as a platform for a novel and alternative source of social authority in Jewish
Palestinian society.
Dissidence and normalization in late AntiquityThe dissident, subversive character of the rabbinic calendrical procedure is
likely to have waned after the rabbis’adoption, during the third–fifth centu-
ries, offixed rules that led eventually to the rabbinic calendar’s becoming a
completelyfixed scheme (see above). The multiplication of these rules must
have led at some stage to the realization that empirical new moon sighting and
judicial interrogation of witnesses had become unnecessary and redundant. By
the tenth century, although the calendar seems still to have been determined
annually by a rabbinic court (in spite of having become almost completely
predictable), the judicial procedure is unlikely to have still been practised.^169
This radical, albeit gradual, conversion of the rabbinic calendar from an
empirical andflexible system to a calculated andfixed scheme—comparable
with the evolution of other Jewish calendars in late Antiquity, such as thefixed
scheme attributed to the Jews in the Council of Serdica document of 343CE—
may have been partly the result of Christian influence (i.e. the influence of
fixed, Christian Easter cycles). In the specific case of the rabbinic calendar, it
was more directly the outcome of a demand of Palestinian and Babylonian
rabbinic communities to observe festivals and fasts on exactly the same dates,
and hence to determine the calendar with standard, unitary rules (Stern 2001:
232 – 75). But from a broader perspective, as we have seen in this chapter,
formalization andfixation was a common trend to all subcultural calendars,
whether Gallic, Christian, or Jewish: all ended up assimilating features of the
dominant, official calendars of the Roman Empire (mainly the Julian calen-
dar), and all ended up asfixed calendar schemes.
The period when the rabbinic calendar evolved in this way corresponds,
moreover, to one of decline of the city councils in the Roman Empire, and of
political ascendance of religious leaders such as Christian bishops and Jewish
patriarchs. The adoption of afixed calendar, authoritative without the need for
any legitimizing judicial procedure, reflects perhaps a change in the position
and authority of patriarchs and rabbis in late antique Palestine. The normali-
zation of the rabbinic calendar—from an eccentric, pseudo-judicial procedure
to a stable,fixed scheme—reflects itself, to a certain extent, the late antique
(^169) Determination of calendar dates by a rabbinic court persisted as late as the 10th c.: Stern
(2001) 188–9. But since decisions were taken then on an annual (and not monthly) basis, it is
unlikely that they involved any longer witnesses of the new moon. Note, however, that according
to a text attributed to R. Saadya Gaon, some Rabbanite Jews still carried out the Mishnaic judicial
procedure in this period: Poznański (1898) 267–8, 272–3.
352 Calendars in Antiquity