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

44 WHAT’S INACALENDAR?
for the ensuing Sabbath on which work is also not permitted. Similarly,
in the Covenanter’s solar calendar the Day of Remembrance (New Year’s
Day) and the first day of the Mazzoth Festival are always observed on the
fourth day of the week, whereas in the rabbinic lunar year they will never
fall on one of three workdays, among them, nota bene, the fourth day of
the week, the Mazzoth Festival never on the second, fourth, or sixth day
of the week and New Year’s Day never on the first, fourth, and sixth.
In the mainstream tradition the night of the Seder celebration, which
commemorates the historical Passah (Pesach) lamb ritual in the Jerusalem
Temple, is observed on the eve of the fourteenth day in the first month
as the opening ceremony of the Mazzoth Feast. In distinction, according
to the yah[ad time schema the Passah lamb is to be sacrificed in the afternoon
of the fourteenth as a separate ritual, with the Mazzoth Feast beginning
in the morning of the fifteenth, as explicated in the Temple Scroll
(11QT [= 11Q19] 17.6–11):
On the f]ourteenth of the first month [at twilight] (they shall celebrate) the
Passah of YHWH and shall sacrifice, prior to the evening offering they
shall sacrifice [it, all males] twenty years old and over shall celebrate it and
shall consume it at night in the courtyards of the sanctuary. (Then) they
shall get up early and go each one to his tent.
After a blank at the beginning of the next line, which indicates the opening
of a new paragraph pertaining to the Mazzoth Feast, the text reads:
And on the fifteenth of this month there will be a ho[ly] assembly (and) you
shall not do any work on it. It is the Feast of Mazzoth (over) seven days for
YHWH. 39
The conclusions drawn from this passage in the Temple Scroll gain support
from the restored text of a fragment of another calendrical document
(4Q326) which reads:
In the first (month) on the four[th (day) in it Sabbath,…………………]
on the eleventh in it Sabba[th, on the fourteenth in the Passah on the
third day (of the week), on the fifteenth in it],
the Mazzoth Feast on the four[th] day (of the week), [on the eighteenth in it
Sabbath, on the twenty-fifth in it],
Sabbath, on the twenty-sixth in it the Feast of (the first) g[rain 40
39. Translation by Wilfred G. E. Watson in F. García Martínes, The Dead Sea Scrolls
Translated (Leiden: Brill; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 157, with adjustments to
the Hebrew text published by Elisha Qimron, The Temple Scroll. A Critical Edition with
Extensive Reconstructions (Beer Sheva: Ben-Gurion University Press; Jerusalem: IES,
1996), 27.
40. In other sources (e.g., 4Q321 4 frag. 4.9) this feast is named “Waving of the Omer.”