and the intercalation of only one month in three years are, in lunar astronom-
ical terms, highly inaccurate (as we have seen, for example, in Chapter 2).
Lunar days x andduqahfell behind the moon by one day every six years, hence
by several days within an individual’s lifetime, quickly losing any meaningful
relationship with the real lunar month (Stern 2001: 15). The astronomical,
lunar data that x andduqahmay have been intended to represent bore little
relationship, therefore, with empirical reality: they were purely idealized,
theoretical entities.
Astronomical accuracy mattered less for the lunar days, which did not fulfil
any practical (e.g. liturgical) function within the Qumran calendars, than it did
for the 364-day year. The drift of the year from the sun and seasons, which
accumulated to over one month per 25 years, would have soon caused the
biblical festivals in the Qumran calendars to occur in the wrong agricultural
seasons, with Passover in the winter, the harvest festival in early spring, etc., in
violation of Mosaic Law (see further Chapter 4, near n. 120). This consider-
ation, more than any other, raises the question of whether the 364-day
calendar was ever used in practice, or intended for such use, at Qumran or
in any other community.
Some scholars have suggested that if the 364-day calendar was ever followed
in practice, it would have been abandoned very early on, as soon as its
discrepancy from the seasons became conspicuous or excessive (Beckwith
1992: 461); however, this would not account for the longevity of the 364-day
calendar tradition in literary sources extending from the book of Enoch (third
centuryBCE) through most of the period of Qumran (second-first centuries
BCE). Other scholars have argued that the 364-day calendar could have been
adjusted through regular or occasional intercalations in order to keep up with
the seasons (and they suggest various ways how this could have been done).
However, any intercalation would have disrupted the highly structured six-
year cycle of 364-day years, priestly courses, and lunar days; moreover, this
theory runs counter to the textual evidence, in which intercalation is not even
intimated.^18
A different approach has been to accept the possibility that the calendar
observed at Qumran wandered, like the Egyptian civil calendar, through the
seasons of the year. In Chapter 4, indeed, I have argued that if the 364-day
calendar originated in the Ptolemaic period as a Judaized version of the
ever-recurrent schemes...From then onwards, the Qumran discipline was restricted to sacred
mathematics’(pp. 150–1).
(^18) For a summary of the various intercalation models that have been suggested, see Beckwith
(1970); for a more recent attempt (based on 4Q319, theOtottext), see Glessmer (1996b), (1999:
262 – 8), who emphasizes, however the hypothetical nature of his suggestion (1996b: 156–7). The
hypothesis of intercalation is endorsed by VanderKam (1998) 82–4, 111 and Talmon (Talmon,
Ben-Dov, and Glessmer 2001: 3–6), but correctly refuted byWacholder andWacholder (1995)
28 – 9, 36–7 and Ben-Dov (2008) 210–11, (2008) 18–20.
366 Calendars in Antiquity