Enoch and the Mosaic Torah- The Evidence of Jubilees

Jubilees and the Samaritan Tradition

years of human history before the eschaton is not spelled out in Jubilees,
which means that we cannot be certain it existed for the writer of that book.
But there is a possible parallel here.

Calendar

Along with chronology, both Jubilees and the Asatir are concerned about the
calendar. Jubilees states as follows:

6 :3oAll the days of the commandments will be 52 weeks of days; (they will

make) the entire year complete. 6 :3iSo it has been engraved and ordained

on the heavenly tablets. One is not allowed to transgress a single year,

year by year. 6 :32Now you command the Israelites to keep the years in this

number — 364 days. Then the year will be complete and it will not dis­

turb its time from its days or from its festivals because everything will

happen in harmony with their testimony.... 6 :36There will be people

who carefully observe the moon with lunar observations because it is

corrupt (with respect to) the seasons and is early from year to year by

ten days.

As is well known, Jubilees followed a solar calendar of 364 days (slightly
short of the true solar year of about 365.25 days) that could conveniently be
divided into 52 weeks and four quarters of 13 weeks (91 days) each. The lunar
calendar was specifically rejected.
The details of the Samaritan calendar are not easily gleaned from the
Asatir or many other Samaritan documents, but what soon becomes clear is
that the Samaritans followed a luni-solar calendar, i.e., a calendar in which
each month is determined by the phases of the moon but in which the lunar
year is regularly adjusted to bring it into line with the solar year. What this
means in practice is that a thirteenth month is intercalated every two or
three years, so that over a period of almost exactly nineteen years, the lunar
and solar cycles come into alignment. It is the same principle as the Jewish
calendar,^13 including use of the Metonic cycle and the Julian year. Whereas
the modern Jewish calendar is now calculated, the principles of the Samari­
tan calendar have been a carefully guarded secret; however, there is evidence

13. For more details, see S. Stern, Calendar and Community: A History of the Jewish
    Calendar 2nd Century BCE-ioth Century CE (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).