explain why the new moon procedure had to be designed as a judicial trial.
The procedure is bizarre not only in terms of rabbinic reasoning, but also in
comparison with other ancient calendars. For as we have seen throughout this
study, calendar decisions in the ancient world were always made directly by
the political elite or rulers, with or without the help of experts, in the same way
as all political and administrative decisions were made—and not through
procedures borrowed from judicial courts.^167
If an explanation for the judicial, or pseudo-judicial, character of the
rabbinic procedure is to be sought, it must be related to the social status of
rabbis in Roman Palestine. The extent to which the new moon procedure
described in the Mishnah was actually applied in practice by rabbis is open to
discussion, but sources such as the Palestinian Talmud suggest that rabbinic
courts in late Roman Palestine were involved in the determination of the new
moon, and that the procedure they followed closely emulated that of the
Mishnah.^168 The judicial character of these rabbinic courts, I would suggest,
was intended as a statement of dissidence from the political authorities that
normally controlled the calendar. For as I have argued above, the rabbis
needed to legitimize their claim on the Jewish calendar, which in the Hellenis-
tic world and the Roman East would have been the legitimate privilege of city
councils and cities. The rabbis were not city councilors or political rulers, but
they did act as arbiters and judges; a judicial court (as opposed to a city
council) was a social setting in which they regarded themselves, and may
have been regarded by other Jews, as entitled to belong. By defining the new
moon procedure as specifically judicial, the rabbis were able to draw the
calendar into their own space. The judicial procedure was at once a way of
appropriating the Jewish calendar and of delegitimizing the presumably polit-
ical processes employed by the city councils to determine the new moon and
month. In broader terms, the rabbinic calendrical court served for the rabbis
(^167) The variety of methods employed in this context reflect the variety of political systems that
existed in the ancient world. For Athens, reference has been made in Ch. 1 (near n. 22) to the
5th-cBCE‘First fruits’decree (Meiggs and Lewis 1988: no. 73), which suggests that calendar
decisions were taken in the normal way by the Athenianbouleand Assembly. In Rome, the
Republican calendar was controlled by the pontifical college, and constituted one of the many
political processes of theres publica(see discussion in Ch. 4. 3). In the Assyrian kingdom,
decisions about the Babylonian month and intercalation were taken by the king on the basis of
written advice from astronomer-scholars; as everywhere else, there was nothing judicial about
this procedure (see Ch. 2; in this respect, the rabbinic calendar procedure differed considerably
from the Babylonian, 168 paceWacholder andWeisberg 1971).
See above, n. 134 and after n. 148. It is generally unclear whether the Mishnah should be
read as descriptive, prescriptive, or utopian, and even if descriptive, it remains a literary text
which is never more than an interpretation of historical reality. Some elements of the mishnaic
procedure can be reasonably identified as theoretical or imaginary: e.g. the notion that the new
moon decision was disseminated every month throughout Judaea and further to Syria and‘the
whole Diaspora’through beacons or messengers (mRH2: 2–4: see Stern 2001: 162–3, 245).
Dissidence and Subversion 351