represent a division of the priesthood into 24 groups, following 1 Chron. 24:
7 – 18, each course serving for one week in turn in the Jerusalem Temple. In
these calendar texts, accordingly, every week is designated by its serving
priestly course; consequently, the 364-day calendar is expanded into a six-
year cycle, at the end of which the year begins again with the same course.^12
The practical purpose of listing these priestly courses, however, is likely to
have been very limited in the context of the Qumran community, which is not
known for its direct participation in the Jerusalem Temple cult (if anything,
the contrary), and for which knowledge of the course that served every week in
Jerusalem was of limited relevance. It is questionable, besides, whether the
system of priestly courses described in 1 Chronicles was actually practised in
the Jerusalem Temple in the second tofirst centuries BCE, if ever at all.
Although the priestly courses are sufficiently important in the Qumran calen-
dar texts to be listed in full and to restructure the 364-day into a six-year cycle,
their meaning is likely to be only symbolic, expressing perhaps the commu-
nity’s claim over the true Temple cult. The priestly courses, in these texts, may
thus represent an imagined, ideal order of the Temple cult, in the framework
of which, perhaps in some eschatological era, the festivals listed in the same
calendar are to be correctly observed.^13
The idealistic, abstract character of the Qumran calendars is even more
evident from their failure to conform to the sun or the moon. The 364-day
year may have been intended originally as a solar year;^14 but since it is
approximately one and a quarter day shorter than the true (tropical) solar
year of 365¼days, it would not have taken more than a few decades for the
calendar to fall significantly behind the sun and the seasons.^15 The lunar days
that are listed in Qumran calendars fail to keep track of the moon; this is the
(^12) This is because the 364-day year amounts to 52 weeks exactly, which multiplied by six
produces a multiple of 24.
(^13) It has also been suggested that in these calendar texts the priestly courses are brought into
relation with the heavenly bodies (the sun and the moon), and thus become part of an ideal
cosmic order; however, this is to assume that the Qumran calendar was related to the sun and the
moon, whereas in fact there is no explicit evidence of this in the sources, except perhaps for
duqah, which might be a reference to the moon crescent or disk (see below and n. 16). A very
different suggestion has been that in these calendar texts the priestly courses serve only as a
neutral device for naming the weeks; this is possible, though not attested anywhere else. On these
interpretations, see VanderKam (1998) 73–4 and Talmon in Talmon, Ben-Dov, and Glessmer
(2001) 8–13.
(^14) The books of 1 Enoch (72: 32) and implicitly Jubilees (2: 9) refer to the 364-day calendar as
‘solar’; 1 Enoch 74: 12 also implies that it is stellar, and 74: 17—inexplicably—that it is solar and
lunar (I am grateful to Jonathan Ben-Dov for his assistance on this and on other points). Among
the Qumran sources, 1QH 20: 4–9 mentions the Great Light of Heaven (i.e. the sun) and has
been interpreted as a reference to the solar character of the Qumran calendar (see Vermes 1997:
78); however, the sun is only represented in this passage as determining the alternation of day
and night, and besides, it is unclear whether the calendar is referred to in this passage at all.
(^15) This raises the question of whether the 364-day year deserves, in fact, to be called‘solar’
rather than a purely abstract scheme: see Glessmer (1999) 231.
364 Calendars in Antiquity