Tradition and Innovation
in the Calendar of Jubilees
Jonathan Ben-Dov
The calendar in the book of Jubilees keeps attracting great scholarly atten
tion. The present paper will focus on some points raised in recent studies
and will try to suggest additional ideas for the assessment of the calendar of
Jubilees.^1 The discussion benefits from developments in the study of the
364-day calendar tradition (364DCT), from the full publication of the
calendrical scrolls from Qumran, as well as from a wider scope with regard
to the Book of Astronomy in 1 Enoch (AB).^2
The book of Jubilees is never fully explicit about the calendar em
ployed in it. Strangely, Jubilees is more a book on chronology than a book on
calendars. Although calendrical details are mentioned in the book, they are
explicit only in chap. 6, while the main effort of the author in his recurrent
remarks on timing concentrates on matters of chronology. Thus, quite a few
elements of the calendar in Jubilees are left unsettled.
The book relates to a year of 364 days (364DY), as stated explicitly in
6:32. The same figure is attested elsewhere in Enochic and Qumranic litera
ture: 1 En 74:12; 82:6; 4Q252 Commentary on Genesis^3 II 2-3; 4Q394 3-7 i 1-3;
- A fuller discussion is included in my doctoral dissertation, now prepared for publi
cation as: Head of All Years: Studies in Qumran Calendars and Astronomy in Their Ancient
Context. When preparing this article, I benefited from discussions with Mrs. Atar Livneh, a
graduate student at the University of Haifa working on Jubilees at Qumran. - U. Glessmer, "Calendars in the Qumran Scrolls," in The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty
Years, ed. P. W. Flint and J. C. VanderKam (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 213-78; S. Talmon, J. Ben-Dov,
and U. Glessmer, Qumran Cave4.VI: Calendrical Texts, DJD 21 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001).