The Importance of Knowing the Date
The Book of Jubilees was written round about 200 BCE. For many years nobody knew much about it; there were a few references to it in early Church literature and some Jews in the Middle Ages seem to have heard of it, but generally it was a forgotten book. Then in the middle of the 19th century an almost complete manuscript of Jubilees was found, written in Ge’ez, an ancient Ethiopian tongue. Scholars today believe that the book had been translated into Ge’ez by early Christians from a Greek translation of the original Hebrew. Such a complicated process suggests that the book had once been very popular.
More manuscripts and snippets surfaced after the first was discovered. Then in 1947, when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in a cave at Qumran, the first Hebrew fragments emerged. Their antiquity confirmed that Hebrew had been the original language.
The Book of Jubilees is known as a “rewritten bible”. It retells the bible narrative, from the creation of the world until the time of Moses, adding new events, expanding on many of the original stories and providing additional information. In the first chapter the book claims that the ‘Angel of the Presence’ had dictated it to Moses on Mount Sinai, after he had received the Torah from God. This gives it a sanctity and importance which, the author of the book must have hoped, would encourage readers to take it very seriously.
Like many books written at that time, Jubilees is full of angels and demons; Satan, or Mastema as he is called in Jubilees, appears frequently. After Noah’s flood, God commanded the angels to tie up all the demons. But Mastema managed to do a deal with the Almighty and one-tenth of the demons were left unbound. Mastema and his demons can therefore be blamed for all the bad things that happen in the world. It was Mastema apparently, not God, who encouraged Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, who tried to kill Moses, who encouraged the Egyptians to pursue the fleeing Israelites. But he was also responsible for the tenth plague, for slaying the Egyptian first born. It seems that the author of Jubilees wanted to emphasise that God retains control over Mastema; when something unpleasant needs to be done it is Mastema’s forces of evil who are despatched to do it.
The book is called Jubilees due to the way it divides up history. These days we divide history into centuries - I began this piece by referring to 200 BCE. Jubilees however divides history into periods of 49 years. The author numbers each jubilee as he writes about it. Noah came out of the ark, for example, in the 26th jubilee.
The institution of the jubilee year comes from the bible. According to the book of Leviticus every seven years is to be a sabbatical year and after every seven cycles of 7 years, 49 years in total, there is to be a jubilee year. The number 49 is so significant to the author of the Book of Jubilees, that he sets the whole book into a time frame of 49 jubilees. For the Book of Jubilees, the way the bible counts time is critical.
It is the emphasis on time that paves the way for Jubilees’ radical polemic; its insistence that it is the sun, and not the moon, which determines the passing of the months and the seasons. Unlike Judaism and Islam, but like Christianity, Jubilees follows a solar and not a lunar calendar.
Having a calendar to which everyone subscribes is essential for the smooth running of society. A civilisation in which everyone regularly has a different day off, celebrates bank holidays at different times or starts the academic or financial year on different dates, is a dysfunctional society. One of the principal differences between the Western and Orthodox Christian churches is that they celebrate Christmas and Easter on different dates; it means the two branches of Christianity are rarely cohesive. It is the necessity of conforming to the same calendar which explains why Jews and Muslims living in the west accept the secular calendar, rather their own for day to day events. It’s why in Israel the international calendar takes precedence over its Hebrew counterpart in almost everything, apart from religion.
The Hebrew calendar is a hybrid of the lunar and solar calendars. The months change at the new moon; the years change when the earth is in the same relative position to the sun. Because the lunar month is a little less than 30 days, twelve of them fall short of a year. So periodically we add in an extra month to bring our lunar and solar reckonings into line. Since calendars are so important for the smooth functioning of society, Judaism takes the correct regulation of its calendar very seriously; the Mishnah, the earliest codification of Jewish law, explains in great detail the procedure for confirming the sighting of a new moon.
The author of the book of Jubilees argues fiercely against the lunar calendar. He is adamant that the solar calendar is the correct way to measure time. He disparages those who follow a lunar calendar, arguing that they will end up with a year shorter than it should be, and will never keep the festivals at the right time. Rather than counting twelve new moons, he insists on fixing the year at 364 days. Each month, he writes, is to last 30 days and an additional day is to be added after the 1st, 4th, 7th and 10th months. Having told us that the Book of Jubilees was dictated to Moses by the Angel of the Presence, its author expects us not to deviate from what he tells us about the calendar.
The author of Jubilees was not the only one to argue for a solar rather than a lunar calendar. The sect who lived at Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, also followed a solar calendar. Like Jubilees their months were of 30 days, with an extra day ever three months. Unlike Jubilees though they added one more day to their calendar to make up the correct total of 365 days in a year. Their calendar was mathematically harmonious. Each festival and each new moon fell on the same day each year, always on a Sunday, Wednesday or Friday.
We don’t know who the sect at Qumran were. It is clear though from the documents they left behind that they were a breakaway group who rejected the authority of the Temple in Jerusalem. They demonised the Temple authorities, referred to their own leader as the teacher of righteousness and described the struggle they were engaged in as a battle of light against darkness. We don’t know the details of their quarrel with Jerusalem, but the fact that they retreated to the desert and lived a monastic, isolated life with their own religious hierarchy, laws and calendar suggests that their divisions with the religious mainstream ran deep. Even though they followed the same faith as their opponents, their different calendars kept them apart.
The Qumran sect were not the only ones to disagree with the accepted lunar calendar. The Talmud discusses a group called the Boethusians who also followed a solar calendar. Unlike the Qumran sect they didn’t retreat quietly into the desert to live a monastic life. They actively tried to sabotage the lunar calendar. The rabbinic authorities in Jerusalem used to proclaim the sighting of the new moon to the far flung diaspora in Babylon by lighting a chain of beacons across the hills. Boethusian saboteurs would climb the hills and light the beacons at the wrong time, to confuse and mislead those who kept the lunar calendar.
Calendar disputes have surfaced periodically throughout Jewish history. In the year 922, a technical issue led the religious academies in Babylon and Israel to disagree about a date. The technical issue was minor but the argument was fierce. Angry letters flew back and forth, quarrels broke out, abuse was hurled between one camp and the other. The dispute grew into one about religious authority, about which academy was obliged to defer to the other.
While the argument continued the communities in Babylon and Israel celebrated their festivals on different days. Each school contended that if they followed the opinion of the other they would be eating forbidden bread on the day they had calculated to be Passover. The matter was only resolved when the irascible, argumentative Babylonian scholar Saadia Gaon became involved. He cowed the academy in Israel into submission.
There are new challenges facing the calendar today. In his fascinating book The New American Judaism, Jack Wertheimer hears about someone saying that he and his wife had to attend a wedding on Yom Kippur. “So I’m going to do my fasting thing on Wednesday” he said, “that will be my Yom Kippur”. Given the history of calendar quarrels, an arbitrary free-for-all over when to celebrate religious occasions doesn’t sound like a great idea.