calendar in 37 and 66CEcould have been only fortuitous, since Judaea had
little to do with Parthian Babylonia in this period, and the Seleucid kingdom
was long extinct; the 19-year cycle, moreover, does not appear in Jewish
sources before the eighth centuryCE.^60
The same may be argued with regard to Nabataea when the kingdom
became a Roman province (the province of Arabia) in 106CE, and when the
local lunar calendar—with Babylonian month-names—appears to have been
in line with the Babylonian calendar:^61 the extent to which conformity to the
Babylonian 19-year cycle was consistently or deliberately observed until then
in Nabataea is impossible to know. In Macedonia of the second–third cen-
turiesCE, the local Macedonian calendar—which had remained lunar until this
period—seems also to have conformed to the Seleucid Macedonian and
Babylonian calendars;^62 but it cannot be assumed that Macedonia had been
continuously and deliberately following the Babylonian 19-year cycle, when its
political connection to distant Babylonia hardly outlasted Alexander’s reign
(which ended in 323BCE), and when—by the second-third centuriesCE—the
Seleucid Empire had long ceased to exist.
Intercalation in post-Seleucid statesAs we have demonstrated, in the Parthian kingdom and many other post-
Seleucid kingdoms and cities of Asia Minor and the Near East, the calendar
sometimes deviated by several months from the Seleucid Macedonian and
Babylonian calendars. These deviations cannot be attributed to ignorance or
error, for it should have been very easy for post-Seleucid states to follow the
fixed, Babylonian 19-year cycle of intercalations, and to correct themselves in
the unlikely event that errors were made. These deviations were clearly the
result of deliberate decisions by the post-Seleucid states, in a political context
of independence from the Seleucid Empire and consequent freedom to divert
from its official imperial calendar (Bickerman 1968: 25). Indeed, deviation
from the Seleucid calendar may have been intended as a positive statement of
political independence from Babylonia and (whatever was left of ) the Seleucid
Empire.^63 This is implicit at least in Hasmonaean Judaea, as the books of 1 and
(^60) Ibid. 196–7. The 19-year cycle is mentioned earlier in the Slavonic Enoch (16: 5–8), but the
date and provenance of this passage is very unclear (Stern 2001: 9–10). On the compatibility of
the Judaean calendar with the Babylonian in 37 and 66 61 CE, see further below, n. 67.
The Nabataean (lunar) Nisan began in 106CEshortly after the vernal equinox, in line with
the Babylonian calendar: see discussion below, near the end of 62 }3.
e.g. with Xandikos around the time of March (corresponding to the last month of
the Babylonian year), or Hyperbertaios equated with September. See Ch. 6 n. 8. 63
This explanation applies less to the city of Antioch, which did not ever become‘indepen-
dent’from the Seleucid Empire but rather remained one of its capitals until the fall of the Empire
in 65– 62 BCE.
Fragmentation: Babylonian and Julian Calendars 253