Calendar and Community This page intentionally left blank Calendar and Community A History of the Jewish Calendar, Second Century BCE–Tenth Century CE Sacha Stern Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Sacha Stern 2001 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2001 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Data applied for ISBN 0-19-827034-8 Preface Calendar reckoning is not just a technical pursuit: it is fundamental to social interaction and communal life. The calendar provides an essential point of reference for interpersonal relations and time-bound communal activity. It determines how time is lived and utilized in the community, and sometimes shapes the community's distinctive identity. The calendar is also a way of conceptualizing the dimension of time, and hence, of ‘making sense’ of an important facet of human lived experience. This study goes far beyond the technical question of ‘how did the Jewish calendar work?’ It is an attempt to identify the social and historical processes that led to the adoption or rejection of various calendar systems, and to show how calendars could affect relations between various Jewish and non-Jewish communities. The Jewish calendar—or more accurately, Jewish calendars—will thus be studied in the context of other, non-Jewish calendars, as well as in the wider context of Jewish (and non-Jewish) culture and communal life. My contention, indeed, is that calendars are significant to social history. They are not just a technical tool for historians and epigraphists; nor are they merely an intellectual curiosity. Although, I would hope, this work will assist historians and epigraphists in their interpretation of early Jewish datings, this work should also be treated in its own right as a historical study of early Judaism and Jewish communities. A few words about scope. By ‘calendar’ Idonot mean, in this work, the list of annual festivals or of other annual occasions.1 I shall restrict myself entirely to the calendar as time measurement: in particular, how months and years are reckoned. It is in this sense that the term ‘calendar’ will be used throughout this work.2 My period starts around the second century BCE, when the earliest sources on Jewish calendar reckoning first begin to appear. It ends in the 1 This is why the early rabbinic work Megillat Ta anit will barely be mentioned in this study. 2 The question of how dates are recorded in ancient Jewish documents, inscriptions, and literary sources, is also outside the scope of this work. I shall also refrain from investigating how eras are reckoned; ancient eras are based on concepts of history and chronology which deserve a separate study in its own right. vi PREFACE early tenth century, with the calendrical schism between R. Saadya and Ben Meir. This dramatic event led to the finalization of the rabbinic calendar that is still in use today, and that has become standard throughout the Jewish world. Effectively, my period spans the entire history of the Jewish calendar, from its origins to its final form. Although it straddles Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, this period represents, as far as concerns the Jewish calendar, a coherent and unbroken historical continuum. My main theme, or thesis, is that the Jewish calendar gradually evolved in this period from considerable diversity to normative unity. From the second century BCE to the first century CE, solar and lunar calendars are both attested in the sources; whereas from the first century CE the Jewish calendar becomes exclusively lunar. From this point until at least the sixth century CE the lunar calendar was reckoned by different communities in a wide variety of forms. But by the tenth century, at the end of our period, a single lunar calendar had taken shape, that of rabbinic Judaism. This rabbinic calendar may still have been challenged by the Karaites;3 but in the course of time, it was to become universal and standard throughout world Jewry. The evolution of the Jewish calendar reflects, in a sense, a wider historical pattern. To some extent, it epitomizes the gradual development of solidarity and communitas among the Jewish communities of late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, and hence, the development of an increasingly united culture and religion. My chapter division is thematic but also chronological. Ch. 1, ‘Solar and Lunar Calendars’, focuses on the period from the second century BCE to the end of the Roman Empire. I shall attempt to explain how and why the coexistence of solar and lunar calendars in the early part of this period gave way, from the first century CE onwards, to the predominance of the lunar calendar. Attention will be given to the fact that non-Jewish calendars, in the same period, appear to have evolved in the opposite direction. In the context of the Graeco-Roman world, I shall conclude, the lunar calendar became a distinctive marker of Jewish communal identity. Ch. 2, ‘The Intercalation’ (i.e. the addition of a thirteeenth lunar month in the year), and Ch. 3, ‘The New Moon’, will deal with specific aspects of the Jewish lunar calendars that prevailed in the first century 3 As well as by a number of marginal, sectarian groups loosely belonging to the Karaite movement: see al-Qirqisani, The Book of Lights and Watch-Towers, 1. 15–17 (Nemoy 1930: 388–90; Chiesa and Lockwood 1084: 149–51); al-Biruni (1879) 68. PREFACE vii CE and beyond. In these chapters I shall restrict myself to ‘non-rabbinic’ sources, which include Jewish literature and inscriptions, as well as Classical and early Christian sources. Rabbinic sources will be left to Chs. 4–5, because of their abundance; for this reason alone, the rabbinic calendar deserves to be treated as a separate category. It is also appropriate to leave rabbinic sources to later chapters, because they extend till the end of the period under study, whereas non-rabbinic sources do not take us to much later than the sixth century. Non-rabbinic calendars from the earlier period will also provide a useful context against which the peculiarities of the rabbinic calendar will be better understood. Evidence pertaining to non-rabbinic lunar calendars (Chs. 2–3), especially from the first century CE onwards, is extremely sporadic. Nevertheless, some reliable inferences can be made. The conclusion that will emerge from Chs. 2–3 is that calendars were reckoned very differently from one Jewish community to the next, so that festivals could often be observed on totally different dates. Calendrical diversity existed not only in distant Diaspora communities, but also within Palestine itself, such as in the Jewish community of Zoar. The historical implications of this finding are quite considerable. It suggests that as late as the sixth century rabbinic authority in calendrical matters was yet to be established outside the main rabbinic communities. Ch. 4, ‘The Rabbinic Calendar: Development and History’, will trace the development of the rabbinic calendar—so far as it can be established—from Mishnaic origins to the fixed calendar of the late Geonic period that is still in use today. Chapter 5, ‘Calendar and Community: The Emergence of the Normative Jewish Calendar’, is the most interpretative of this study. It will attempt to explain why the rabbinic calendar evolved the way it did. I shall argue that the emergence of a standard, fixed calendar was not the result of persecution or political crisis in the fourth century, as is commonly believed, but rather of the complex relationship between the Palestinian and Babylonian rabbinic communities in the Talmudic and Geonic periods. It is in this chapter that the main thesis of my study will receive its most explicit formulation. I have striven in this work to be as comprehensive as I could be. Some omissions, however, have been consciously and deliberately made. Nothing will be said, for instance, about the Samaritan calendar, for the good viii PREFACE reason that the earliest evidence available on Samaritan calendar reckoning belongs to the twelfth century or later.4 Another omission I have made is the Karaites, whose distinctive calendar might have deserved a whole chapter on its own. My decision not to include such a chapter in this book is largely due, again, to the nature of the evidence: there