Origins of the Three Weeks

The period known as the Three Weeks (Bein ha-Metzarim) has for almost two millennia helped Jews prepare for Tisha B’Av, our collective mourning over the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE and Second Temple in 70 CE, and the exile caused by both calamities.

Our source for the name of this period comes from Lamentations, the biblical book that grieves the destruction of Jerusalem and the First Temple. In Lamentations 1:3, it says that Judah’s pursuers have overtaken her bein ha-metzarim, “in the narrow places.” A fourth century commentary on Lamentations interprets the phrase to mean “between the days of distress,” specifying that they refer to the three weeks “between the seventeenth of Tammuz and the Ninth of Av.”

Corresponding in 2026 to the evening of July 2 through Tisha B’Av on the evening of July 22, the Three Weeks seem to be for Tisha B’Av what the month of Elul is for the High Holidays. That time give us the opportunity to reflect not just on other biblical and historical events that occurred on these days, but also to examine the most difficult moments in our own lives.

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Bounded as these weeks are by fasts, however (a minor fast on the 17th of Tammuz, and a major one on Tisha B’Av), we are not given the relief and release that comes following the Days of Awe. (It may be that we aren’t meant to fully recover, spiritually and otherwise, from the Three Weeks and Tisha B’Av, until the beginning of a new Jewish year.) The Three Weeks, then, are arguably the most difficult period on the Jewish calendar, and this may be why few continue to observe them.

Because the observance of the Three Weeks began in the centuries between the time when the Mishnah and the Talmud were redacted, we can trace the origins fairly easily. Sometime around the early fourth century, for instance, the rabbis of the Talmud (Taanit 28b) were talking about the destruction of the Second Temple. One rabbi, Rava, mentions that, after four years of war and siege, the Romans breached the walls of the city on the 17th day of Tammuz. Rava’s proof for this statement goes back another century and more before his time, when the Mishnah was completed around 200 CE, bringing together stories, interpretations and practices that were already quite old.

There, in Taanit 4:6, the 17th of Tammuz is connected with “five calamitous matters [that] occurred to our forefathers” on that date: “The tablets were broken by Moses when he saw that the Jews had made the golden calf (Exodus 32:19); the daily offering was nullified by the Roman authorities and was never sacrificed again and the city walls of Jerusalem were breached (both in 70 CE); the general Apostemos publicly burned a Torah scroll; and Manasseh placed an idol in the Sanctuary (2 Kings 21:7).”

Already we can see connections made between events that took place centuries apart. Our ability to do this, even when some events require rabbinical leaps of linguistic interpretation to fit (is it just coincidence that the 17th of Tammuz falls a neat 40 days after Shavuot?), seems a particular aspect of the Jewish genius. Why remember one unfortunate event when you can remember a dozen, and pour your remembrance and some self-examination into them all during a single, intense period? Why see the worst events in history as random when, observed as a part of a continuum, they give us and our liturgy a belated sense of control over the events themselves?

The haftarot read on each Shabbat of the Three Weeks are referred to as the Haftarot of Rebuke: Jeremiah 1:1-2:3, Jeremiah 2:4-28, and Isaiah 1:1-27. All of them address the impending destruction of Jerusalem and, in the words of Isaiah, scold the people of the city in no uncertain terms: “Ah, sinful nation! People laden with iniquity! Brood of evildoers! Depraved children! They have forsaken God, spurned the Holy One of Israel, turned their backs.”

The traditional view is that the institution of reading the haftarah goes back to 168 BCE (the time of the Maccabean War and the origins of Chanukah), when the Seleucid Emperor Antiochus IV forbid the reading of the Torah. In place of the weekly parashah, thematically-similar passages from the prophets, or Neviim, were recited instead. The Haftarot of Rebuke stand out, however, because they have nothing to do with the weekly parashot. The earliest reference to them comes from a source that can be dated anywhere from the fifth to sixth century.

Nowadays, the Three Weeks are known because, depending on your level of observance, weddings and other public celebrations are prohibited then, as is listening to and playing music, cutting your hair or buying new clothes, or reciting Shehecheyanu. The conclusion of The Three Weeks comes during the first nine days of Av when, added to the above prohibitions, those of eating meat and drinking wine are included, among others.

It is remarkable how much of this is there from the start since, in the Mishnah passage quoted above, it adds, “During the week in which the Ninth of Av occurs, it is prohibited to cut one’s hair and to launder clothes … Not only does one fast on the Ninth of Av, but from when the month of Av begins, one decreases acts of rejoicing.”

The Jewish historian Josephus, who only survived the war with Rome by going over to their side, left us a long and devastating account of what happened. He does describe the Romans breaking through two outer walls and gaining control of a third, and while none of these events seem to land exactly on the 17th of Tammuz, the last of them comes closest.

The Romans were already in Jerusalem and had taken the Antonia Fortress, which lay on the northwest corner of the Temple Mount. In the middle of building earthworks and ramps to gain control of the Temple Mount and the city’s Old Wall (or First Wall) that ran perpendicular to it, the Jewish forces wouldn’t leave them alone: “Sometimes [the Romans] suffered losses through Jewish stratagems,” Josephus writes, “as their crushing superiority made them overconfident just when despair of survival made the Jews more daring than ever.”

For better or worse, this could describe us at many moments throughout our history. “When despair of survival made the Jews more daring than ever” — suddenly it doesn’t sound like ancient history anymore. It’s one more thing to think about during the Three Weeks. PJC

Tim Miller is a poet and writer living in Pittsburgh. He is online at wordandsilence.com.