Calendars in Antiquity. Empires, States, and Societies

Calendars and Qumran sectarianism

The absence of calendar polemics in Qumran sectarian sources (Jubilees
excepted) raises our suspicion that the adoption of a different calendar was
not considered a sufficiently significant issue for the Qumran community to be
defined as separatist or sectarian. However, the formation and maintenance of
a sectarian identity is not necessarily dependent on polemics and rejection of
the outside world. The possible relationship between the 364-day calendar and
Qumran sectarianism needs therefore to be probed further.
Shemaryahu Talmon (1951, 1958) was thefirst to argue that the calendar
was a cornerstone of Qumran’s sectarian‘schism’, and his theory has rarely
been challenged since.^37 It is reiterated in the official edition of the Qumran
calendar texts, where Talmon writes:‘the [calendar] difference caused the
members of the community to abstain from participation in the Temple cult’,
and again:

The discrepancies between the solar and lunar calendrical schedules inevitably

undermined the social order and communal life of Judaism at the height of the

Second Temple period, and effected an unbridgeable gap between the“Commu-

nity of the Renewed Covenant”and its opponents. It may be said that the

calendar controversy was a major cause, possibly thecausa causansof the

Yah:ad’s separation from mainstream Judaism.^38

This position was argued in more detail in his article of 1958, where he
emphasized, quite plausibly, that reasons for the Qumran schism should be
sought in the‘sphere of action’(i.e. religious practices) rather than of ideas,
and went on:

No barrier appears to be more substantial and fraught with heavier consequences

than differences in calendar calculation, to quote the French sociologist

E. Durkheim, since a common calendar‘expresses the rhythm of collective

activities’. An alteration of any one of the dates that regulate the course of the

year inevitably produces a breakup of communal life, impairing the coordination

between the behaviour of man and his fellow, and abolishes that synchronization

of habits and activities which is the foundation of a properly functioning social

order....Whoever does not observe the festivals of the year at the same time as

Jubilees is another significant difference, as lunar elements are frequently included in Qumran
calendar sources; see further Glessmer (1997) 145–58. The relevant passage of Jubilees, 6: 31–8, is
not attested in any of the extant fragments from Qumran, although this is obviously of no
particular significance.

(^37) It is endorsed e.g. by VanderKam (1998) 113–16, with an elaborate historical narrative
(concededly hypothetical) to go with it. Davies (1983) 85 and A. I. Baumgarten (1997) 78, 109 are
alone, to my knowledge, to have challenged Talmon’s theory.
(^38) Talmon, Ben-Dov, and Glessmer (2001) 3, 6.‘Community of the Renewed Covenant’and
Yah:adare both designations of the Qumran community.
372 Calendars in Antiquity