Calendars in Antiquity. Empires, States, and Societies

plausibility (in this case, astronomical) of their testimony and to ensure that their testimonies are congruent.^160 As in all t ...

explain why the new moon procedure had to be designed as a judicial trial. The procedure is bizarre not only in terms of rabbini ...

as a platform for a novel and alternative source of social authority in Jewish Palestinian society. Dissidence and normalization ...

normalization of the rabbinic movement from politically marginal to main- stream in Jewish society and Judaism. This process of ...

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7 Sectarianism and Heresy: From Qumran Calendars to Christian Easter Controversies This chapter concerns the fragmentation and d ...

religious traits) with peculiar characteristics such as separatism, marginality, and insularity. The concept of‘sect’is therefor ...

Sect and heresy, therefore, are far from synonymous. A sect can only be identified as also a heresy if it is defined in relation ...

This assumption is based on the premise that diversity of calendars cannot be sustained within a single, undivided society. Inde ...

Empirical evidence, which will be examined in detail in this chapter, suggests that in the context of Qumran the calendar had le ...

The tone of this passage is clearly derogatory: the institution of this feast is mentioned together, in this passage, with Jerob ...

The 364-day calendar is implicit throughout Qumran sources, where it is assumed in the narrative of the Flood Story, in the Psal ...

alone, the 364-day year must be identified as the leading calendar in Qumran literature.^8 In this respect, the corpus of Qumran ...

disagreements of this kind did not necessarily entail sectarianism, nor did they necessarily lead to social division and schisms ...

represent a division of the priesthood into 24 groups, following 1 Chron. 24: 7 – 18, each course serving for one week in turn i ...

result of being based not on empirical lunar observations, but on an abstract scheme that appears to have been modelled on the 3 ...

and the intercalation of only one month in three years are, in lunar astronom- ical terms, highly inaccurate (as we have seen, f ...

Egyptian calendar, a wandering calendar may not have been so alien to its users. A few scholars have noted, furthermore, that th ...

the representation of some cosmological (or eschatological?) ideal where solar years, lunar months, priestly weeks, and liturgic ...

Calendar polemics in Qumran sectarian sources We now turn to the question of whether the calendar was treated at Qumran as a pol ...