preoccupations and expectations 203
ninety- one days, and incorporated all sorts of regularities around the
numbers 4, 7 and 13, was in quite widespread use in the last centuries
bce. It is also found in a section of I Enoch, composed probably in the
third century bce, which calls itself ‘the Book about the Motion of the
Heavenly Luminaries’ and contains revelation of astronomical wisdom
to the patriarch Enoch by the angel Uriel:
This is the first law of the luminaries: the luminary (called) the sun has its
emergence through the heavenly gates in the east and its setting through
the western gates of the sky. I saw six gates through which the sun emerges
and six gates through which the sun sets. The moon rises and sets in those
gates and the leaders of the stars with the ones they lead, six in the east and
six in the west, all of them – one directly after the other. There were many
windows on the right and left of those gates.Fragments of this Enoch text, or something similar, were found among
the Dead Sea scrolls, and some of the sectarian scrolls treat the 364- day
year as a divinely ordained system reflecting the true order of the world.
Unlike this calendar, which followed a roughly solar pattern, lunar
time reckoning was more common among Jews: ‘From the moon comes
the sign for Festal days, a light that wanes when it completes its course.’
Both Josephus and Philo presupposed a calendar that operated accord-
ing to the moon, and the early rabbis took it for granted that a month
would start only when the new moon had been observed and confirmed
by appropriate human authorities. Calendrical discrepancies even
between those operating lunar calendars could raise very practical
issues, as we have seen in the differences between Pharisees and Sad-
ducees about the date of festival offerings in the Temple.^6
Vows, Oaths and Asceticism
Speculation about the calendar may perhaps be ascribed to the lack of
clarity on the calendar in biblical texts. The opposite is the case with
vows and oaths, of which the Bible has many examples, while warning
strongly against swearing falsely in God’s name and requiring sacrifices
for failure to uphold an oath, even if the oath was made in error. Even
the biblical discussion of the right of an adult male sometimes to annul
vows and oaths made by his wife or daughter assumes the strength of
such binding utterances.^ Hence the imprecations of Ben Sira in the
second century bce against oaths of any kind: ‘Do not accustom your