Early Judaism- A Comprehensive Overview

festivals the nature of the calendar by which they were calculated. In the

priestly portions of the Torah, the months are designated with ordinal

numbers and the days are, of course, numbered as well. But no text indi-

cates whether a solar calendar, a lunar calendar, or a combination of the

two was used as the system in Second Temple times for the very practical

issue of determining when public festivals occurred. Exodus 12:1 identifies

the month of the Passover as the first month of the year; hence, for dating

festivals, a Spring inception of the year was assumed. Psalm 104:19 could be

taken as an indication that lunar considerations were involved in dating

festivals (as they were later): “You have made the moon to mark the sea-

sons [or: the festivals]; the sun knows its time for setting.” But nothing spe-

cific should be inferred from the verse. Sirach 43:6-8, after a section extol-

ling the wonders of the sun, has been adduced as evidence that by the early

second centuryb.c.e.the moon determined festal dates. Note in particular

43:6-7: “It is the moon that marks the changing seasons, governing the

times, their everlasting sign. From the moon comes the sign for festal days,

a light that wanes when it completes its course.” One prominent trait of

1 Enoch72–82,Jubilees,and the sectarian literature from Qumran is the

prominence of a solar year lasting 364 days; the festival dates are deter-

mined according to it.

It is appropriate to append a short reference to synagogues to this sur-

vey of information about the Temple and worship in the land of Israel. It

would seem that having only one temple could prove inconvenient for

those who lived some distance from it, even though the area of Jewish set-

tlement was not very large and a person was not often required to be at the

Temple. Also, the traditional form of sacrificial worship at the Jerusalem

Temple (the only place where it could be effected) may not have met all the

religious needs of Jewish people. Whatever the reasons may have been, at

some point or very gradually in the Second Temple period, synagogues, lo-

cal places for worship and study, began to appear, perhaps at first in the

Diaspora (there are third-century-b.c.e.references from Egypt), but also

in the land of Israel (the earliest evidence is from the first centuryb.c.e.).

The Gospel of Luke documents the presence of a synagogue at Nazareth

and the importance of Scripture reading and exposition in the Sabbath

service there (Luke 4:16-30; notice that 4:15 refers tosynagoguesin Galilee).

Others are known from Herodium, Masada, and Gamla (see fig. 51), and

there are references to synagogues in Jerusalem (e.g., Acts 6:8-9). The syna-

gogue was a place for communal activities (see the Theodotus Inscription

[fig. 24]) including reading, studying, and expositing the Scriptures and

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james c. vanderkam

EERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
Tuesday, October 09, 2012 12:03:53 PM