Shemaryahu Talmon, Jonathan Ben-Dov, and Uwe Glessmer, editors. Qumran Cave 4. XVI: Calendrical Texts. Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, XXI. Oxford: Clarendon Press. xii, 263 pp., 13 plates; Sacha Stern, Calendar and Community: A History of the Jewish Calendar, 2nd Century BCE–10th Century CE. Oxford University Press, 2001. xvi, 306 pp.

Abstract

Since the publication of the first Qumran scrolls more than half a century ago, the schematic 364 day solar year of Jubilees has been posited as a major issue in the schism of the Qumran community from mainstream Judaism. Shemaryahu Talmon was among the pioneers in assessing the impact of this calendar upon the life of the Qumran community, as best illustrated by the Yom Kippur confrontation with the Wicked Priest who came to suppress the sect's observance of the fast on a date in conflict with the prevalent lunar calendar. Talmon's thesis is that the sect, like the author of Jubilees, viewed the observation of the moon as leading to corruption of the ideal 364 day calendar in which the holidays and all dates were perpetually fixed to particular days of the week. Whether and how the sect made correction for the annual deficit of one and one quarter days is not known, but presumably they had only disdain for the arbitrary methods of lunar intercalation.