לוח קומראן: שחזור היסטורי

This article offers a historical reconstruction of the 364-day calendar associated with theQumran community and reassesses its role in sectarian formation and controversy. Whileearly scholarship—especially Shemaryahu Talmon—viewed the calendar as a central factorin the sectarian split, more recent studies, led by Sacha Stern, have argued that the calendarwas purely theoretical and never implemented in practice, primarily due to its astronomicalinaccuracy and the absence of clear external references to a calendar dispute. Challengingthis view, the article surveys the calendrical corpus from Qumran, including astronomicaltexts, Jubilees, MMT, the Community Rule, and the Pesher Habakkuk, demonstrating thecalendar’s pervasive presence and its polemical significance within sectarian literature. Theanalysis shows that the 364-day calendar structured festival observance, priestly cycles,and long chronological schemata, and that no compelling evidence exists for the use ofalternative calendars at Qumran.The article proposes a historical reconstruction situating the adoption and transformationof the calendar within the political and religious developments of the second and early firstcenturies BCE. The 364-day calendar likely emerged in pre-sectarian intellectual circles andwas adopted during the formative phase of the Qumran movement in the second centuryBCE, when calendrical disagreements contributed to sectarian differentiation and conflictsover Temple authority. In this reconstruction, the calendar functioned initially as a practicaland identity-defining system. However, in the early first century BCE, during a period ofrapprochement between the sect and the Hasmonean ruler Alexander Jannaeus, the social andpolitical conditions that sustained strict calendrical separation may have shifted. Combinedwith the growing seasonal drift caused by the absence of intercalation, this developmentlikely contributed to the gradual abandonment of the calendar in practice, even as it waspreserved as an idealized and authoritative framework within the sect’s literary tradition. Byintegrating literary, textual, and historical evidence, the study offers a nuanced model thatreconciles the calendar’s early practical significance with its later theoretical status.