of inscriptions and legal or commercial documents.^105 This raises the question
of whether it functioned there as an official (rather than dissident) local
calendar, although its‘official’status would depend on the socio-political
status of those who controlled it, which will be discussed below.^106
Origin, development, changeThe history of Jewish calendars in Antiquity and the early Middle Ages has
been accounted elsewhere in detail (Stern 2001), and only needs a summary
here. The biblical origins of the Jewish calendar are very unclear, as the
Hebrew Bible itself does not specify how its calendar is structured or functions.
However, the calendar of the ancient Israelites is likely to have been lunar, if
only because, as we have seen, all calendars in the ancient world before 500
BCE—with the striking exception of Egypt—were lunar.^107 Under Persian
Achaemenid rule the Jews, like all other people of the Near East, appear to
have adopted the official imperial, Babylonian calendar.^108 But thefirst literary
sources describing the Jewish calendar explicitly and in detail only emerge in
Judaea in the third centuryBCE, and seem to present two calendars in compe-
tition: a lunar calendar—presumably of a Babylonian–Seleucid kind (on which
see Chapter 5)—and the 364-day calendar (see Chapters 4. 2 and 7). By the
first centuryCE, when Qumran literature came to an end, the 364-day calendar
seems to have faded into complete oblivion. From the Roman period onwards,
all Jewish calendars were lunar.^109
A chief characteristic of the Jewish lunar calendars was their tremendous
variety: until the end of Antiquity and still in the early Middle Ages, festivals
such as Passover could often be celebrated at different times from one Jewish
(^105) The Jewish calendar is commonly used in Judaean documents and ostraca from the early
Roman period, and in the 4th–6th cc., in synagogue mosaics (above, n. 102) and the funerary
inscriptions from Zoar in southern Palestine (Stern 2001: 24–5). Note, however, the mention of
‘January’in a fragmentary synagogue mosaic from Beit Shean of the late 5th–early 6th cc.
(Ovadiah and Ovadiah 1987: 33–4 no. 29; Meimaris 1992: 83).
(^106) The only Diaspora community where the Jewish calendar was similarly used for general,
dating purposes was in Babylonia, as attested at least in the Babylonian Talmud (bKetubot
94b–95a, also perhapsbBava Metzia72b end). There, however, the Jewish calendar would have
been very similar to, and perhaps at times indistinguishable from, the local non-Jewish Babylo-
nian calendars, which were lunar and still dominant in the region in the late-antique Sasanian
period (see Ch. 5. 4 and Stern 2004). The nature of and relationship between these calendars is
unfortunately not well documented and will therefore not be discussed in this chapter, but the
issue of‘calendar dissidence’must certainly have been very different there.
(^107) For a refutation of the theory that the biblical calendar was that of the 364-day year, see
Ch. 4. 2.
(^108) This is suggested by the latter books of the Hebrew Bible and the Elephantine archive.
(^109) As confirmed by Philo, Josephus, and Christian and rabbinic sources, as well as some
epigraphic and documentary evidence. For this whole paragraph, see Stern (2001) 2–46.
332 Calendars in Antiquity