The Jewish Calendar is not significant to the issue.
First, only a small percentage of Jews believe in a young earth, perhaps as many as 5%.
Second, and I must just make quick comments, and post key excerpts from Jewish sources showing that the old Jewish belief in an ancient earth and ancient universe was suppressed and then resurrected:
There is no traditional count calculating the supposed age of the universe pre-dating rabbinic Judaism, and even the calculation of Yose ben Halafta was not accepted as usable for legal dating until many years afterward.
“The hardening of this near-6000 year old date came in part from the Ari, Rabbi Isaac Luria. The Ari dismissed ancient Jewish teaching about a very old universe, instead insisting those many thousands of years (or billions in one ancient calculation) were all “spiritual” and had no physical presence. In the Ari’s mind, the world was physically young.”
The young earth idea in Judaism is a later development than the ancient earth belief.
“The Ari’s system of kabbala became the accepted one of Jewish mysticism and served as the basis for the messianic pretensions of Shabbatai Tzvi and the theology of the hasidic movement. It also became the normative kabbala of the non-hasidic rabbinic elite in both Europe and the Middle East. This coincided with Christian attempts to date creation, the most famous of which is that of James Ussher, which roughly corresponds to Yose ben Halafta’s.”
This led to the belief that a near-6000 year old universe was an indisputable halakhic fact. However, this far from being true.
Hence, “when certain haredi rabbis – Rabbi Elyashiv, for example – insist that a 5769 year old universe is the halakha, and that any deviance from it is heresy, they are basing this ‘halakhic’ judgment on very flimsy grounds.”
Note:
Sefer Temunah comments on the “Shmita Theory”, the idea that sabbatical cycles existed before the creation of Adam, and that those cycles – those years – were actual physical years.
Sefer Temunah states that we are in the 6th 7,000-year sabbatical cycle and that the world is 42,000 years old.
Because of the spread of Lurianic Kabbalah, Shitat Sefer Temunah (Shmita Theory) became less and less known. Only those few scholars who studied ancient kabbalistic works were aware of it.
Could The World Have Been Created ‘Old’?
- No Jewish source exists to support this contention.
- To make the world appear to be billions of years old when it is really 6000 years old is problematic:
a. It makes G-d appear to be deceptive.
b. If one accepts the idea that G-d created an ‘old’ world, why not say the world was created 5 minutes ago and we with it, with all of our memories, etc. ready-made?
c. Again, there is no Jewish source for this idea. It was invented by the 19th century Christian apologist Philip Henry Gosse.
In his work Otzar HaHayyim, Yizhak of Acco writes that, because the sabbatical cycles referred to in Shitat Sefer Temunah existed before Adam, they must be measured in Divine years, not human years.
1. Therefore, Sefer Temunah is speaking of Divine years when it states that the world is 42,000 years old;
2. According to midrashic sources, a Divine day is 1,000 earth-years long.
3. A Divine year would therefore equal 365,250 earth years,
4. So, according to Yitzhak of Acco, the universe would be 42,000 x 365,250 earth-years old, and
5. That calculation comes out to 15.3 billion years, very close to current estimates for the Big Bang.
