Calendars in the Dead Sea Scrolls

Measuring Time

James C. VanderKam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134709625
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

1997 was the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Calendars in the Dead Sea Scrolls explores the evidence about calendars in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Hebrew Bible and other ancient Jewish texts. James C. VanderKam examines the pertinent texts, their sources and the different uses to which people put calendrical information in the Christian world.
Calendars in the Dead Sea Scrolls provides a valuable addition to the Dead Sea Scrolls Series and contributes to the elucidation of the scroll texts themselves and their relation to other Biblical texts.

Part I
INTRODUCTION TO BIBLICAL AND POST-BIBLICAL CALENDARS

Before turning our attention to the calendrical information that comes from the Dead Sea scrolls, it is very useful to have before us some idea about calendars in ancient Israel and early Judaism. This provides a helpful background against which to view the data from the Dead Sea scrolls because the authors of those texts consciously based their time reckonings upon the ancient Scriptures. Surveying the sources outside the scrolls also shows what was known about ancient Jewish calendrical thought before the scrolls were discovered.

1
THE HEBREW BIBLE

The Hebrew Bible, the earliest surviving collection of Israelite—Jewish writings, includes no document that could be called a calendar as we think of calendars today. As a matter of fact, the Bible provides little information about calendars, yet it does offer some givens that have necessarily played a role in all subsequent Jewish calendrical calculation. Several of the key passages should now be adduced and their value for the topic at hand assessed.

IMPORTANT PASSAGES

The creation account in Gen. 1:1–2:4a

Much is said already in the priestly creation story of Genesis 1. The paragraph devoted to the fourth day in the creative week reads:

And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.’ And it was so. God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.

(1:14–19)¹

The paragraph establishes that God is in control of the heavenly luminaries: they themselves are not personified or deified as they were in some neighboring cultures. Also, he assigns duties to both sun and moon (the stars are mentioned later) during each day: they are meant for signs, seasons, days, and years. The term translated “seasons” (mw‘dym) is one that elsewhere in the Bible means “festivals”. Therefore, one could say that in this paragraph the sun and moon are given calendrical assignments for three of the entities that are significant in Biblical and post-Biblical calendars—days, years and festivals. The religious festivals were carefully dated and thus regularly mentioned in connection with the calendar and, of course, days and years are two of the fundamental elements in any system for measuring time. It is interesting that neither sun nor moon is actually named here: they are merely described as the greater and lesser lights. From these verses we could conclude that in biblical reckoning of time both sun and moon had to be considered. Both were created by God, and to both he gave calendrical functions. Note that at the end of the paragraph, regarding day four, we meet the refrain “there was evening and there was morning”, a sequence that seems to say something about when the writer thought the day began (see below).

The flood story

A second passage in Genesis has also figured prominently in subsequent calendrical thought. Of all the stories in the first book of the Bible, the flood narrative has the highest density of specific dates, all of which fit within slightly more than a one-year span and all of which designate the months by ordinals (see below on this system for naming months). The text relates that Noah was 600 years of age when the flood waters fell on the earth (Gen. 7:6, 11). The dates mentioned in the Hebrew text are the following (dates are expressed as month/date in the month):

600th year of Noah’s life 2/17 the waters come (7:11)
7/17 the ark rests on one of the mountains of Ararat (8:4), 150 days after the deluge started (7:24; 8:3)
10/1 the tops of the mountains appear (8:5)
601st year of Noah’s life
1/1 the waters are dried up and Noah removes the covering of the ark (8:13)
2/27 the earth is dry

The careful reader of the story will notice that the months are assumed to contain thirty days because five months (2/17–7/17) are said to total 150 days. These would not be the standard lunar months of the later Jewish calendar because such months had either twenty nine or thirty days in them, and it would have been virtually impossible to have five consecutive months of thirty days each. It has been suggested, although the text does not specifically say, that the year began in the autumn in the flood calendar as that is when the rains come in the Near East. However, we are dealing with unusual rainfall in this case, not a super-sized autumnal rainy season. Since the version of the flood story in which the numbered months are used is the priestly one, and elsewhere in the priestly source the first month is in the spring, it is more likely that the flood calendar also began in the spring. As we will see, the flood story was an important scriptural base for the calendars elaborated in the Book of Jubilees and in at least one of the Dead Sea scrolls.

Scholars have long puzzled over the significance of the report that the flood lasted one year and eleven days (from 2/17 in one year to 2/27 in the next). One hypothesis that has been advanced to explain the numbers is that the flood was believed to have lasted one year but that that single year is expressed in two systems: the basic unit is the lunar year which lasts 354 days, and the eleven additional days are added to arrive at a full solar year of 365 days.²

THE MOON AND THE SUN

The teaching of Genesis 1 that both the sun and the moon play a part in marking times is borne out elsewhere in the Bible where both luminaries are mentioned in calendrical contexts.

The moon

The moon served as a primary means for segmenting time in the ancient world. Observation led very early on to the conclusion that the span of time between one new moon (that is, the first time that part of the lunar surface becomes visible after the period of its invisibility) and the next was twenty nine or thirty days. The course of the lunar month could be charted as the percentage of its surface illuminated by the sun increased until the full moon (when the half of the lunar surface visible to the human eye was lighted) and then decreased to the point of invisibility.

Genesis 1 is not the only biblical passage that recognizes the role of the moon in measuring time. For example, in Ps. 104:19 the poet, as he praises the wondrous works of the Lord in creation, sings: “You have made the moon to mark the seasons; the sun knows its time for setting”. Here again the term translated “seasons” is the one that can also refer to festivals. If the psalmist understood the term to mean “festivals”, he did not specify which holidays were marked by the moon, but it is clear that he did not assign a similar role to the sun. The writer may have had in mind the two great festivals that take place exactly half a year apart—the holidays of unleavened bread and tabernacles (on these, see p. 10). The seven day Festival of Unleavened Bread began on the fifteenth day of the first month, while the Festival of Tabernacles commenced on the fifteenth day of the seventh month: that is, both began when the moon was full. Ps. 81:3 probably refers to the Festival of Unleavened Bread, a holiday closely tied to the Passover (which was celebrated on 1/14) and exodus from Egypt. It reads: “Blow the trumpet at the new moon, at the full moon, on our festal day”. The fifth verse of this psalm refers to the night of the first Passover, thus suggesting that the full moon of verse 3 is the one on which the Festivals of Passover—Unleavened Bread began.

Several passages in the Bible show that the first day of the month or the new moon was considered a special day. The point emerges clearly from 1 Sam.: 20, one of the stories involving Saul, Jonathan and David. In it we read about the meals—apparently not ordinary ones—that took place on the new moon and the day following. At a time when his relations with Saul had deteriorated badly, David met his friend Jonathan and said to him: “Tomorrow is the new moon, and I should not fail to sit with the king at the meal; but let me go, so that I may hide in the field until the third evening” (v. 5). The term “new moon” is quite understandable, but at this juncture in the story the reader has no clue what the significance of the phrase “until the third evening” might be (see also v. 12). The sequel clarifies the issue. Jonathan and David arranged to meet on the day after the new moon (vv. 18–19). The day of the new moon came and David was absent from the meal (vv. 24–25), but Saul assumed that something had happened to David to disqualify him from what appears to have been a sacred meal (v. 26): “But on the second day, the day after the new moon, David’s place was empty. And Saul said to his son Jonathan, ‘Why has the son of Jesse not come to the feast, either yesterday or today?’” (v. 28). Saul’s seemingly irrational anger at David’s absence—anger directed consequently at Jonathan—had the result that “Jonathan rose from the table in fierce anger and ate no food on the second day of the month, for he was grieved for David” (v. 34). The next morning, that is, on the third day Jonathan met David (v. 35). From this passage it seems that, at least for Saul’s household, a two-day celebration marked the arrival of the new moon.

The sacral character of the first of the month also emerges from 2 Kgs. 4:23. This verse appears in the story about the prophet Elisha and the Shunammite woman whose long-awaited child had died. She wanted to go to Elisha quickly to report the news, but her husband replied: “Why go to him today? It is neither new moon nor sabbath”. The implication is that one visited a man of God like Elisha on the first of the month or the seventh day of the week. The prophet Isaiah included the new moons with the sabbaths and festivals in his condemnation of insincere worship (1:13–14; cf. Hos. 2:11; Amos 2:5). Sabbath and new moon are also paired in Ezek. 46:1–3. The new moon is not, however, listed in the calendar of festivals in Leviticus 23 apart from the first of the seventh month (Lev. 23:24); yet in a similar passage, Num. 28:11–15, the firsts of each month are included among the “appointed times” of the Lord.

The sun

Although there is no conclusive evidence in the Hebrew Bible that a solar year was known or used (unless the dates for the length of the flood are to be interpreted in this way), the movements of the sun and the related changes of seasons were carefully marked. There are references to the year (a measure that could not ignore the sun), its beginning and end, and major festivals were located near the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. Since several of these holidays were connected with harvest seasons, their proper timing was dependent upon the movements of the sun. The setting of the sun also marked the end of a day in some calculations such as the end of certain periods of impurity.

The role of the sun in marking intervals during the day is expressed in the story of the Lord’s promise that he would add fifteen years to the life of King Hezekiah who “became sick and was at the point of death” (2 Kgs. 20:1). The king requested a sign which would guarantee that the Lord would heal him, and the prophet Isaiah then brought the message:

‘This is the sign to you from the Lord, that the Lord will do the thing that he has promised: the shadow has now advanced ten intervals; shall it retreat ten intervals?’ Hezekiah answered, ‘It is normal for the shadow to lengthen ten intervals; rather let the shadow retreat ten intervals.’ The prophet Isaiah cried to the Lord; and he brought the shadow back ten intervals, by which the sun had declined on the dial of King Ahaz.

(2 Kgs. 20:9–11; cf. Isa. 38:7–8)

It remains the case, nevertheless, that no scriptural statements assert the role of the sun’s course in defining a year. Despite its greater size, it seems to be the lesser light in the Bible.

THREE SYSTEMS FOR DESIGNATING MONTHS

Although there are no systematic statements about calendars in the Hebrew Bible, there are three sets of names for the months in a year. The information that accompanies references to these systems allows us to conclude that all the lists began in the spring of the year. While both Leviticus 23 and Numbers 29 allot a special place to the first day of the seventh month (Lev. 23:23–25; Num. 29:1–6), it is never called New Year’s Day (Rosh Ha-Shanah) in the Bible. That development seems to have occured at a later time.

Canaanite month names

There are four month-names that are possibly of Canaanite origin. They are:
Abib(Exod. 13:4; 23:15). This is the first month of the year (see 12:2), since it is associated with the exodus from Egypt and the Festival of Unleavened Bread. The name refers to an unripe head on a stalk of grain. See also Deut. 16:1–3.

Ziv 1 Kgs. 6:1, 37 date the inception of Solomon’s building activity on the temple to his fourth regnal year in the month Ziv which is explained as the second month of the year.

Ethanim 1 Kgs. 8:2 calls it the seventh month, the month during which the temple was dedicated.

Bul 1 Kgs. 6:38 places completion of the temple project in Solomon’s eleventh year in the month of Bul, that is, the eighth month.

It is interesting that these month names appear only in special contexts. Abib is employed only in connection with Passover, and the other three occur only in date formulas in the story about the construction of Solomons temple.

Numbered months

The most common way of referring to the months in the Hebrew Bible is through use of the ordinals first to twelfth. These ordinal designations appear frequently in the priestly source of the Pentateuch. We have seen that numbered months are prominent in the flood story. Another section in which they occur often is 2 Kgs. 25 (=Jeremiah 52) where the last days of Judah before the destruction of Jerusalem are under consideration. Perhaps some sort of chronicle underlies the chapter. It may be noteworthy that “twelfth” is the largest ordinal attested; there is no thirteenth month in the Hebrew Bible and thus no intercalary month in this system.

Babylonian month names

A number of biblical sources employ month names that originated in Babylon; in fact the Jerusalem Talmud preserves the memory that the exiles brought these month names back with them upon their return from the east (Rosh Ha-Shanah 1.56d). When these names occur in the Bible they are often accompanied by explanatory phrases indicating the ordinal of the month. Not all of the twelve are mentioned in the Bible, but the following seven are and they, with the five missing ones, constitute the Jewish month names to the present. It comes as no surprise that the names appear in books that date from the post-exilic period, when Jewish contact with Babylon and its Persian successor who had adopted the same calendar was immediate.

Nisan (Esth. 3:7; Neh. 2:1). In the former passage it is identified as the first month. Note that both occurrences of the name are in texts set during the Persian period, that is, after 538 and before 333 BCE.
Sivan Esth. 8:9 calls it the third month.
Elul Neh. 6:15 dates completion of the wall to this month (=the sixth month).
Chislev (Zech. 7:1; Neh. 1:1). In Zechariah it is said to be the ninth month.
Tebeth Esth. 2:16 says it is the tenth month.
Shebat Zech. 1:7 terms it the eleventh month.
Adar(Esth. 3:7, 13; 8:12; 9:1, 15, 17, 19,...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
• PREFACE
• PART I: INTRODUCTION TO BIBLICAL AND POST-BIBLICAL CALENDARS
• PART II: THE CALENDARS IN THE QUMRAN TEXTS