The tone of this passage is clearly derogatory: the institution of this feast is
mentioned together, in this passage, with Jeroboam’s worship of calves—
reminiscent of the early Israelites’sin of the golden calf—and‘devised of his
own heart’is an emphatic indication that his festival was not divinely or-
dained. Indeed, in the festival calendars of the Pentateuch (e.g. Lev. 23, Num.
28 – 9, and Deut. 16) there is no festival in the eighth month. This, together
with the characterization of the eighth month as‘devised in his own heart’,
confirms beyond doubt that the error of Jeroboam was calendrical. It is
unclear in what respect his festival was‘like the feast that is in Judah’, but it
presumably differed in the date. The‘feast that is in Judah’is most likely a
reference to Tabernacles, on the 15th of the seventh month. Jeroboam erred in
holding it one month later, on the eighth.
But the precise meaning of‘the month which he had devised of his own
heart’remains unclear. Some have suggested that Jeroboam was reinstating a
traditional northern Palestinian calendar in which the second harvest festival
was celebrated in the eighth month, thus one month later than in the southern
Judaean calendar (Talmon 1986: 118–23). It is equally possible that after
rebelling against the Davidic dynasty and establishing himself as king in the
North, Jeroboam made an intercalation of one extra month—just as Near
Eastern kings and cities were later to do when they broke loose from Seleucid
rule (see Chapter 5)—with the result that his seventh month, i.e. according to
his own reckoning, corresponded to the eighth month in the Judaean calendar.
Either way (the two explanations are not necessarily mutually exclusive), the
purpose of Jeroboam as presented in this biblical passage would have been to
demonstrate his newly acquired political and religious independence from the
kingdom of Judah.‘Sectarianism’—as defined above—would not be the appro-
priate term in this context; and there is certainly no suggestion of disagreement
about how the calendar was fundamentally structured or reckoned.
Qumran: the 364-day calendarJewish calendar sectarianism is most famously associated with the Qumran
community, whose literature (the‘Dead Sea Scrolls’) is dated to the second
centuryBCE–first centuryCE. The calendar common to the Dead Sea Scrolls is
based on a schematic, non-lunar 364-day year; this peculiar calendar is also
attested in other, contemporary Judaean sources (1 Enoch and Jubilees) and
has been discussed, together with its possible origins, in Chapter 4. 2. In this
chapter I shall consider the possible uses of this calendar in the Qumran
community (or‘sect’), and its relevance—if any—to Qumran sectarianism.^4
(^4) By‘Qumran community’I do not necessarily mean a community located in Qumran, an
ancient settlement north-west of the Dead Sea in the vicinity of which the so-called‘Dead Sea
360 Calendars in Antiquity