To sustain this theory, it will be necessary to account for the differences
between the Egyptian 365-day and the Judaean 364-day calendars, and above
all, why the Egyptian year may have been reduced in Judaea by one day.
The 364-day calendar could be interpreted, in various ways, as a Judaization of
the 365-day Egyptian calendar. Mention has been made above of the advan-
tage, from a Jewish perspective, of a year-length of 364 days dividable by seven,
making it 52 whole weeks. In the context of the book of Enoch, where the
notion of weeks is largely ignored, the reduction of the Egyptian year to 364
days could have been intended instead to obtain a multiple of four, i.e. a year
dividable into four equal seasons. The notion of four seasons was alien to
Egyptian tradition, where the year counted only three seasons, but it is
prominent in the astronomical scheme of 1 Enoch (e.g. 82: 4, 11–20, and
implicitly in ch. 72) as well as in Babylonian astronomy (e.g. MUL.APIN). The
364-year could thus be seen, in Enoch, as a compromise between the 365-day
year of the Egyptian calendar and the quadripartite year of Babylonian
astronomical tradition.
Another way in which the 364-day calendar may be interpreted as a Jewish
modification of the Egyptian calendar is that the Jews may have objected to the
latter’sfive epagomenal days. These days may have been regarded as anoma-
lous (because outside the sequence of months) or as religiously objectionable
(because they were celebrated in Egypt as the‘birth of the gods’, a highlight of
the ritual year; Borghouts 1986). This would explain why, in the Jewish 364-
day calendar, the epagomenal days were relocated to the four cardinal points
of the year (equinoxes and solstices), and why they were consequently reduced
fromfive to four.
The relationship between the Egyptian 365-day and the Judaean 364-day
calendarsfinds further support from the simple fact—which again, has not
been given sufficient notice—that the 364-day calendar makes itsfirst appear-
ance in the late third centuryBCE(in the book of Enoch), precisely when
Judaea was under Ptolemaic rule.^115 This seems more than a mere coincidence.
(^115) This dating of the Astronomical Enoch is Milik’s (1976: 7, 273), based on an Enoch
fragment from Qumran (4QEnastra= 4Q208) which he dated to the late 3rd–early 2nd c.BCE,
and which implied that the original composition was somewhat earlier, presumably in the 3rd c.
BCE(see also Schürer 1973–87: iii. 254–6; E. C. J. Tigchelaar and F. García Martínez in Pfannet al.
2000: 95–171, esp. 106). However, Milik’s dating of 4Q208 was only palaeographical, and thus
may be treated as somewhat conjectural. Since then,^14 C analysis of 4Q208 has suggested a later
dating, i.e. (according to the calibration in Jullet al.1995: 14) either between 166 and 102BCEor
between 182 and 92BCE, or better (according to the more recent calibration in Doudna 1999: 470)
either between 167 and 53BCEor between 172 and 48BCE(with an intercept in 100BCE). As
Doudna (1999) 438 explains, any date within these ranges is equally possible, although there is a
slightly higher probability at the intercept. These results suggest, therefore, that the fragment
could belong to any time between the second quarter of the 2nd c.BCEand the mid-1st c.BCE, thus
considerably later than Milik’s dating; which opens up, in turn, the possibility that this work was
composed in Judaea’s post-Ptolemaic period (the need to redate this fragment on the basis of^14 C
is surprisingly ignored by Jullet al.as well as by Tigchelaar and García Martínez; on redating the
TheRise of the Fixed Calendars 201