who calculate’to ensure that the New Year (1 Tishri) and the Day of the
Willow (21 Tishri) did not occur on a Sabbath.‘Calculation’is not normally
associated with the calendar in early rabbinic sources, since the procedure
ascribed to the rabbinic court is based entirely on empirical sightings of the
new moon. This passage suggests, possibly, that other groups unlike the
rabbinic court—rabbis, or perhaps even city councils—determined the calen-
dar on the basis of a calculation, and that R. Simon attempted to exert some
influence on their decisions.^152
In general, it would have been expedient for everyone to reach accommo-
dation and agree on common dates, whether between rabbis and city councils
(as above in the story of R. Yoh:anan, who seems not to question the council’s
decision) or between various rabbinic courts (as when R. Yehoshua bowed to
R. Gamaliel’s authority).^153 But in some cases, disagreement and diversity
could have remained. Epigraphic evidence of dates diverging from the rabbin-
ic calendar has been found, in Palestine, in the fourth–sixth-century Jewish
funerary inscriptions of Zoar. In this southern city, the Christian community
used the Julianized calendar of the province of Arabia, but the Jews reckoned a
lunar calendar that differed from that of contemporary rabbis.^154
The emerging picture, therefore, is that the destruction of the Jerusalem
Temple and collapse of the high priesthood in 70CEled to the fragmentation
and, one could call it,‘diasporization’of the Palestinian Jewish communities.
This had a direct effect on the Jewish calendar. Control of the calendar was
taken over by competing bodies such as city councils, individual rabbis,
and rabbinic courts, leading at times to calendrical diversity—by contrast
envoy; again, this argument is unwarranted and serves only to support the traditional view of a
single, patriarchal authority over the calendar (this traditional view generally forces Safrai,
throughout the article, to arrange his seemingly conflicting sources into similar artificial,
chronological sequences: thus according to him the mid-2nd-c. meeting in the valley of Rimmon
(pH:agigah3: 1 (78d)) occurredbeforethe court relocated shortly afterwards to Usha (Safrai 1965:
29 etc.).
(^152) pSukkah4: 1 (54b). R. Simon’s instruction differs from the later rabbinic calendar, which
allows the New Year on the Sabbath. In Stern (2001) 172 I presented the alternative argument
that the attribution to R. Simon (late 3rd c., the same sage as mentioned in the previous n.)
should not be considered reliable, especially as this passage is not cited as a saying of R. Simon
but only a report of what he did; if so, the passage reflects rather the context of the late 4th-c.
editorial layer of the Palestinian Talmud, in whose period a calendar calculation was beginning
to supersede the empirical method of the early rabbinic court.
(^153) mRH2: 8–9; see above, n. 150. The pragmatic need to reach accommodation between
conflicting calendars may explain, with regard to the 1st c.CE, why Josephus says surprisingly
nothing on calendar sectarianism (as pointed out in Stern 2001: 22), even though sectarianism is
of much interest to him, and even though Qumran and other sources suggest very strongly the
existence of fundamental disagreements about the calendar (on which see further Ch. 7).
(^154) Stern (2001) 87–98, 146–53, and on the Christian inscriptions, Meimaris and Kritikakou-
Nikolaropoulou (2005), (2008). Some might argue that because of its distance and marginality
from the rabbinic centres in Galilee and western Judaea, the Jewish community in Zoar was an
unusual case (Yizhar Hirshfeld, pers. comm.).
348 Calendars in Antiquity