Enoch's calendar - Background to the times of John the Baptist

[steve53]

Maybe.

But if God himself defined when the New Year should begin as written in the Torah then it is hard to think that the Jews would abandon it for what seems like no good reason.

 

[patrick457]

Maybe.

But if God himself defined when the New Year should begin as written in the Torah then it is hard to think that the Jews would abandon it for what seems like no good reason.

The thing is, while God says in Exodus 14 that Nisan is to be the first month, in Exodus 23:16, he commands the Israelites to celebrate “the Feast of Ingathering (Sukkot, aka Feast of Booths: September-October) at the end of the year, when you gather in from the field the fruit of your labor.” So within the same book, you have both the Tishri-year and the Nisan-year represented.

It’s a bit complicated to determine which was the ‘original’ way of reckoning years. Some think that the Tishri-year was the original Israelite reckoning (cf. the Gezer calendar), and the Nisan-year was a development. (When it was developed depends on whether you pin the Torah to the time of Moses, or much later.) Others think that the Nisan-year was the original, and the Tishri-year was the later one. And as mentioned, still others think that each of the two systems were originally two different calendars - one was Israel’s and the other was Judah’s - that were merged into one.

But then again, it’s possible the Israelites had two ‘new years’ all along: one in spring and one in autumn. After all, (‘barley’) festivalAkitu was originally held two times a year: in spring (the barley harvest) and in fall (the sowing of barley). Eventually, only the spring festival - now a New Year festival - remained during the Neo-Babylonian period (ca. 7th-6th century BC). Who’s to say the Israelites may not have had a similar practice: Passover and Booths - both originally connected with the cutting and sowing of barley, just like Akitu - may have also served as a sort of ‘new year’ festivals for the early Israelites.

 

[Cyberseeker]

patrick457:

The thing is, while God says in Exodus 14 that Nisan is to be the first month, in Exodus 23:16, he commands the Israelites to celebrate “the Feast of Ingathering (Sukkot, aka Feast of Booths: September-October) at the end of the year, when you gather in from the field the fruit of your labor.” So within the same book, you have both the Tishri-year and the Nisan-year represented.

Tishri is always the 7th month in the Bible. This term, ‘turn of the year’ has caused a bit of confusion. It is assumed to refer to the new calendar year, but it wasnt. The ‘turn’ was really a season-change term used for agricultural purposes.
*
“Celebrate the Festival of Weeks with the firstfruits of the wheat harvest, and the Festival of Ingathering at the turn of the year.”
(Exodus 34:22, Ex. 23:16)*
It happened in autumn, and is translated from the Hebrew word, ‘tequwphah’ which refers to the autumn equinox. (‘teshuphah’ was the spring equinox.)

Another source of confusion is the practice in Judah to count the reign of kings from Tishri. Again, this should not be assumed to be the new calendar year. Abib (Nisan) remained the first month, but the kings ‘regnal’ count of years was measured from the 7th month, in the same way as our modern ‘financial’ or ‘school’ years are reckoned.

Somewhere between Nehemiah and Maccabees this got interfered with and Rosh Hashanah (Tishri) became the New Year.

 

[steve53]

Nothing in Josephus suggests anything other than a New Year’s celebration in Nisan. It would make sense as well, as the Passover was always in Nissan and was the big holiday for the Jews.

 

[patrick457]

Nothing in Josephus suggests anything other than a New Year’s celebration in Nisan. It would make sense as well, as the Passover was always in Nissan and was the big holiday for the Jews.

Actually, Passover and Booths were big holidays. And Josephus actually knows about the Tishri-years as well (which he calls “the ancient order”) - he attributes Nisan-years to Moses.

Moses, however appointed Nisan, that is to say Xanthicus, as the first month for the festivals, because it was in this month that he brought the Hebrews out of Egypt. He also reckoned this month as the commencement of the year for everything relating to divine worship. But for selling and buying and other ordinary affairs he preserved the ancient order.

 

[steve53]

Actually, Passover and Booths were big holidays. And Josephus actually knows about the Tishri-years as well (which he calls “the ancient order”) - he attributes Nisan-years to Moses.

Moses, however appointed Nisan, that is to say Xanthicus, as the first month for the festivals, because it was in this month that he brought the Hebrews out of Egypt. He also reckoned this month as the commencement of the year for everything relating to divine worship. But for selling and buying and other ordinary affairs he preserved the ancient order.

I am not sure what that means. It is very possible after the destruction of the Second Temple and outlawing of the High Priesthood and Second Temple ritual that a lot of religious Calendar-related celebrations got shuffled about. That is why for Jesus’ period, Josephus should be defaulted to. I will have to look into it further.

The Jews of two thousand years ago did not have a lot of conventional entertainment outlets- no plays, no athletic events, no gladiatorial events. Did they have any dancing? I am not sure. David played the lyre, so they had music of some sort.

Herod the Great caught a lot of heat for building an Amphitheater in Judea- in fact, he was almost assassinated for it.

No art except of a geometric nature- they could not represent any living thing as it would be considered trying to compete or improve upon God’s creations.

Point being that the Jewish festivals served as a cultural and religious touchstone. Sure, there was worship, but also socializing, match-making, buying and selling, probably organized story-telling. And to be sure there was a dark underbelly to these great gatherings of people where people let their baser natures loose.

The Second Temple had four major festivals, and a myriad of minor ones. In total, probably 3 months were given over to some sort of religious gathering celebration.

Here is a cut and paste from Wiki:

Rosh Hashanah (Hebrew: רֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה‎, literally “head of the year”) is the Jewish New Year. The biblical name for this holiday is Yom Teruah (Hebrew: יוֹם תְּרוּעָה‎), literally “day [of] shouting/blasting”, sometimes translated as the Feast of Trumpets. It is the first of the High Holy Days (Hebrew: יָמִים נוֹרָאִים‎ Yamim Nora’im, lit. “Days of Awe”) specified by Leviticus 23:23-32, which usually occur in the early autumn of the Northern Hemisphere.

Rosh Hashanah is a two-day celebration, which begins on the first day of Tishrei. Tishrei is the first month of the Jewish civil year, but the seventh month of the ecclesiastical year.

Rosh Hashanah has its origin in the beginning of the economic year in the ancient Near East, marking the start of the agricultural cycle.[1] In its theological interpretation, the day is said to be the anniversary of the creation of Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, and their first actions toward the believed realization of humanity’s role in God’s world.

Rosh Hashanah customs include sounding the shofar (a hollowed-out ram’s horn), following the prescription of the Hebrew Bible to “raise a noise” on Yom Teruah; and eating symbolic foods such as apples dipped in honey to evoke a “sweet new year”.

 

[patrick457]

Tishri is always the 7th month in the Bible. This term, ‘turn of the year’ has caused a bit of confusion. It is assumed to refer to the new calendar year, but it wasnt. The ‘turn’ was really a season-change term used for agricultural purposes.
*
“Celebrate the Festival of Weeks with the firstfruits of the wheat harvest, and the Festival of Ingathering at the turn of the year.*”
(Exodus 34:22, Ex. 23:16)
It happened in autumn, and is translated from the Hebrew word, ‘tequwphah’ which refers to the autumn equinox. (‘teshuphah’ was the spring equinox.)

Another source of confusion is the practice in Judah to count the reign of kings from Tishri. Again, this should not be assumed to be the new calendar year. Abib (Nisan) remained the first month, but the kings ‘regnal’ count of years was measured from the 7th month, in the same way as our modern ‘financial’ or ‘school’ years are reckoned.

Somewhere between Nehemiah and Maccabees this got interfered with and Rosh Hashanah (Tishri) became the New Year.

I personally tend to see things like this:

The pre-exilic Israelites had two/three major agricultural (barley-related) feasts, which marked the two halves of the year: Passover-Pentecost in the spring and Booths (Sukkot) in autumn. (In fact, you might say that the biblical texts doesn’t really specify any single day as New Year’s.) There was still no distinction between Rosh Hashanah (or rather, Yom Teruah), Yom Kippur, and Booths proper: they were all originally part of a single holiday season.

In the Torah, the first day of the seventh month is a day of rest and trumpet blasts. And since the acclamation of the king was one of the instances in ancient Israel in which the horn was blown, it’s possible that the first days of Tishri was originally a sort of commemoration of Yhwh’s enthronement and a kind of symbolic renewal/re-creation of the ordered world. (You might note that Ezra read the Torah to the people during Tishri - which by analogy, we might compare to the Babylonian practice of reading/reciting the Enuma Elish on the Akitu festival. In fact, later Jewish lore claimed that the world was created in the month of Tishri.*)

So, originally, the fall feast had these connotations of enthronement and creation/renewal (Feast of Trumpets), purgation (Day of the Atonement), and fertility (Booths). However, after the exile the original unity of the fall festival was shattered, and each of these mini-feasts were considered to be festivals in their own right.

• In fact, it is thought that the reason the creation narrative in Genesis is expressed in terms of a seven-day period is because both Passover and Booths were celebrated over the course of seven days.

 

[patrick457]

I am not sure what that means. It is very possible after the destruction of the Second Temple and outlawing of the High Priesthood and Second Temple ritual that a lot of religious Calendar-related celebrations got shuffled about. That is why for Jesus’ period, Josephus should be defaulted to. I will have to look into it further.

I don’t know of any shuffling, although I do know that at least one feast (Hanukkah) got reinterpreted. Originally, that feast had political overtones in that it was a kind of ‘independence day’, but post-AD 135 it was made more palatable when the focus got shifted to the supposed miracle of the menorah that never went out.

The Jews of two thousand years ago did not have a lot of conventional entertainment outlets- no plays, no athletic events, no gladiatorial events. Did they have any dancing? I am not sure. David played the lyre, so they had music of some sort.

David danced before the Ark of the Covenant. The Old Testament (and a few extrabiblical sources) speaks of musicians, singers, musical instruments and dancing. Music and dance are one of those cultural universals (traits all cultures in the world share).

Speaking of which, I’m reminded of that short story by Jorge Luis Borges about Averroes translating Aristotle’s Poetics into Arabic. Borges’ Averroes faced a difficulty in translating Aristotle because in his Arab culture, there was no concept of theatrical performances, and so he couldn’t really understand what Aristotle meant by “tragedy” and “comedy.” Averroes sees a group of children play-acting and hears a traveler’s garbled account of a play in China, but still fails to understand that those are important hints. In the end, Averroes understands ‘tragedy’ to mean ‘panegyrics’ and ‘comedy’ to mean ‘satire’, in other words genres of poetry. So he concludes: “admirable tragedies and comedies abound in the pages of the Koran and in the mohalacas of the sanctuary.”

No art except of a geometric nature- they could not represent any living thing as it would be considered trying to compete or improve upon God’s creations.

The objection was more to depictions of human beings or animals. (That however didn’t stop one aristocrat in Jerusalem from depicting birds or Antipas from decorating his palace with animal figures.) That didn’t extend to plants - the golden vine on the Temple, the coinage of the Herods and the Roman prefects - or inanimate objects.

Of course, if you look throughout Jewish history as a whole, the Greco-Roman period (when many Jews were pretty much iconoclastic, even radically so) is really the exception. In the OT period, you had Israelite/Judahite art; from the 3rd century onwards, you have these synagogues decorated with artworks.

 

[patrick457]

No art except of a geometric nature- they could not represent any living thing as it would be considered trying to compete or improve upon God’s creations.

The objection was more to depictions of human beings or animals. (That however didn’t stop one aristocrat in Jerusalem from depicting birds or Antipas from decorating his palace with animal figures.) That didn’t extend to plants - the golden vine on the Temple, the coinage of the Herods and the Roman prefects - or inanimate objects.

Of course, if you look throughout Jewish history as a whole, the Greco-Roman period (when many Jews were pretty much iconoclastic, even radically so) is really the exception. In the OT period, you had Israelite/Judahite art; from the 3rd century onwards, you have these synagogues decorated with artworks.

 

[steve53]

Thanks, Patrick, as usual, for your informative posts.

The Jews did celebrate the Sabbatical year which was every seventh year. So determining when that year might have started would give us a clue as to when they celebrated the new year. There is something in Hagan about Herod’s conquest of Jerusalem in 37 BC that suggests that the sabbatical year began in the spring around Nisan. I will check it later tonight.

 

[steve53]

In the fall of 37 BC, Herod conquered Jerusalem with a large factor being the weakness of the Jewish defenders due to the Sabbatical year. Josephus is clear, and this is confirmed by Deuteronomy, that the Sabbatical year started in the fall of 38 BC and was coming to an end in the fall of 37 BC.

But the Sabbatic year and the Calendar year are not the same.

In a passage in Antiquities, XI 4:8, Josephus writes that the month of Nisan is the first month in the Jewish calendar and is the “beginning of our year.”

So the first of Nisan would be the Jewish New Year in the times of Jesus and, of course, be held during a new moon. The Passover would begin on the 14th day of that lunar month, Nisan, which would be nigh on to a full moon.

 

[Cyberseeker]

Your Josephus reference pertains to the Persian period when the year did indeed begin in Nisan.

Your Herod reference shows that the New Year had been changed to begin in Tishri, sometime in the intervening 400 years. That is my whole point. It helps explain why the Dead sea scrolls were so hostile concerning the changes that had been made.

“All the children of Israel will forget and will not find the path of the years, and will forget the new moons, and seasons, and Sabbaths and they will wrongly determine all the order of the years. For this reason the years will come upon them when they disturb (misinterpret) the order.” (Book of Jubilees 6:33-37)

The original Sabbath years originally began when the calendar year began! (Nisan) The only Sabbath year that began in Tishri was the Jubilee which occurred only on the 49/50th year. Incidentally Jubilee began on the 10th, not the 1st Tishri. Little wonder that it was ‘lost’ during that time.

 

[Cyberseeker]

Bartholomew, are you still around? :tiphat: I thought I should get back to your question, can Enoch’s 364-day calendar be synchronised with our solar year?

It takes 365.242 days for the Earth to get around the Sun. As long as Earth remains, nothing is going to change that. However, the ‘Enochian’ calendar might have more to it than what it seems. When studying it, one cannot help but notice a strict sabbatical emphasis. There are seven days in the week and there are 52*7=364 days (exactly) in the year. Any deviation from this pattern is strongly condemned and that might be the clue to additional intercalations. There would be no add-hoc leap-year additions whenever it suited unless the days were in multiples of seven and applied according to a pre-defined sabbatic formula. I think we can make a reasonable guess at how they did it.

The book of Enoch starts with a 360-day calendar and expands it to 364 days. This has led some scholars to wonder if further intercalations might follow a sabbatical pattern. Some scroll experts have mooted the idea, not the least of whom was Jean Carmignac, a French scholar (one of the translators), who proposed that 7-day additions be made on the 7-year shemitah - the religious cycle commanded by Moses.

The book of Jubilees also indicates it might be so. Like the earlier book of Enoch, the days were 364, but Jubilees adds another dimension - a relationship between the weekly Sabbath and the longer term sabbatic year. ‘Jubilees’, referring to the former book, says:

“Enoch was the first among men that are born on earth who learnt writing and knowledge and wisdom and who wrote down the signs of heaven according to the order of their months in a book, that men might know the seasons of the years according to the order of their separate months, and he was the first to write a testimony and he testified to the sons of men among the generations of the earth, and recounted the weeks of the jubilees, and made known to them the days of the years, and set in order the months and recounted the Sabbaths of the years.” (Book of Jubilees 4:17-18)

Here is the clue to the problem of our solar year being 365.24 days. The Qumran community extended their annual count of days to the ‘Sabbath of years’ suggesting that further intercalations were made at those special intervals. So let us attempt a reconstruction to see if it tracks the solar cycle. Here is Carmignac’s proposition. Each seventh year had an additional seven days added.
Hence the total number of days per ‘week of years’ (seven years) was:

2548…(364*7)
plus 7…(added on 7th year)
= 2555…(total number of days)

Now, please divide 2555 days by seven years. The figure is now equivalent to 365 days per year! That is very close and the question begs to be asked, “Can further sabbath adjustments complete the solar cycle without losing the sabbatic pattern and without losing time?” Let’s try.

There is another special year, the Jubilee. Sabbaths began 1st Nisan but Jubilee was announced with fanfare of trumpets on the seventh month of the forty-ninth year. So, let us continue our reconstruction of the Enochian calendar with 7 leap days every seven years, by adding 7 extra days every forty-nine years. Now calculate the number of days in the Jubilee cycle.

2555…(1st week years 1-7)
2555…(2nd week yrs 8-14)
2555…(3rd week yrs 15-21)
2555…(4th week yrs 22-28)
2555…(5th week yrs 29-35)
2555…(6th week yrs 36-42)
2555…(7th week yrs 43-49)
plus 7…(added on 49th year)
= 17892…(total number of days)

Now, please divide 17892 days by forty-nine years. The figure is now equivalent to 365.14 days per year! Wow, pretty close isn’t it?

I hasten to add, that I am not insisting that the original Hebrew calendar was done this way. As Patrick pointed out in post #2, the biblical calendar was luni-solar, whereas this one is solar. Where we do differ however, is that the Qumran community could have made this calendar work quite efficiently for several hundred years, without the seasons drifting, and without compromising their special Sabbath formula.

 

[steve53]

Josephus is very clear on this and he should be and, in fact, IS the default authority on the Jewish calendar and the timing of the festivals during the time of Christ.

You do not take into consideration the over-riding importance of the lunar cycle. That is why the Jews based their year upon it.

When the lunar calendar went out of adjustment with the solar calendar an entire month would be added in order to maintain that the first of every month is a new moon and the 14th or 15th of every month would be a full moon. The lunar year was out of adjustment by 10 or 11 days every year, so every three years a new month, a full lunar cycle, would be inserted- this called Afar II.

And, as I posted earlier, the length of the days were fairly constant through the entire year in that part of the world. The growing season was more dependent upon weather patterns which are admittedly are ultimately dependent upon the yearly variation of the length of the day in other parts of the world, but in the case of the Middle East practically speaking a 10 day shortfall compared to the solar year was not a deal breaker.

Your scholarship and persistence in investigating the “Enoch Calendar” is to be admired but I do not think your conclusions are merited by the evidence you present.

 

[BartholomewB]

Cyberseeker, thank you for taking the trouble to provide so much additional detail. As I said earlier, my only source of information was Allegro’s book on the Dead Sea Scrolls. The idea of a calendar based on an unvarying 364-day year seemed to me, when I read it, rather difficult to believe, but it wasn’t a central issue for his book and I didn’t see any reason to attempt to find out any more about it.

The underlying question, I think, is this: In Jewish use, whether before, during, or after the Babylonian Exile, was any calendar ever used that was not strictly lunar, in the sense that each month began at the New Moon? We have to allow, of course, for the possibility of occasional miscalculations and adjustments, so that some months might begin a day too early or a day too late. But was there ever a Jewish calendar resembling our present-day Gregorian calendar, or the earlier Julian calendar, in which the 12-month cycle has been deliberately cut adrift from the lunar cycle? I mean, was there ever a calendar of that kind in official use, under the authority of the priesthood, the Temple, the kings of Judah and Israel, the Hasmoneans, the Herods, or anybody else? I tend to suspect that the answer is No, but I have no proof of that.

Thanks
Bart

 

[Cyberseeker]

steve53:

Josephus is very clear on this and he should be and, in fact, IS the default authority on the Jewish calendar and the timing of the festivals during the time of Christ.

Josephus was from Jewish ruling class. Yes, he would have disapproved of the Enochian calendar, and supported the official (albeit hellenised) one.

steve53:

You do not take into consideration the over-riding importance of the lunar cycle. That is why the Jews based their year upon it.

We are talking about the Qumran people, not me. Yes, the weakness in their system was their failure to tie it back into the lunar months.

steve53:

Your scholarship and persistence in investigating the “Enoch Calendar” is to be admired but I do not think your conclusions are merited by the evidence you present.

Please realise, I do not actually agree with the calendar proposed by the Dead Sea scrolls, except to say that it was proposed. My point in starting this topic was only to discuss their theory, and how it might have backgrounded the times of John the Baptist.

My emphasis is that, the ‘official’ calendar had been interfered with, and there was a dispute about it. **The DSS people were trying to recover the original Hebrew calendar! **Just because they were not getting it right is not the issue. They knew there was one to be found, and they knew it had to tie into the Sabbath cycles.

When I noticed how the astronomical scrolls were an attempt to find an earlier (lost) calendar, I began looking for it myself. If you want to see my reconstruction of an ancient Hebrew calendar, please go here:

 

[Cyberseeker]

BartholomewB:

The underlying question, I think, is this: In Jewish use, whether before, during, or after the Babylonian Exile, was any calendar ever used that was not strictly lunar, in the sense that each month began at the New Moon? … was there ever a Jewish calendar resembling our present-day Gregorian calendar, or the earlier Julian calendar, in which the 12-month cycle has been deliberately cut adrift from the lunar cycle? I mean, was there ever a calendar of that kind in official use, under the authority of the priesthood, the Temple, the kings of Judah and Israel, the Hasmoneans, the Herods, or anybody else? I tend to suspect that the answer is No, but I have no proof of that.

Thanks
Bart

There is a book called ‘Calendar and Chronology, Jewish and Christian’ by Roger Beckwith which is about as detailed as we can find on this subject. He says the 364-day calendar goes back to about 250 BC and comes from the Essenes. Im not sure that we can be adamant about this, but it seems possible that this sect (or perhaps a group within it) followed it.

That is why I think intercalary days must have been added as described in my previous post. 250 years would lose over 300 days if no adjustment had been made over such a long time. Obviously the DSS calendar was in operation at the time of John the Baptist. Perhaps it was only operating for a few decades with no intercalary days being added. However, Im inclined to agree with Beckwith that it went for longer, albeit within a minority group.

 

[BartholomewB]

There is a book called ‘Calendar and Chronology, Jewish and Christian’ by Roger Beckwith which is about as detailed as we can find on this subject. He says the 364-day calendar goes back to about 250 BC and comes from the Essenes. Im not sure that we can be adamant about this, but it seems possible that this sect (or perhaps a group within it) followed it.

That is why I think intercalary days must have been added as described in my previous post. 250 years would lose over 300 days if no adjustment had been made over such a long time. Obviously the DSS calendar was in operation at the time of John the Baptist. Perhaps it was only operating for a few decades with no intercalary days being added. However, Im inclined to agree with Beckwith that it went for longer, albeit within a minority group.

Okay, Cyberseeker, I think that puts us all square. A calendar of a non-lunar type, based on a notional solar year that may or may not have been 100 percent accurate, seems to have been in use at some period, among some Jewish communities, but it was never the official calendar authorized for general use by the Jewish religious or secular rulers in Jerusalem. That is where we now stand, I think.

The Greek lunar calendar seems to have been, technically speaking, a very good calendar indeed, in terms of accuracy and reliability, particularly after the introduction of the Calippic cycle based on the approximation 76 solar years = 940 lunar months = 27,759 days. We never seem to hear of Pontius Pilate or any other imperial governors in the East attempting to impose the Julian calendar by force, which I imagine they would have been able to do easily enough if they’d thought it would be an improvement.

It also emerges quite clearly from the Gospels that the Temple authorities had no quarrel with keeping 14 Nisan as Passover and so on with the Day of Atonement and the other major festivals. So I’m still left wondering what it was, exactly, that sparked – according to Allegro – the outburst of “hatred” against the switch to the Greek lunar calendar. Just resistance to change, perhaps, like British resistance to metrication from the 1970s onward?

 

[BartholomewB]

Cyberseeke and other posters here at CAF:

I’ve been having computer problems for the last week or so. There have been long periods when I simply haven’t been able to get into the internet at all. Yesterday and today it’s been a bit better, but it can always happen again, and all I can do is ask you to be patient! I’ll keep in touch as often as I possibly can.

Regards
Bart

 

[Cyberseeker]

BartholomewB:

So I’m still left wondering what it was, exactly, that sparked – according to Allegro – the outburst of “hatred” against the switch to the Greek lunar calendar. Just resistance to change, perhaps …

As you say, the Greek system works well, but it is not what God gave to Moses. So, from the Essene point of view, it was more than just ‘change’ ; it was interference with something that was ‘holy’ . That would be why they were so angry.

For most people it probably wasn’t a problem. The new system kept time and that was all that mattered. However, when we study the Shemitah through the Hasmonean period, we notice that Sabbatical years were regularly accompanied with famine. The reason for this was because the start-point of the Sabbath years had been switched from Nisan to Tishri. Consequently the planting season (tishri-bul) had to be deferred till the following year.

The other problem pertained to the Jubilee. It got lost in the New Year change.