For decades, scholars have debated whether the Qumran sect associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls actually used its unusual 364-day calendar, or viewed it as more of a theoretical ideal.
Now, a new study published in the Tarbiz Quarterly for Jewish Studies suggests that neither explanation is fully accurate. Instead, Prof. Eshbal Ratzon argues that the community used the calendar for a time before seasonal drift and changing Hasmonean politics prompted them to abandon the system.
A Calender as a Religious Statement
Ratzon, a professor at Tel Aviv University, set out to answer a question that has puzzled scholars for decades. Unlike the approximately 365.25-day solar year, the Qumran calendar consisted of exactly 364 days. The calendar used 364 days because the number divides evenly into 52 seven-day weeks, so every festival would always fall on the same weekday each year.
To the Qumran sect, this order in the calendar demonstrated what they saw as God’s perfect design. They believed God set the calendar at Creation and that people could not change it. This belief clashed with Jerusalem’s religious leaders, whose priests used a lunisolar calendar that most Jewish people followed during the Second Temple period.
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