Tevet טבת

Chanukah burns out in the first days of Tevet, and on the tenth comes a fast: on that day began the siege that ended in the destruction of the First Temple. There are four fasts of the destruction: the tenth of Tevet, when the siege began; the seventeenth of Tammuz, when the wall was breached; the ninth of Av, when the Temple burned; and the third of Tishrei, when Gedaliah was killed. Tevet is the first in the order of events. Tradition remembers something else in Tevet too: on the eighth the Septuagint was finished, and the sages compared that day to the day the calf was cast—translation made the Torah "translatable", severable from its tongue.

The month names now in use are Babylonian: "the names of the months came up with us from Babylon", says the Jerusalem Talmud. In the Torah months are counted—"the first", "the seventh"—from Nisan, the month of the Exodus.