- JEWISH CALENDARS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE
Jewish calendars deserve a place of importance in this work. The Jews wrote
more about their calendars, starting from the third centuryBCE, than just about
anyone else in the ancient world until the late Roman period, when extensive
monographs on the Roman calendar and the Christian Easter cycles began
also to appear.^101 Why the Jews gave such literary attention to their calendars
remains unclear. In contrast, the epigraphic display of calendars that was
widely practised among the Romans (the publicly displayedfasti) seems not
to have been adopted—as it was for example by the Gauls of Coligny—by the
Jews of the Graeco-Roman world.^102 Again, the reasons for this remain to be
explained.
The literary sources together with some epigraphic evidence afford us
detailed knowledge of the variety of Jewish calendars in Palestine, Babylonia,
and the Jewish Diaspora in the Roman Empire, although in the Roman period
Jewish calendars were all lunar. In the Diaspora communities in the Roman
Empire, Jewish calendars were only used for the determination of Jewish new
moon and festival dates; Jewish inscriptions and documents are otherwise all
dated according to the local official calendars, e.g. Julian, Alexandrian, or
Greek and Macedonian—with only very few exceptions from the late
Roman period.^103 The use of non-Jewish local calendars was presumably
dictated by the demands of daily business and public life, as well as by the
conventions inherent in the Graeco-Roman‘epigraphic habit’.^104 But the use
by Jews of an entirely different, lunar calendar for cultic purposes—in contrast
with other, pagan cults that normally followed the dates of the local official
calendars—will raise the question of whether it should be interpreted as
‘dissident’.
In areas of Palestine that may have been populated by a Jewish majority
until the end of Antiquity (Judaea and Galilee in particular), the Jewish
calendar was commonly used for more general purposes, such as the dating
(^101) Early Jewish literary sources with extensive descriptions of the calendar include the books
of Enoch, Jubilees, and calendar texts from Qumran (3rd–1st cc.BCE); in late Antiquity (3rd–6th
cc.CE), tractatesRoshHa-Shanah(RH),Sanhedrin(Sanh), and other passages of the Mishnah,
Tosefta, and Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds (abbreviatedm,t,p, andbrespectively). By
contrast, as has been noted in thefirst part of this work, there are surprisingly few literary sources
that present or explain the Egyptian, Babylonian, and Greek calendars in any detail except
Geminus’history of the Greek astronomical calendars:Elem. Astr.8. 26–60. Censorinus’DeDie
Natali 102 is a major monograph on the Roman calendar, but relatively late (3rd c.CE).
All I can point to are the Jewish month-names listed in the Ein Gedi inscription (Levine
1981) and inserted in the zodiac wheel of the Sepphoris synagogue mosaic (Weiss 2005), but
these hardly qualify as calendars.
(^103) These exceptions are the marriage contract of Antinoopolis (417CE: Stern 2001: 137–40) and
perhaps the Catania funerary inscription of 383 104 CE(on which see below).
Stern (2001) 24–7 and n. 105; see also (for Rome) Rüpke (1995) 443–5.
Dissidence and Subversion 331