Latest Dead Sea scroll published, calendar based on a 364-day year. What use is that?

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BartholomewB

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There’s something I find strange about the latest Dead Sea scroll to have been pieced together, deciphered, translated and published (link below). It confirms what John Allegro wrote in his first book about the scrolls, back in the fifties: the Qumran community used a calendar based on a 364-day year. Since 7 × 52 = 364, their year was exactly 52 weeks long. Every year began on the same day of the week, Wednesday, and festivals such as Passover and Pentecost also invariably fell on the same day of the week.

What I find strange about it is that astronomy was already sufficiently well-developed at the time for everyone to know that 364 days is not the exact duration of the solar year. It’s more than a whole day too short. The calendar would very soon have gotten out of step with the observable seasons. Even if the Qumran community used it for liturgical purposes only, using an astronomically more correct calendar for their agricultural and other secular needs, they would soon have found themselves celebrating Passover before the Spring equinox, which the present-day Jewish calendar is specifically designed to avoid. So why did they do it? What could they hope to gain by persisting in such an obvious error?


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Apologies – the Haaretz article now seems to be behind a paywall. It wasn’t when I looked at it an hour or so ago. Maybe it doesn’t matter – the news has been in all the papers.
 
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The scrolls are important to us from a cultural point of view. I’m not particularly interested in what day of the week anything took place on.
I want to know how they lived, and learn what things were like in that era fro the writers.
 
An interesting thing is that the calendar discrepancy of Qumran may pose a possible solution for the apparent Passover/Last Supper discrepancy between John and the synoptic Gospels.
 
pianistclare said:
The scrolls are important to us from a cultural point of view. I’m not particularly interested in what day of the week anything took place on.
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The new scroll is only about the calendar. Nothing else! The news was in Sunday’s papers.
 
BartholomewB said:
What I find strange about it is that astronomy was already sufficiently well-developed at the time for everyone to know that 364 days is not the exact duration of the solar year.
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Our calendar has 365 days yet it is actually 365.25 days which is why we have a leap year to catch up. Our day technically isn’t 24 hours but 23 hours 56 minutes. We adjust for that too.

The 360 day calendar had five spare days after the winter solstice assigned to feast days.

It is therefore reasonable to suggest that a 364 day calendar also had spare days added at some point, possibly once every seven years so that the year always started on the same day of the week.
 
Well, if enough eons pass, Christmas will be in June, and the people south of the Equator will have a shot at a white Christmas…
 
The purely solar calendar ensures that the festivals always fall on the same day of the week.
Eg Yom kippur would always be on Friday
New Year’s Day will always be on Wednesday. Thatnhas religious implications as you can recall what God did on the fourth day in Genesis.

The calendar is a hot button issue and marks a major difference between the sect and the establishment. This can be seen in the the way the Halakhic letter 4qMMT has the calendar at the beginning followed by a very polemical discourse.

I learned this from the Great Courses. So I’m not an expert and please do your own fact checks if necessary.
 
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TheButler said:
It is therefore reasonable to suggest that a 364 day calendar also had spare days added at some point, possibly once every seven years so that the year always started on the same day of the week.
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That would certainly be an improvement. There are two difficulties, though.

(1) It reduces the discrepancy but doesn’t eliminate it altogether. The Qumran community’s calendar year will no longer be 29.8 hours too short, in comparison with the true mean solar year, but it will still be 5.8 hours too short. It will take six times as long to move Passover back before the Spring equinox, but it will get there eventually.

(2) The newly reconstituted calendar scroll, as far as it has been reported in the media, says nothing about any adjustment to the unchanging 364-day year.
 
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