The Báb Appoints the Day of God

*A retelling based on **Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era** by J. E. Esslemont, which sets out the laws of the Bahá'í calendar. Passages in quotation marks are preserved in that book.*

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When we speak of Naw-Rúz as a Bahá'í Holy Day, we are speaking of something that the Báb Himself brought into being. The new year of the spring equinox is far older than the Faith — for thousands of years the peoples of Persia and beyond had greeted the return of spring with rejoicing — but it was the Báb who took that ancient festival and gave it an entirely new meaning and an entirely new setting, by weaving it into a calendar of His own creation.

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The Báb was not only the Herald of a new Revelation; He was a Lawgiver. In His chief doctrinal work, the Bayán, He set aside many of the laws and forms of the past and ordained new ones for the Day that was dawning. Among the most beautiful and enduring of these was a wholly new way of measuring time. He instituted, as Esslemont records, "a calendar of nineteen months of nineteen days each, the months being named after the attributes of God."

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Consider what that means. Nineteen months of nineteen days come to three hundred and sixty-one days; a small number of additional days, set apart for hospitality and gift-giving and care of the poor, complete the solar year. But the truly remarkable thing is the naming. The Báb did not call the months by the names of old gods or emperors or seasons, as other calendars had done.

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He named each one for a quality of the Divine — splendour, glory, beauty, grandeur, light, mercy, words, perfection, names, might, will, knowledge, power, speech, questions, honour, sovereignty, dominion, and, last of all, loftiness. The first month He named **Bahá** — "splendour," "glory" — the very Most Great Name of the Revelation that was to come.

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To live through a Bahá'í year is therefore to pass, month by month, through a litany of the attributes of God, so that the ordinary turning of the calendar becomes a quiet act of remembrance.

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The nineteenth and final month, called **'Alá**, "loftiness," the Báb appointed to be the month of fasting — nineteen days in which the believers abstain from food and drink from sunrise to sunset, turning their hearts away from material things and toward the spirit. And it is here that Naw-Rúz takes its place. The Fast ends, and the new year begins, at the same moment: the spring equinox.

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As Esslemont sets it out, the month of 'Alá "is a month of fasting," and "Naw-Rúz, the Bahá'í New Year's Day, falls on the vernal equinox … and comes immediately after the fast."

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So the festival is framed with exquisite care. The believers pass through the self-denial and inwardness of the Fast in the last and "loftiest" month of the year; and then, at the very instant the long winter ends and the sun returns to its springtime strength, the discipline gives way to joy, and the new year breaks upon them. The Báb crowned this day with the highest of titles, designating Naw-Rúz the **Day of God**. It is "a Bahá'í feast day," Esslemont writes, "celebrated with great rejoicing as the beginning of the new year and the renewal of all things."

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There is a deep wisdom in this arrangement. By tying the new year to the equinox, the Báb anchored the festival not in human decree but in the order of the heavens themselves — Naw-Rúz arrives when the sun crosses into spring, the same cosmic turning that quickens the whole earth.

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By placing it immediately after the Fast, He joined renewal to preparation, so that the joy of the new year is the joy of those who have first emptied themselves to receive it. And by naming it the Day of God, He lifted what had been a seasonal celebration into an act of worship — a yearly acknowledgment that the springtime of the world points beyond itself to the One who made both the spring and the soul.

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Everything that later believers would experience at Naw-Rúz — the breaking of the Fast, the gathering in joy, the sense of all things made new — flows from these provisions of the Báb. He took the oldest festival of His people and made it the threshold of a new world, the Day of God set at the head of a year named, from beginning to end, for the qualities of the Divine.

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*This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see **Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era** by J. E. Esslemont.*

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