Calendar and Community: A History of the Jewish Calendar, 2nd Century B.C.E.-10th Century C.E. (review)

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...