Calendars in Antiquity. Empires, States, and Societies

schematization andfixation of calendars was part of a general trend beginning
in the great empires of the ancient Near East and culminating with the Julian
calendar of the Roman Empire. The schematization andfixation of Jewish
calendars in late Antiquity was clearly also part, somehow, of this macro-
historical trend.

The Diaspora: subversiveness, hybridity, and subculture

In most parts of the Graeco-Roman world, where the Julian or Julianized
calendars had become dominant, the Jews’adherence to a lunar calendar
would have appeared unusual. Lunar calendars only survived in provinces of
the Roman Empire where, it so happens, Jewish communities were sparse:
Greece, Macedonia, Moesia (see above, n. 8), and possibly also Gaul. But
where the Jewish Diaspora was mainly concentrated, in Asia Minor, Syria,
Egypt, Libya, and Italy, the dominant calendars were all non-lunar. In these
provinces, the Jewish lunar calendar would have been quite distinctive.^119
The distinctiveness of the Jewish calendar in the Diaspora contextfinds
vivid expression in a passage of Philo of Alexandria (first centuryCE), referring
no doubt to the Egyptians of his own day as much as to those of the biblical
narrative:

But not all (peoples) treat the months and years alike, but some...reckon by the

sun, others by the moon...Wherefore (Scripture) has added,‘This month (shall

be) to you the beginning’[Exod. 12: 2]...lest they follow the Egyptians, with

whom they are mixed, and be seduced by the customs of the land in which they

dwell.^120

Not only Jewish and Egyptian calendars differ from one another, but the Jews
are somehow forbidden by Scripture from changing their calendar and imitat-
ing or adopting the Egyptian ways. This passage expresses, if only implicitly,
the significance that a lunar calendar may have had for the identity of the
Jewish Alexandrian community: the calendar had become to the Jews, effec-
tively, a statement of their distinct identity.
Elsewhere I have argued that forfirst-century Jews, maintenance of a lunar
calendar and resistance to Julianization—in contrast with almost all other

(^119) See ibid. 42–6. A possible exception might be the border city of Palmyra (where the Jewish
community is well represented in inscriptions), if indeed its official calendar was still lunar: see
above, n. 6. 120
Philo,Quaestiones ad Exodum1. 1 (Marcus 1953: 4–5), with fuller citation and discussion
in Stern (2001) 33–4. Philo’s implicit reference to the Egyptian calendar as solar is possibly a
reflection of its adaptation, a few decades before he was writing, to the Julian calendar. The
distinctiveness of the Jewish calendar as lunar is also noted in rabbinic sources from the 3rd–6th
cc. (ibid. 45), but their context was Palestine, where the situation was far more complex, as will be
discussed below, rather than the Diaspora in the Roman Empire.
336 Calendars in Antiquity