groups representative of‘mainstream’Judaea (more on this below), but either
way, Judaea was not renowned in Antiquity for knowledge of either astronomy
or mathematics. This may be taken as another indication, intimated already in
earlier chapters, that calendars have less to do with expert scientific knowl-
edge, astronomical or mathematical, than is commonly assumed.
The origins of the 364-day calendarThe origins of the Judaean 364-day calendar are very contentious. Most
influential has been the theory of Jaubert, who claimed it was the priestly
calendar of ancient Israel. According to Jaubert, this is the calendar assumed
in the late, priestly narratives of the Hebrew Bible; it remained the official,
cultic calendar of the Jerusalem Temple until the end of Hellenistic rule; and
after its downfall at the beginning of the second centuryBCE, its observance
was still advocated in the books of Enoch and Jubilees.^105 In actual fact, the
Hebrew Bible does not explain how its calendar is to be reckoned; Jaubert’s
theory, therefore, is no more than a hypothesis. It rests on thefinding that if
one assumes a 364-day calendar, in which the relationship between dates and
weekdays is constant, dated events in Biblical narratives consistently occur
only on‘significant’weekdays—Sunday,Wednesday, and Friday, which cor-
respond to the weekdays when, in the 364-day calendar, the Biblical festivals
occur—and significantly (almost) never on the Sabbath. The fallacy of this
theory, however, has been subsequently exposed in a number of independent
studies.Wacholder, in particular, has shown that the pattern of event dates in
the Hebrew Bible (which Jaubert exploits) can be explained entirely as a
literary predilection, in the Bible, for‘round’or other standard numbers.^106
In historical terms, it is far more likely that the calendar of ancient Israel
was lunar, as everywhere else in the ancient Near East. The noted silence of the
Hebrew Bible with regard to the workings of its calendar—even though it
frequently gives precise dates for festivals and narrated events—is highly
significant in this respect. It is precisely because all calendars in the Near
East were lunar that the Hebrew Bible did not need to specify that its own was
too. A description of the calendar would only have been necessary if its
calendar had differed from the Near Eastern lunar norm. The 364-day calen-
dar is unlikely, therefore, to have early Israelite origins. There is no reason to
(^105) See especially Jaubert (1957a); also ead. (1953), (1957b).
(^106) Wacholder andWacholder (1995). More specific elements of Jaubert’s theory have been
criticized and/or refuted by J. M. Baumgarten (1962), (1987) 76, Beckwith (1996) 101–4, and
Ravid (2003). Baumgarten (1962) points out that the weekdays of these dated events are never
mentioned in Jubilees, which suggests that they were not regarded as significant. See further
below, n. 117.
TheRise of the Fixed Calendars 197