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This "most" is quite arbitrary. And why cave 1, which is quite far away, and not cave 4, which is very close by? I don't think there's a snowflake's chance in hell that any texts were part of a local library. Makes me think of some early 20th c. facility in the local borough. Reading was not a frequent skill, writing (as entailed by a scroll) was even less. The scrolls were not produced locally, so they were imported, but what would make anyone think that they were imported at a different time from all the rest??

MMT does favour a few Sadducee-like rulings against positions which the Pharisees took. The red heifer material also favours the Sadducee position.

The material that we have about the Sadducees all comes from negative sources and almost certainly well after their time, so it is quite untrustworthy. We have nothing similar to the Essene source that Josephus. What we do know about the Sadducees is that they were strongly temple-oriented and that they were the opposition to the Pharisees who would have supported Aristobulus and who en masse died in Pompey's siege of the temple. We have to adduce our information about the Sadducees. Some of the indications we have from later sources are obviously wrong, such as their not believing in angels, yet the Sadducees were torah centred and angels are to be found in Genesis, so they certainly believed in angels. We know however from the temple siege that they were strictly Sabbath adherent, that they were devout to the end, dying at the altar performing their priestly duties. Our views of the Sadducees are too influenced by all the bad press.

The Essenes on the other hand were excluded from the temple, putting much of the material in scrolls in conflict, as that material is pro-temple, pro-priest.

Nevertheless, the division into Sadducee, Pharisee and Essene is a much later one than is reflected in the earliest scrolls. While the Sadducees are a continuation of the priestly party after the loss of the sons of Zadoq (who emigrated to Egypt), the Pharisees may be seen emerging during the latter part of the Hellenistic Crisis with the access of common people to the temple with the knocking down of the wall between priest and Israelite, but there is no trace of the Essenes at all.


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andrewcriddle

The author of Jubilees clearly saw the 354 day year as a departure from Gods will to follow Gentile (eg Seleucid) customs. However this is obviously to some extent polemical, aimed to persuade Torah observant Jews that the 354 day year is ungodly; hence there must have been acceptance of the 354 day year among many Jews who did not regard themselves as in anyway selling out to the Gentiles. Jubilees is at least partly written to convince such Jews that their loyalty to Torah is incompatible with their use of a 354 day year.

(Even accepting that the 354 day year first enters Judaism well after Alexander the Great I'm not sure that it was due to only to Seleucid pressure. As I previously posted, keeping Passover at full moon appears to have been accepted in 2nd century BCE Egypt where Seleucid pressure was not an issue.)


If the 354 day year entered Judaism as a result of Seleucid pressure then one would expect it to be finally officially accepted by the Temple authorities while Seleucid influence was still important. This Seleucid influence gradually diminishes during the 2nd century BCE and becomes negligible during the rule of Simon the Maccabee. It is eventually replaced by Roman control the Romans of course using a solar not a lunar year.

Vanderkam has speculated that the 354 day year was finally officially accepted during the later part of the rule of Jonathan the Maccabee ie 150 BCE or slightly later. This is obviously a guess but is IMO more likely than the acceptance by the Temple of the 354 day year while under Roman not Seleucid influence in the 1st century BCE.
I agree that the Festivals of Unleavened Bread, Weeks and Tabernacles are originally agricultural festivals unrelated to the moon (Passover which was probably originally separate from Unleavened Bread is IMO more doubtful)

In Deuteronomy 16 we have this sort of original pattern for the festivals.

It is less clear that the later pattern in Leviticus 23 is still independent of the moon, at least both Passover and Tabernacles start at the middle of the month ie full moon in a lunar calendar.

Weeks I agree remains non-lunar and it may be significant that the 'Boethusians' (probably the Sadducees) appear to have disagreed with the Pharisees about how precisely to fix its date.

Some have argued that Elephantine Papyri in the 5th century BCE (eg the 'Passover Papyrus') indicate the use of a lunar calendar at that period but this is probably speculative.

My general point is that although it is on the whole probable that the lunar calenadar first enters Judaism after 200 BCE it remains entirely possible that a lunar calendar was introduced two centuries before this.

Andrew Criddle

andrewcriddle

IIUC adding a week every seven years would really mess up the attempt in some of the DSS calendars to keep the lunar months in synch with the year over a 3 year cycle.

A 35 day extra month every 28 years works rather better.

Andrew Criddle

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Attempts at relating the two calendars are in my understanding late, if the mishmarot are of any help. MishC, which contains historical references, tells us about Shelamzion, Hyrcanus and Aemilius. If that document reflects the approximate period of all mishmarot then we are within a decade or so of Pompey's siege. A late accommodation of the lunar calendar need not have considered synchronizing the two.

My interest in the week every seven years and an extra week every 49 years was only in its keeping the calendar up with the solar year.


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If the Babylonian calendar was the secular calendar then it's not strange that at least people in commerce would have adopted it. Taxes would have been paid according to this calendar. Business would have been conducted that way. That would mean that a lot of Jews would have been familiar with it. However, this would have had no effect on the temple, which had a religious commitment to their perfect calendar. We can also imagine that the people of the land used some simple form of solar calendar, such as the one that 364 days was an improvement over. This means that there was likely three calendars in operation at the same time. Egypt was known at times to have had four.

I think you are labouring the content of Jubilees 6. It is clearly in a gentile context, which fits the data we have. That some Jews were confused is only to be expected. But that's no skin of the temple's nose. The temple did its own thing.

I missed the statement about it being accepted in Egypt. Maybe a case of in one eye, out the other ear.

With the return of the conservative priesthood and the rededication of the temple the direct assault by Antiochus IV on the faith and on the calendar would have been staved off cultically. Outside the temple however, there is no reason for the Babylonian calendar to have fallen away. It would have been parallel calendars without much effect at all on the temple. Cultic matters unless changed from the inside are extremely impervious to change.

The opportunity for a change of calendar comes with the ascendency of the Pharisees, but this was only possible when the Sadducees had lost its control of the cultus, ie after 63 BCE. The calendar would have been a sticking point between the two groups and a defining characteristic for the Pharisees. A Roman change of calendar, if it happened rather than using what was current for day to day affairs, would not have had any effect on the Pharisees who had been using it for perhaps a century and who would have been defined by it. As the temple cultus had resisted change, so would the Pharisees.

I don't think the Boethusians were Sadducees, for I see the Sadducees representing the rump of the priesthood after the sons of Zadoq had emigrated. The family of Boethus came from Egypt. Herod had trouble finding a suitable person to be high priest, first trying someone from Babylon, then a member of the family new returned from Egypt Boethus. The priests that we know of who went to Egypt were the sons of Zadoq, so I'm inclined to consider the Boethusians descendents.

Aramaic lingua franca.

Who would have introduced it? Why? Why don't we see it in the Astronomical Book of Enoch?


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andrewcriddle

Ezekiel the Tragedian (Eusebius Praeparatio Evangelica Book 9)
probably an Alexandrian Jew before 100 BCEAristobulus in Alexandria c 150 BCE as quoted by Eusebius in Ecclesiastical History Book 7 chapter 32 from the canons of AnatoliusAndrew Criddle

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Sorry, I've lost concentration here. I thought we were going to be talking about the Essene Hypothesis rather than ploughing through Eusebius. But thanks for the citations of both the Eusebeian Ezekiel the Tragedian and the Eusebian Aristobulus.


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andrewcriddle

I think we're in danger of repeating ourselves if we continue this thread much longer. But do you have specific grounds for regarding Eusebius as an unreliable witness to what Ezekiel and Aristobulus said ?

Andrew Criddle

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I'm not a great fan of literary fragments at best of times. Their use is much more uncontrollable than our analyses of straight literary works. We often have enough material in an author's output to know a little bit about the author. Fragments, for some reason get taken as more valuable despite having less to judge by. It stinks to me.

The value of their testimony if one were able to give validity to them would then need to be analysed under the conditions in which they were written, conditions we don't have.

Then we have problems of dating the statements. Look at what Eusebius says about Aristobulus: he "was chosen among the seventy interpreters of the sacred and divine Hebrew Scriptures by Ptolemy Philadelphus" and doesn't Eusebius take Aristeas to be accurate??

I can't get too enthusiastic about this Egyptian data of yours. It is a far tangent from the topic taken in the effort to give life to the lunar calendar.

You started the thread, showing interest in my statement: "Essenes have nothing to do with the DSS." What happened?


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John A. Broussard

What bothers me is that some of those "straight literary works" seem to be themselves just made up of fragments. E.g., the Matthew gospel.

I sometimes wonder if most of the "Christian" manuscripts we now have available from the 2nd to 4th Centuries C.E. aren't mainly collections of fragments.