cultures (as may have been the case in the Serdica calendar), but rather of
‘horizontal’relations between Jewish and other, local subcultures. For the
Latin (and later Christian) tradition oflunadating which Aurelius Samuel
used constituted itself, as argued above, a dissident subculture in the Roman
West where the official calendar was overwhelmingly Julian. The adoption
of Latin-style lunar reckoning by Jews like Aurelius Samuel represented,
therefore, a form of participation in this broader subculture. Jewish dissidence
in the Roman Empire did not mean isolation from other elements of society
which may have shared common, if subtle, subversive objectives.
Judaea/Palestine: rabbis and city councilsIn Judaea (renamed Palestine in the second centuryCE), in contrast to the
Diaspora, the Jewish lunar calendar was used not only for setting the dates of
Jewish festivals, but also for general purposes such as legal and commercial
documents, and dedicatory and funerary inscriptions. This raises the question
of whether it functioned there as an official local calendar, similarly to the
lunar calendars of the cities of Roman-period Greece; this would have made it
dissident in a much more limited sense than in the context of Jewish Diaspora
communities. The status of the Jewish lunar calendar in Palestine was com-
plex, however, and deserves more detailed investigation.We need to ask who
controlled it, and whose political authority, therefore, it represented.We need
to investigate whether there was a single authority in charge of this calendar,
and whether other, non-Jewish calendars were also simultaneously used.
In the biblical monarchic period the calendar of Israel is likely to have been
controlled by the king; this is implicit, at least, in Jeroboam’s institution of a
festival on the 15th day of an eighth month that he had‘contrived in his heart’
(1 Kgs. 12: 32–3). This all disappeared under the great empires, when as
mentioned above, the Jews appear to have simply adopted the imperial
Babylonian calendar that was set or controlled by the Achaemenid and
Seleucid kings. In the post-Seleucid period, however, control of the calendar
would have naturally passed back into the hands of the Jewish ethnarchs or
kings who were also high priests in the Jerusalem Temple, from the mid-
second to mid-first centuriesBCE.When in 37BCEJudaea came under the rule
of Herod, a non-priestly king, the calendar may have been left in the hands of
the high priest—an arrangement that could then have been maintained
throughout the period of direct Roman rule between 6 and 70CE, when high
priests often assumed political power of some importance.^131 It is also
(^131) Priestly involvement in the Jewish calendar before 70CEis attested inmRH1: 7, albeit in
competition with a rabbinic court: see Kurtstag (1975) and Hezser (1997) 483–4. In the late 3rd c.
CEpriests may still have been competing with rabbis for precedence within the rabbinic
Dissidence and Subversion 341