory, Beauty, Grandeur, Light, Mercy, Words, Perfection, Names, Might, Will, Knowledge, Power, Speech, Questions, Honour, Sovereignty, Dominion and Loftiness. The first month is Bahá, and the first day of every month also bears the name Bahá.

The same numbers appear in the Báb's farewell to the Letters of the Living, as The Dawn-Breakers records it, where He speaks of a "váḥid" and of the number of "Kull-i-Shay'". The book's notes explain that "váḥid", meaning "unity", has the numerical value of nineteen, and that "Kull-i-Shay'", meaning "all things", has the value 361, or nineteen times nineteen.

In the Bayán, the Báb made the last month, 'Alá (Loftiness), the month of fasting. He decreed that the day of Naw-Rúz should end that period, and He designated Naw-Rúz as the Day of God. So the first day of the month of Bahá, the day of Bahá of the month of Bahá, became the new year. It falls at the spring equinox, usually on 21 March.

Bahá'u'lláh confirmed the calendar in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas. "The number of months in a year, appointed in the Book of God, is nineteen," He wrote. "Of these the first hath been adorned with this Name which overshadoweth the whole of creation." He also settled a question the Báb had left open. Nineteen months of nineteen days fall short of the solar year by four days, or five in a leap year, and the Báb had not fixed where those days belong. Bahá'u'lláh placed them before the month of fasting: "Let the days in excess of the months be placed before the month of fasting." He called them days of giving, when the believers are to provide good cheer for themselves, their families and the poor before they begin the Fast. At the close of the Fast comes Naw-Rúz: "We have enjoined upon you fasting during a brief period, and at its close have designated for you Naw-Rúz as a feast."

This is a retelling. For the full text, see The Kitáb-i-Aqdas and its Notes.

Bahá'u'lláh. (1873). *The Kitáb-i-Aqdas (with its Notes)*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/bahaullah/kitab-i-aqdas/