Tardy response here:
Apollos wrote:
However, I was under the impression that the liturgical work, the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, which showed up at Masada, used the solar calendar in its liturgical observance. Talmon's work might be out of date.
Newsom’s critical edition of the
Songs was published in ’85, so Talmon should have had adequate opportunity to consider that document for his article.
I gave a cursory look at the
Songs, and it appears that the calendrical material is limited to superscriptionary material,
e.g., “
By the instructor. Song of the sacrifice of the seventh Sabbath on the sixteenth of the month.” Talmon may not have considered this material to be an inherent part of the document; after all, superscriptions can be peripheral to textual traditions.
Then again, Talmon might have decided that the slight superscriptionary material was not significant enough to warrant terming the
Songs “
a calendrical work.” The
Songs document is fundamentally a liturgical work.
Apollos wrote:
I'll also note that both of the editors of the Encyclopedia thought that the Solar calendar was widespread, with Schiffman going so far in one of his works as saying that the Qumran community were Sadducee in their Halaka, and that the Pharisees ran the Temple cultus.
You might be correct about the editors’ own opinions. However, these editors let Talmon have the say in the article on calendars in their
Encyclopedia. They hardly would do so if they considered his treatment of the evidence to be untenable.
Apollos wrote:
But the argument for the solar calendar being widespread and the more ancient is that made from the books of Enoch and the book of Jubilees, which were used by the early Christians.
And which were so neglected by the church that – were it not for the DSS – they would have had to be reclaimed, for the greatest part, from Ethiopian manuscripts. Of course, the Ethiopian Christian and Jewish communities have had a rather idiosyncratic character. Both have preserved texts that appear in no other Christian or Jewish traditions.
Furthermore, both
Enoch and
Jubilees are compositions from the middle of the Second Temple era. They are not so reliable an indicator of “
more ancient” calendrical paradigms.
It seems most likely to me that the vector of ritual development would have gone from
(a) rituals based on organic/observed phenomena to
(b) rituals that mimicked organic/observed phenomena, but were artificially tooled to suit practical or philosophical sensibilities. This is the line of development that occurs within mainstream Judaism, with the tinkering of the Hillel calendar.
Apollos wrote:
I also note that Talmon seeks to portray the authors of the Qumran writings as a small sect. From what I can see (and the Oxford Dictionary of the DDS which came out in 2010 reinforces that impression), this is an outdated view, since we know that there are over 900 different scribes represented at Qumran. This was no small, isolated movement.
The number of scribes does not necessarily telegraph the size of the movement (if, indeed, there was a movement). For one thing, it is not a given that all of the manuscripts were produced directly by members of the movement. If what we have is the remains of the movement’s library, then many of the manuscripts could have been produced by independent sources, and acquired into the collection.
Then again, the manuscripts apparently span more than two centuries in their dates of production. Hundreds of scribes over hundreds of years may not indicate a large movement – all the more so if the sect saw significant turnover. Josephus, for example, spent three years following a desert-dwelling figure (
viz., Bannus). If other educated persons went through a similar phase, the movement may have had a revolving door of scribal contributors, without fielding a large number of enduring adherents.
Apollos wrote:
Vanderkam thinks that the lunar calendar was adopted when the Seleucids forced the Jews to offer a monthly sacrifice to their king, which coincided with the time when the ancient priesthood was deposed.
This occurred in the lead-up to the Maccabean uprising. Once the Maccabees obtained control over the cultus, it seems likely to me that they would have done away with such a ritual innovation. The Maccabees stood for traditional Jewish observance, and purifying the temple of Seleucid abomination was a pinnacle of their achievements.
Apollos wrote:
This idea of creative exegesis is of course very popular right now, but I'm not convinced by the arguments: not yet anyway. But the arguments for the solar calendar don't rely solely upon Qumran, but also upon Inter-Testamental literature.
The idea of creative exegesis is not merely “
popular”; it is obvious. Unless, of course, one holds to the opinion that the
pesharim authentically articulate cryptic truths embedded in biblical texts, through divine inspiration. I welcome any reader to peruse the Qumranic literature and come to their own appraisal of the collection’s inspiration.
And of course, creative handling of biblical texts and traditions is not limited to the Qumranic corpus. Other period literature indicates that this was a feature of the Second Temple era.