A History of Jewish Time.

Calendar and Community: A History of the Jewish Calendar, Second Century BCE--Tenth Century CE. By SACHA STERN. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

"Sod ha-ibbur--the secret of intercalation" is the ancient term designating the mechanics of the Jewish calendar. While the calculation of the Jewish calendar has been public knowledge for over a thousand years, the obscurity implied by this phrase, together with the relative complexity of the calculations, accurately characterizes the attitude of most scholars and laypeople who have tended to veer away from the whole subject. Hence, the subject of the Jewish calendar has been the sub-specialty of a small group of scholars working in relative obscurity.

Nevertheless, a calendar affects religious and secular life every day, month, and year. Calendar change reflects culture change, and the evolution of a calendar can provide insights into the evolution of a culture.

Sacha Stern's new book, Calendar and Community, is an historical approach to the evolution of the Jewish calendar over the course of about 1100 years, from the second century B.C.E. to the tenth century C.E., when the calculated luni-solar Jewish calendar in use today was definitively established. Stern's focus is on the method of time measurement, not the theological or social functions of the weekly sabbath and annual festivals. As Stern notes, most of the major scholarship on the rabbinic period calendar has not been available in English, and scholars such as Bornstien, Jaffe, and Akavia did most of that work in the earlier part of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, through the integration of recent archeological discoveries and a re-evaluation of earlier scholarship and classical textual references (both Jewish and non-Jewish), Stern makes a major contribution toward re-writing the accepted academic and rabbinical histories of the Jewish calendar, as well as making this more available to the English reading public. One of Stern's interesting arguments, for example, is that the meaning of "sod ha-ibbur" as "secret of intercalation" only developed in the eighth century; prior to this, "sod ha-ibbur" referred to the "council of intercalation" that set the rabbinical calendar (190). In general, his work significantly adds to an increasingly complex picture of the Jewish communities that lived during this period.

Stern's major thesis is that "the Jewish calendar gradually evolved in this period from considerable diversity to normative unity" (vi). This is in sharp contrast to the traditional rabbinical view, which has decisively influenced most previous scholarship. This view is that there has always been only one Jewish calendar used by all Jews--the rabbinical lunar calendar. At least since the time of the Second Temple the new month was declared upon the observation of the new lunar crescent, as described in the Mishnah and other Tannaitic sources (Stern cites the Tosefta and halakhic Midrashim). Nevertheless, the rabbinical calendar methodology changed from observation to fixed calculation, ostensibly by the publication of the calendar's rules by Hillel the Patriarch in 358/9 C.E., which was a response to the inability of the calendrical court to continue functioning due to persecution. Most modern scholars, with some modification, have endorsed this rabbinical history, along with the rabbinical view of the importance--and reality--of Jewish calendrical uniformity.

In contrast, Stern shows us that both this presumed unity of Jewish calendrical practice, as well as the date and manner of the shift from observation to calculation, are incorrect and reflect only the imaginings of the rabbinic movement. His most important thesis is that for this thousand-year period, there was no unity of Jewish calendrical practice, and that the unity established by the Middle Ages developed gradually as the rabbinic movement grew. In fact, for Stern, evidence of use and non-use of the rabbinic calendar can be used as a marker of rabbinic hegemony in the Jewish world.

Stern begins the story of calendrical disunity by considering the evidence of various Jewish solar and lunar-based calendars during the first and second centuries B.C.E. This is a good place to start because of the decisive evidence of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which have provided numerous texts describing the use of schematic or calculated calendars which are not based upon the methodology of observation of the new moon described in the Mishnaic texts. Indeed, this has been the "hot spot" in Jewish calendrical scholarship since the first publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls. There has been--and continues to be--vigorous academic argument about these calendars: who used them and when they were used, if ever. The major debate is whether these were utilized only by some marginal "sect" who collected the Dead Sea Scrolls, or whether they were actually used by the priesthood in the Second Temple as the cultic calendar for some period. While Stern's summary of the academic debate is cursory and probably the weakest section of the book, (1) this is not essential to the main thrust of his argument, which concerns the development and use of various lunar calendars by Jews following the destruction of the Second Temple. For Stern, the importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls calendar texts is to show definitively that in the late Second Temple period there is no single "Jewish" calendar, for "both solar and lunar calendars were variously observed, in a relationship that remains somewhat unclear" (4).

By the late first century C.E., all evidence of Jewish use of solar calendars disappears. This is particularly noteworthy because, according to Stern, "whilst the non-Jewish calendars of the Roman Near East were switching from lunar to solar reckonings, the Jewish calendar was evolving, in the very same period, in the opposite direction: in the first century C.E .... the Jews appear to have lost all interest in the solar calendar, so that only the lunar calendar prevailed" (44). Stern proposes that as a result the "lunar calendar (formerly Babylonian, now Jewish) became to the Jews a marker of cultural difference" (45). While Stern does discuss why this happened, it seems likely that the demise of the Jewish solar calendar is probably related to the destruction of Jerusalem, the Second Temple, and Qumran by the Romans during the Jewish War of 70 C.E.

But this development did not lead to calendrical unity. It is well known that the Mishnaic texts describe in elaborate detail a process by which a rabbinical court would take testimony about the appearance of the new moon, declare the new month, and communicate this to the rest of the Jewish world via signal fires and messengers. While there is evidence of a rabbinical calendar court existing in Palestine until at least the ninth century (190)--and at the same time, that the calendar had not yet reached its final form (185)--the nonrabbinic textual and archeological evidence that Stern marshals shows that the court's decrees were not universally heeded. Even in Palestine--but also in Egypt and Asia Minor--it seems that many Jewish communities kept their own calendar, at least until the sixth century. Many of these used a method similar to the observationally determined lunar calendar of the Mishnah, while others used a form of calculation similar to the later rabbinical calendar. As an example, Stern interprets the complaint at the Council of Nicaea (325 C.E.)--one of whose main tasks was to unify Christian observation of Easter and separate it from the Jewish observation of Passover--that the Jews "celebrate Passover twice in the same year" as implying that different Jewish communities used different calendars (84).

Given a lunar calendar system whose key element for deciding the beginning of a month is the appearance of the new moon, only an observational calendar will work; even today, Stern notes, modern astronomers are not able to predict "the criteria required for the moon to become visible" (102) since it is not only the result of planetary motion, but local topography, global location, and weather. This is even a problem today for contemporary Moslems, who continue to use a similar observational procedure to declare each month in their non-intercalated twelve lunar month calendar. (2) The result for Roman period Judaism was that the method of observation led to practical diversity. The actual observation of the new moon would frequently vary from location to location, as would the decision to intercalate an additional month to align the holidays with the seasons (that is, make sure Passover fell in Aviv, the springtime). Thus, Stern suggests that the extent to which the Mishnaic descriptions represent "actual practice in this period, rather than mere theory, is generally difficult to prove" (157). His major finding, of great importance to the study of late Antique Judaism, is that this diversity of calendars "suggests that as late as the sixth century rabbinic authority in calendrical matters was yet to be established outside the main rabbinic communities" (vi).

Nevertheless, it is clear that the rabbis placed great importance on calendrical unity; the problem was that the observational system itself made this almost impossible to achieve. The result, according to Stern, was the slow evolution toward the calculated Jewish calendar, starting in the third century. The major shift was to begin the month at the conjunction of the moon and sun, i.e., when the moon is invisible, rather than the sighting of the first crescent. Given this--along with the use of the average length of the lunation and a number of other rules (which Stern details in an accessible way)--a fully calculated calendar was possible.

Stern rejects the idea that Hillel the Patriarch published the calendar's calculations in 358/9 C.E. On the one hand, Stern believes "Hillel the Patriarch" may have never really existed, since he is first mentioned in texts from the eleventh century and other medieval literature attributes the calculated calendar to other individuals (179). In addition, he reasons that the ostensible "persecution" of the Jews in Palestine was not significant in this period because the archeological discovery of "a large number of monumental Palestinian synagogues dating from the fourth to the sixth centuries suggests a prosperous Jewish community that was far from contemplating destruction" (215). While Stern considers the possibility of Christian influence on Jewish calendars, since the Jewish attempts at standardization on a calculated lunar calendar follow similar efforts by the Church in its dating of Easter, he thinks this had only peripheral impact.

Rather, Stern argues that the development of a calculated calendar was mainly a response to the internal needs of the rabbinic movement. In particular, the purpose was to "ensure that Babylonian rabbis were able to observe the same calendar as in the Land of Israel" (255). The Palestinian rabbis, Stern suggests, were willing to alter their calendar and adopt a fixed methodology in the fourth century in order to secure the Babylonian rabbis' loyalty. This was probably the result of an incremental process over the course of the third and fourth centuries in which "ever-multiplying calendrical rules ... may have simply overrun the old Mishnaic system" (256). The final form of the calculated calendar was settled in the tenth-century dispute between the Babylonian R. Saadya Gaon and the Palestinian R. Ben Meir, in which Saadya rejected Ben Meir's calendar decision as not in keeping with the calculated "four gates" calendar table, which was already widespread at that time.

While Stern notes that as late as the sixth century there is evidence of diversity in Jewish calendar practice, by the tenth century this has disappeared. This is broadly significant, concludes Stern, because 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" (vi). This, he notes, developed in concert with the geographic expansion of the rabbinic community from Palestine to Babylon, Egypt, North Africa, and Europe, "eventually to dominate the whole of world Jewry" (211).

Stern has done a great service in providing this history. While he emphasizes the need to significantly revise our understanding of the development of Jewish and rabbinic culture in this period are pointed out, he has left it to others to explore the social and theological implications of calendar change and its impact on culture. One of these might include investigating further the interrelation of the Christian and Jewish communities of the period, with the calendar as one element of a larger dialectic. Another may be to question why the Mishnaic calendar was observationally based, while the Babylonian calendar it supposedly derived from had already evolved into a calculated calendar based on the 19-year Metonic cycle since the fifth century B.C.E. Indeed, while the preface includes a short summary of the author's theses, when I reached the end I yearned for a non-existent summary statement that would take this next step, or at least point the way. But this is a minor criticism, indeed, of an otherwise important monograph.

NOTES

(1.) For example, in a discussion of the synchronistic calendars Stern states that "most scholars agree that the lunar month begins around the time of the new moon," citing Beckwith, Wise, and Talmon and Knohl who support this position. However, he fails to mention another group of scholars--including Milik, the original publisher of the texts--who claim that the lunar month begins with the full moon. See J. T. Milik, Ten Years of Discovery in the Wilderness of Judaea, translated by J. Strugnell (London: SCM Press, Ltd., 1959), p. 152, n.5; Ben Zion Wacholder and Martin G. Abegg, A Preliminary Edition of the Unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls: The Hebrew and Aramaic Texts from Cave Four. Fascicle One (Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1991), p. 60; Martin G. Abegg, "Does Anyone Really Know What Time it is: A Reexamination of 4Q503 in Light of 4Q317," in The Provo International Conference on the Dead Sea Scrolls: Technological Innovation, New Texts, and Reformulated Issues, edited by Donald W. Parry and Eugene Ulrich, XXX, 396-406 (Boston: Brill, 1999), p. 406; James C. Vanderkam, "Calendrical Texts and the Origins of the Dead Sea Scroll Community," in Methods of Investigations of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Khirbet Qumran Site: Present Realities and Future Prospects, edited by Michael O. Wise, Norma Golb, John J. Collins, and Dennis G. Pardee, 722, 371-388 (New York: The New York Academy of Sciences, 1994), p. 381.

(2.) See, for example, Lisa M. Krieger, "'Moon Sighting' Dispute Clouds Muslim Holiday," San Jose Mercury News, December 13, 2001, pp. 1A, 14A.

Reviewed by RON H. FELDMAN

RON H. FELDMAN edited The Jew as Pariah, a collection of essays by Hannah Arendt on Jewish identity and politics. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate Theological Union working on a dissertation about aspects of ancient Jewish calendars.