The Missing Holiday

     The biblical calendar appears 5 times in the Torah. Twice in Exodus and once in Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.  In these lists are all the holidays as celebrated during biblical times- specifically during the period of the first Temple.  Conspicuous in its absence is the holiday of the New Year.  I hear you saying- but its explicitly listed in Leviticus 23 -"on the first day of the seventh month...." and same for Numbers 29.
     The date given - the first day of the seventh month- is nowhere called "New Year".  It appears to be a reminder that the holiday of Succot is coming.  It is not even mentioned in Exodus and Deuteronomy.   The first of the seventh month does not become "New Year" until probably around the second century BCE.   The concept of a day of judgement is a later addition in the book of Jubilees and in rabbinic literature.
      So where is our New Year?  Do we in fact have a New Year.?  The Babylonians had a spring New Year festival called Akitu  in which the king pledged loyalty to the  deities. In Ugarit (northern Canaan) there is circumstantial evidence for a New Years festival in the fall associated with the final grape harvest.
    It seems that Israelites kept two calendars in biblical times. One started in the spring where the months start with Nisan.  This was the liturgical calendar upon which the festival dates are given.  The other calendar was agricultural which started and ended in the fall.  This leads some scholars to postulate that the holiday of Succot was originally a New Years festival.  It is possible that both the spring calendar  and the fall calendar had a new year.  There are parallels between the fall festival of Succot and the spring festival of Pesach.  The lamb for the Passover sacrifice was set aside on the tenth corresponding to Yom Kippur and both days have a day called Atzeret in Torah sources.
     The question is then if there was a New Years festival, why was it downplayed.  The answer might be that in the other ancient near East religions the festival enacted an enthronement of sorts for the deity and the king.  In Israel God did not need annual enthronement.  It was a given state of affairs.