to explain why intercalations (in the lunar calendar) must be made every three
years; it certainly does not necessitate or imply a calendar based on this year-
length. It should also be emphasized that the evidence of this passage is at best
only implicit, and thus not the likely source material from which a whole
calendar might have been constructed. Thus the suggestion that this short,
inconsistent, and not at all explicit passage, or some tradition underlying it,
generated the formation of Enoch’s 364-day year-length and calendar is
extremely far-fetched.
The question is rather how 1 Enoch progressed from a 360-day year,
discernable in the earlier layers of the text and ostensibly inherited from
Babylonian astronomical sources such as MUL.APIN, to its own distinctive
364-day year. The addition of four days to the 360-day year lacks justification.
Some has suggested that they were added at the beginning (or end) of each
season for purely ideological reasons, to draw out the importance of the
fourfold division of the year (Ben-Dov 2008: 34–7); but why this division
should have been ideologically important remains to be explained.^112 A year
of 364 days does have the advantage, from a Jewish or biblical perspective, of
being a multiple of seven, thus dividable into 52 weeks exactly, with the New
Year and other festivals occurring annually on the same day of the week. But
although these features are noted and emphasized in the book of Jubilees and
in the Qumran scrolls, the book of Enoch makes hardly any mention of
weekdays or weeks (only briefly in ch. 79).^113 If it is in the book of Enoch
that the 364-day year wasfirst formulated, it would not have been conceived,
infirst instance, as consisting of a whole number of weeks, and this will not
explain, therefore, the addition of four days to the 360-day year.
The origins of the 364-day year need also an explanation in terms of its
intended function. In the book of Enoch, the 364-day calendar serves only an
astronomical purpose: it is a schematic time frame for the annual course of the
sun. In spite of the religious character of this work, and in spite of 1 Enoch’s
strong advocacy for the 364-day year (in 75: 1–2, 82: 4–6), this calendar is
never used for dating the biblical festivals and the Sabbaths or for any other
liturgical purpose (VanderKam 1998: 26). Thisfits well with Babylonian
Further evidence of a 364-day year in Babylonian astronomy is inferred by Horowitz (1994) 94
from a few 7th-c.BCEziqpustar lists (lists of stars at their culmination), but this notion—if the
inference is correct—would still remain only implicit. A division of the circle into 364 parts (as
opposed to 360 degrees, normal in Babylonian astronomy) is implied by one cuneiform text, AO
6478 (see Hunger and Pingree 1989: 143), but this source is marginal to Babylonian astronomy
and not easily reconcilable with it. See Britton (2007) 126.
(^112) The evidence that Ben-Dov (2008) 40–7 adduces for the importance of the four seasons in
Jubilees (the Flood story) and a few passages in Qumran literature is not very strong.
(^113) On the importance of the septenary principle in Jubilees and Qumran sources (also
underlying the pentecontad calendar of the Temple Scroll, 11Q19 xviii f., xxi, on which see
also Stern 2001: 22), see Ben-Dov (2008) 52–67. On 1 Enoch 79: 4, see ibid. 109.
TheRise of the Fixed Calendars 199