The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls: The ... - josephprestonkirk

SHEMARYAHU TALMON 35
As against this, in his praise of God’s mighty deeds at Creation the
author of Ps 8:3 mentions the moon and the stars, but omits any reference
to the sun:
When I look up at your heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and
the stars set in their place by thee, what is man that you shouldst remember
him.
Again, in Ps 104:19 the moon is explicitly lauded as the divinely
appointed source of the seasonal cycle: “You have made the moon to
mark the seasons.”
The laudation is picked up in Ben-Sira’s description of the role
accorded to the moon at Creation (43:6–8), which is couched in terms
that bring to mind the Covenanters’ vocabulary pertaining to the sun and
the solar calendar:
The moon prescribes the periods, (itôt, (his is) the rule over appointed time
(qēs), and an everlasting sign ()ôt (olam). His is (every) festival (mô(ē d), and
from him (every) feast.
The authors of 1 Enoch and Jubilees never tire of propagating a solar calendar
of 364 days per annum 22 as the exclusively legitimate time schema:
The computation of the days in which the sun goes its course in the sky. It
comes in through a door and rises for thirty days (in each
month)…together with the four which are added to determine the intervals
(in the year) between the four seasons (viz., the four quarters of the
year)…The year is completed in three hundred and sixty-four days (1 En.
82:4–6; cf. 72:32; 74:10, 12, 17; 75:2 et al.).
And all of the days which will be commanded will be fifty-two weeks
of days, and all of them are a complete year.…Command the children of
Israel so that they shall guard the years in this number, three hundred and
sixty-four days, and it will be a complete year (Jub. 6:30–32 et al.).
Concomitantly they disenfranchise the lunar calendar, which caused
Israel to stray from the correct course of times, as God had warned Noah:
All the Israelites will forget and will not find the way of the years. They
will forget the first of the month, the season(s) and the Sabbath(s); they will
err in respect to the entire prescribed pattern of the year…There will be
people who carefully observe the moon…it is corrupt (with respect) to the
seasons…Everyone will join together both holy days with the profane and
22. It has been suggested that this ephemeris had its origin in a Mesopotamian ideal
lunar year of 364 days. See the recent discussion of the matter by Wayne Horowitz,
“The 360 and 364 Day Year in Ancient Mesopotamia,” JANES 24 (1997): 35–44.