Calendar and Community: A History of the Jewish

Calendar, 2nd Century B.C.E.-10th Century C.E. by

Professor (Rabbi) Sacha Stern (review)
Article in Jewish Quarterly Review 95(4):710-714 · January 2005 with 5 Reads
DOI: 10.1353/jqr.2005.0064

Adler, William. (2005). Calendar and Community: A History of the Jewish Calendar, 2nd Century
B.C.E.-10th Century C.E. (review). Jewish Quarterly Review. 95. 710-714. 10.1353/jqr.2005.0064.
Jewish Quarterly Review 95.4 (2005) 710-714

As the word "community" in the title suggests, Stern's work is more than a technical study of Jewish
calendars. The author also hopes to identify the historical and social processes leading to their
adoption or rejection. Beginning with the second century B.C.E. (when information about the Jewish
calendar first becomes available), Stern tracks the development of the Jewish calendar up to the
time of the schism between R. Saadya and Ben Meir. The organizing argument of the book is that the
emergence in the ninth and tenth centuries of a normative Jewish calendar "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" (p. vi).

To avoid skewing the discussion in favor of the calendar in use today, Stern defers a discussion of the
rabbinic calendar until the final two chapters. The first three chapters of his study deal mainly with
non-rabbinic evidence. His first task is to explain how solar calendars, the existence of which is well
documented in the period of the Second Temple, fell into disuse by the end of the first century C.E.
The deviation of the 364-day solar year from a real solar year makes it unlikely that the solar
calendars evidenced in the Book of Enoch and Qumran were ever anything more than theoretical
constructs. But whether theoretical or real, Jewish solar calendars fell out of favor by the end of the
first century—this, at a time when, under the ascendancy of the Julian calendar, the solar calendar
was becoming increasingly fashionable elsewhere. In Stern's view, the Jewish tilt to a lunar calendar
may thus suggest "a deliberate attempt, on the part of first century Jews, to distinguish themselves
from Roman culture and the increasingly expanding Graeco-Roman world" (p. 45). The lunar
calendar, whose adoption had earlier signified Jewish integration into the dominant Near Eastern
culture, was now a sign of cultural difference.

Without intercalation, the discrepancy between the lunar and solar year inevitably produces
undesirable results, the most conspicuous of which would require the observance of Passover in a
season other than spring. The present-day rabbinic calendar follows a system designed to ensure
that Passover never occurs before the calendrical vernal equinox. But as late as the sixth century,
there was no uniform system of intercalation. In the lunisolar cycles mentioned in Qumran and in
Jewish pseudepigrapha, it is uncertain whether the intercalations were empirical or cyclical. Stern
also doubts that the equinoctial rule was as widely observed in the first century as has sometimes
been postulated. Following a suggestion by E. Schwartz, he proposes that the late celebration of
Passover in the period of the Second Temple was not connected with the equinox at all; it was only
to allow time for pilgrims to reach Jerusalem. Since the destruction of the Temple removed the need
to accommodate the travel plans of pilgrims, Jews after 70 allowed the observance of Passover to
recede to earlier dates in the solar year. Far from a fixed system, calendrical intercalation was simply
an ad hoc expedient designed to compensate for discrepancies that had built up over time. Nor was
there anything approaching a standard calendar, especially one reflecting the rabbinic model. In fact,
Christian writers of the fourth century regularly accuse the Jews of ignoring the equinox. If there was
any rule at all, it was simply to make sure that Passover was celebrated in the month of March. In
Stern's view, all of this vindicates his central point: before the finalization of the rabbinic calendar,
Jewish calendars diverged quite significantly from one community to the next.

Stern's discussion of the various methods for determining the beginning of the month (chapter 3)
argues much the same point. Before the fourth century, Jews marked the beginning of the month
empirically, through observation of the new moon. Because...