Definition
Bul is a term drawn from ancient Hebrew chronology designating a specific month in the Hebrew calendar. It is the eighth month of the ecclesiastical year and the second month of the civil year. The month is equivalent, roughly, to October in the modern Gregorian calendar. In later Hebrew usage, the month was renamed Marcheshvan (also rendered Marshevan or Cheshvan), a name that remains in use today.
Bul appears in legal and biblical scholarship primarily as a calendrical reference point — most notably in the Hebrew Bible's account of the construction of Solomon's Temple, which is said to have been completed in the month of Bul. Its appearance in legal dictionaries reflects the tradition of equipping common law practitioners and scholars with the tools to read ancient documents, scriptural references, and ecclesiastical records that employed the Hebrew calendar.
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Why It Matters in Research
Bul is an edge-case entry — genuinely rare in legal proceedings but not without research value in specific contexts. Researchers working with ecclesiastical records, biblical law, ancient Hebrew legal instruments, or scholarly commentary referencing Old Testament chronology may encounter the term as a temporal marker. Understanding that Bul corresponds to October and maps onto the second month of the Hebrew civil year is essential to correctly interpreting any document that uses this dating system.
The term also illustrates a broader navigational point: both editions of Black's Law Dictionary include calendar and chronology entries — for Hebrew, Roman, and other ancient systems — that were included precisely because legal scholars of the 18th and 19th centuries frequently worked across scriptural and civil legal traditions. These entries can be useful anchors when reading older ecclesiastical court records, canon law documents, or learned treatises that assumed familiarity with non-Gregorian time systems.
No meaningful change between the first and second editions of Black's Law Dictionary. The entries are substantively identical, with only a minor typographical difference ("ecclesiastical" vs. "ecclesiasticnl" — the latter a typesetting artifact in the second edition).
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Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary agree exactly on the substance: Bul is the eighth month of the Hebrew ecclesiastical calendar and the second of the civil calendar, later renamed Marshevan, corresponding to October. Neither edition elaborates further, and neither connects the term to any legal proceeding or statute. The entry exists as a reference tool, not a doctrinal term. No divergence between sources worth noting; the entry appears to have been reproduced without revision.
Historical dictionaries outside the Black's corpus do not appear to have treated Bul as a legal term requiring independent definition. Its presence in Black's reflects the encyclopedic ambition of early American legal dictionaries to cover chronological and ecclesiastical reference matter alongside purely common law vocabulary.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
For broader context on ancient and ecclesiastical calendar systems as they arise in legal and scriptural scholarship, see the Law Mind Encyclopedia entries on Hebrew Law and Ecclesiastical Courts, where temporal and calendrical references appear in interpretive context.
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