TIP OF THE DAY 125: Hebrew calendars

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QUESTION: Did ancient Israel have a single calendar?

SOFTWARE: A smart All search on ancient Hebrew calendars led me to appropriate resources.

ANSWER: The answer is no and it matters when exploring the divided kingdom. From Kitchen, K. A. On the Reliability of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2006:

i) Calendars

We have in practice to deal with three distinct calendars: (1) the ancient and Hebrew spring-to-spring calendar (months Nisan to next Nisan), (2) the ancient and Hebrew autumn-to-autumn (“fall”) calendar (months Tishri to next Tishri), and (3) our modern winter-to-winter calendar (months January to December, next January), which we have to overlay upon the old calendars to “translate” them into our current usage. Any attempt to work out the two lines of Hebrew kings, assuming that they both used the same ancient calendar (whether spring/Nisan or autumn/Tishri), soon falls apart, as neither the regnal years nor the synchronisms given between the two kingdoms make sense on this procedure. It is clear that the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah used different calendars, one Nisan to Nisan, the other Tishri to Tishri. But which used which? The two best and most recent scholars on the whole subject, Thiele and Galil, differ on this point. Thiele assigned the Tishri calendar to Judah and the Nisan one to Israel, while Galil did the opposite. Thiele had respectable reasons in the Hebrew text for his choice (Solomon’s count of years, building the temple; Josiah’s enactment of cult reforms; Nehemiah’s [1:1; 2:1] datings), but they are not needfully decisive. Galil produced no clearly independent evidence for his opposite view (his adduction of Jer. 36:22, pp. 9f., proves nothing). Thiele’s choice of calendars leads to consistently one-year-too-high and one-year-too-low figures being given respectively for Israelite years for accession of Judean kings and for Judean years for accession of Israelite kings. He explained this as due to each kingdom citing the other’s years by its own count, not the years the other kingdom actually used. This is possible, but is considered by others complex, if consistent.

On Galil’s choice of calendar, the synchronisms fit, without any other adjustment, which may speak in favor of attributing (with him) a Nisan-based calendar to Judah and a Tishri-based calendar to Israel. But careful examination of the total regnal data (at least for 931–841) shows that Thiele’s treatment of coregencies is to be preferred to Galil’s failure to account for a good number of regnal and synchronistic data. Coregencies tend to reflect political events or threats of such.

From Manasseh (in mid-seventh century) to the end of the Judean monarchy, dates are largely agreed. Between 841 and Hezekiah’s reign, improvements on both Thiele and Galil can be made (cf. below), such that nearly all our data in Kings appear to be reasonably consistent.

(ii) Regnal Years

Again, any attempt to impose the same type of regnal year-count (accession or nonaccession) on both kingdoms overall is doomed to failure, and has to be discarded. Each used either form of year-count under particular circumstances.

But on this both Thiele and Galil are in close agreement; namely, that Israel used nonaccession dating in the tenth and ninth centuries but changed to accession-year dating in the eighth, and that, broadly, Judah held to accession-year dating throughout; here Thiele would attribute a brief use of nonaccessionyear dating under just three kings, which appears justifiable on political grounds (Jehoram, Ahaziah II, Joash under Israelite influence). Thus we assemble a practical dating for these kings in table 3, on the following pages. This table incorporates the fixed dates from external references (Egypt, Assyria, Babylon), here printed in bold figures. It also incorporates the entire corpus of years of reign and of synchronisms from 1-2 Kings (paralleled by Chronicles), nearly all of which fit well together, once the well-established Near Eastern usages are applied. Thiele’s “pattern twelve-thirteen” kind of anomaly and Galil’s dismissals of perfectly good data can now both be discarded. Only very minor miscopying need be assumed in (at most!) barely three instances out of scores of figures, and these may simply be correct figures not yet properly understood.

Coregencies usually have political significance, e.g., to affirm the succession under threats (real or potential) from within or without. And a new king might continue his old year-numbering at his accession to sole power, or choose to make a complete break to affirm that a different regime was now in power. A good example of the latter is Hezekiah starting a new year-numbering after the death of Ahaz, with whose pro-Assyrian policies he clearly disagreed.

Thus we find in Kings a very remarkably preserved royal chronology, mainly very accurate in fine detail, that agrees very closely with the dates given by Mesopotamian and other sources. Such a legacy would, most logically, derive from then-existing archives (such as the “book(s) of the annals of the kings of Judah” and “of Israel” mentioned in Kings), besides archives of administrative, legal, or other documents. It cannot well be the free creation of some much later writer’s imagination that just happens (miraculously!) to coincide almost throughout with the data then preserved only in documents buried inaccessibly in the ruin mounds of Assyrian cities long since abandoned and largely lost to view.[1]

QUESTION: Liturgical/ecclesiastical calendars are overlays on secular calendars, current or historical. What calendars are in use in Jewish and Christian worship?

SOFTWARE: A combination of multiple smart All searches and Perplexity allowed me to built this list. It could be achieved in a single Perplexity query.

ANSWER: The calendars include:

• Gregorian calendar
• Jewish (Hebrew) calendars
• Julian calendar
• Revised Julian calendar
• Coptic calendar
• Ethiopian calendar
• Armenian calendar
• Syriac calendar
• Samaritan calendar
• Enoch calendar (of historical interest)

At this point we are interested in the Hebrew calendars and the Enoch calendar as they were used in biblical times.

QUESTION: Describe the Enochian calendar and where scripture/pseudepigrapha uses it.

SOFTWARE: A smart all search on Enochian finds some useful results which I supplement with Perplexity for the details.

ANSWER: from Barker, Margaret. The Mother of the Lord. Vol. 1. London; New Delhi; New York; Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2012.

As Davies observed: ‘The rest of Judaism is presented as having gone astray in this regard, but not by virtue of a recent [i.e. second century BCE] act of rebellion.’ The Qumran community still sang of ordering their worship ‘in accordance with the laws of the Great Light of heaven’ and they understood Hosea 2:11—‘I will put an end … to her feasts, her new moons, her Sabbaths and all her appointed feasts’—to mean that the festivals of the nations would be abolished. Many people, then, were still using the ancient solar calendar in the time of Jesus. Morgenstern argued that the change from solar to lunisolar calendar was made by Ezra, early in the fifth century BCE, and this may have been the time when the new calendar was finally imposed in Jerusalem. The major changes, however, were made by Josiah, which is why he removed from the temple any signs of sun worship.

The solar calendar did survive in several forms: the P account of Noah, for example, assumes the 30 day month of the solar calendar. Enoch’s Astronomy Book sets out a simple solar calendar, or rather, two solar calendars to which the moon is related. One calendar has twelve months of 30 days, but Enoch’s has an extra day at the end of every three months, entrusted to its own angel, and giving a year of 4x91 days, 364 days, and the argument in the Astronomy Book is for the 364-day calendar. Enoch’s calendar, like that of ‘P’, is spring based: ‘The sun emerges in the first month from the main gate’, and the season is the spring. It is a primitive system, using only the ‘gates’ of the horizon to mark the rising and setting of the sun, and working with seven as the number base. Neugebauer concluded: ‘We are dealing with an extremely primitive level of astronomy, which shows no relation to the sophisticated Babylonian astronomy of the Seleucid period, nor to its Hellenistic Greek sequel. Of course no chronological conclusion should be based on such negative evidence for procedures which might well be of local Palestinian origin, uninfluenced by contemporary scientific achievements elsewhere.’

The Qumran Temple Scroll assumes a solar calendar, as do the fragments of a priestly calendar, and this primitive system accounts for the plan of the ideal temple set out in the Temple Scroll. It may even have depended on the existence of such a temple to establish the fixed points necessary for the calculations[2]

From VanderKam, James C., and Peter W. Flint. The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their Significance for Understanding the Bible, Judaism, Jesus, and Christianity. 1st ed. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002.

We have already seen that 1 Enoch 72–82 describes the workings of a 364-day solar calendar, along with a 354-day lunar arrangement; the details of both were revealed to Enoch by the angel Uriel. Jubilees, unlike 1 Enoch, rejects lunar calendars and staunchly defends a 364-day solar calendar, which, it claims, was revealed to Enoch. The Qumran calendars, most fully visible in about twenty different texts but evident in others, side with 1 Enoch in presenting both a solar calendar (364 days) and a lunar calendar (354 days).[3]

From Perplexity:

The Enoch calendar is an ancient solar calendar described in the pseudepigraphal Book of Enoch. Its key features include:

1. A 364-day year divided into 52 weeks of 7 days each.
2. Four quarters of 91 days, each beginning on a Wednesday.
3. Months of 30, 30, and 31 days in each quarter.
4. No leap year adjustment.

This calendar structure creates a consistent pattern where dates always fall on the same day of the week year after year.

Jewish texts referencing the Enoch calendar include:

1. The Book of Enoch (1 Enoch): Contains detailed descriptions of the calendar.
2. The Book of Jubilees: Mentions a similar 364-day calendar.
3. Dead Sea Scrolls: Some scrolls from Qumran contain references to a comparable calendar system.
4. Pirqei deRabbi Eliezer: While not directly mentioning the Enoch calendar, it attributes calendar-related knowledge to Enoch.

The Enoch calendar is not part of mainstream Jewish practice but has garnered interest among scholars studying ancient Near Eastern timekeeping systems and biblical chronology.