Dead Sea Scrolls: One of Last Two Encrypted Ancient Writings Deciphered in Israel, Revealing Secret Calendar
After decades of work, one of the final two encrypted Dead Sea Scrolls that had resisted efforts to decipher its meaning has at last been decoded, revealing an ancient Jewish calendar.
The Dead Sea Scrolls have represented one of archaeology’s most compelling enigmas since their discovery in the 1940s and ’50s in the Dead Sea Caves. Also known as the Qumran Scrolls, they were written by the hermetic religious Qumran Sect in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. This particular scroll was written in coded Hebrew, a rarity among the existing body of deciphered texts, according to Haaretz.
The Qumran Sect’s name for itself was the Yahad, which translates to “Together Community,” according to the Jerusalem Post. Archaeologists had spent decades assembling and deciphering their fragments, until at last only two had remained undecoded. Researchers from Haifa University in Israel spent a year painstakingly reconstructing the scroll from 60 fragments, according to Jerusalem Online. Some of those fragments were just a few millimeters across. The research was published in the journal Biblical Literature.
Trending: Physics Breakthrough: ‘Sound Tornadoes’ Can Levitate Humans With New Acoustic Tractor Beam
“Tens of thousands of fragments belonging to over 900 scrolls were found in the caves of Qumran,” Eshbal Ratson, a biblical expert at Haifa University, told Haaretz. “This is the most important archaeological find ever made in Israel. This is literature from the Second Temple period, and that’s rare.”
Ratson told Haaretz that most Jews from that time period used a calendar similar to the one we use today. The Qumran sect used a 364-day calendar—so, almost based on a solar year but not quite—with 30- or 31-day months in each season. Since 364 divides into 7, Ratson continued, each date falls on a specific day of the week and all holidays have fixed dates.
Don’t miss: Turkish Forces Bomb Key U.S. Ally In Fight Against ISIS In Syria, Complicating Alliance
“We now know that in the Temple there were disputes over what happens it the Passover falls on Shabbat,” Ratson told Haaretz “What supersedes what, Shabbat or the holiday? This sect solved the problem, since no holiday fell on Shabbat. This scrolls details all dates on which Shabbat falls and all the days of the week on which the holiday falls.”
158520351
The 364-day calendar also contained the sect’s previously unknown word for days that marked the changing of the seasons: tekufah. The word, whose meaning had previously been lost, appears in the Mishna (the written record of oral Jewish laws), according to Haaretz.
“This shows us that the researchers who believed the day of celebrating the transition between the seasons was called by this name were correct, and that this word, used in the Mishna, was preserved from the days of the Second Temple—it’s a very early concept in the halakha [religious Jewish law],” Raston told Haaretz.
This article was first written by Newsweek
More from Newsweek
- Dead Sea Scrolls: Ancient Skeletons Discovered in West Bank Cave May Solve 2,000-Year-Old Biblical Mystery
- First Copy of Jesus’s Secret Writings to His Brother Recovered From Antiquity in Original Greek
- Secrets of Ancient Egyptian Writing Revealed in 2,000-Year-Old Papyrus Scrolls
JBL 136, no. 4 (2017): 905–936
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.15699/jbl.1364.2017.290288
eshbal ratzon
eshbal@gmail.com
University of Haifa, Haifa 3498838, Israel
jonathan ben-dov
jonbendov@gmail.com
University of Haifa, Haifa 3498838, Israel
In this article we ofer a reconstruction and edition of one of the last unpublished
Dead Sea Scrolls. It is an extremely fragmentary calendrical scroll written in the
Cryptic A code. While images of 4Q324d were included in the DJD series, no
formal edition of it exists. Te suggested jigsaw-puzzlelike reconstruction integrates
forty-two extremely small fragments into a stretch of fve consecutive columns
of what we consider to be one continuous scroll (pace earlier preliminary
editions). In terms of its content, the calendar contained in this scroll resembles
the one found at the top of 4Q394 3–7 (a copy of 4QMMT) and in 4Q394 1–2.
An intriguing interlinear gloss in both shape and content ofers a ruling on the
Festival of Wood Ofering that follows the halakic rulings of the Temple Scroll.
A distinctive corpus of scrolls written in cryptic script stands out among the
scrolls found in Qumran.1 While the fnal publication of all Qumran scrolls is ofen
celebrated, several scrolls in cryptic script are the only scrolls lef that have not been
Tis study was written with the support of the Israel Science Foundation, grant number
1330/14. We would like to express our gratitude to Asaf Gayer, who has been deeply involved in
the material reconstruction of this scroll and ofered invaluable help. Composite images in this
article are based on the PAM images, supplied to us courtesy of the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls
Digital Library, Israel Antiquities Authority. In addition, we gained much beneft from the new
multispectral images supplied to us by the same library (photographer: Shai Halevy). 1For a description of this corpus, see Stephen J. Pfann, “Te Character of the Early Essene
Movement in the Light of the Manuscripts Written in Esoteric Scripts from Qumran” (PhD diss.,
Te Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 2001); Pfann, “Writings in Esoteric Script from Qumran,” in
Te Dead Sea Scrolls Fify Years afer Teir Discovery: Proceedings of the Jerusalem Congress, July
20–25, 1997, ed. Lawrence H. Schifman, Emanuel Tov, and James C. VanderKam (Jerusalem:
Israel Exploration Society, 2000), 177–90. furnished with a full scientifc edition.
In effect, they are the last unpublished Dead
Sea Scrolls. We are privileged to have completed an edition of one of these last
scrolls and present it here. We assign the scroll presented here the number 4Q324d.2
Te reconstruction suggested here for one of these extremely fragmentary
scrolls presented outstanding difculties and required extraordinary eforts, much
like assembling a jigsaw puzzle with individual pieces measuring 1.5 cm × 1.5 cm
on average. Important preliminary work on this scroll was carried out by Józef T.
Milik and Stephen J. Pfann, to whom we are greatly indebted. Te fnal result, as
presented here, is a calendar text covering a 364-day year, with pronounced concluding
formulas at the conclusion of each of the seasons. A calendar list of the
same kind was famously preserved at the top of 4Q394 3–7, a copy of the important
halakic scroll Miqṣat Mataśe haTorah. Tere only its last line can be read, but more
information can be gleaned from the better-preserved scroll 4Q394 1–2.3 Notwithstanding
the partial information of the above scrolls, we are now able to trace the
structure of the whole year according to that—or a very similar—order.
A complete publication of this modest-looking scroll is signifcant for Qumran
studies, even for the entire feld of biblical studies, in several respects. It alerts
scholars to the opportunities that are still present in the Dead Sea Scrolls corpus if
older editions are reexamined with the proper attention and with new technologies
available today.4 Te scribal practice of this little scroll adds particularly telling
2Te number 324d was used by Pfann for only a small part of the sixty or so fragments
discussed here, as he divided them into six diferent copies 4Q324d–i. Since we now see all
fragments as constituting a single copy, we name it 4Q324d, the frst available siglum in the
sequence. Although we are alert to the confusion that choosing this siglum may cause, we prefer
to use it in order to preserve the direct fow of 4Q324 numbers, rather than invent a whole new
siglum. Since no publication was written about this scroll beyond the mere editions, the risk of
confusion seems limited. 3 See the initial publication of 4Q394 1–2 and 3–7 in Elisha Qimron and John Strugnell,
Qumran Cave 4.V: Miqṣat Mataśe ha-Torah, DJD X (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 6–9, 44–45. While
DJD X assigns frags. 1–2 and 3–7 to one and the same manuscript, Strugnell (ibid., 203) doubted
this association, and VanderKam concluded against it; see James C. VanderKam, “Te Calendar,
4Q327 and 4Q394,” in Legal Texts and Legal Issues: Proceedings of the Second Meeting of the
International Organization for Qumran Studies, Cambridge, 1995, ed. Moshe Bernstein, Florentino
García Martínez, and John Kampen, STDJ 23 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 179–94. In his title, VanderKam
called frags. 1–2 by the old designation “4Q327.” His arguments were accepted by Shemaryahu
Talmon; see S. Talmon, J. Ben-Dov, and U. Glessmer, Qumran Cave 4.XVI: Calendrical Texts, DJD
XXI (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001), 158. Elisha Qimron leaves the question open in his new edition:
Te Dead Sea Scrolls: Te Hebrew Writings [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2013), 2:204.
For the relation between MMT and the calendar of 4Q394, see Hanne von Weissenberg, 4QMMT:
Reevaluating the Text, the Function, and the Meaning of the Epilogue, STDJ 82 (Leiden: Brill, 2009),
33–38.4 See, e.g., Jonathan Ben-Dov, Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, and Asaf Gayer, “Reconstruction of a
Single Copy of the Qumran Cave 4 Cryptic-Script Serekh haEdah,” RevQ 29 (2017): 21–77;
This content downloaded from 132.74.77.47 on Sun, 31 Dec 2017 14:52:23 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Ratzon and Ben-Dov: A Calendrical Scroll from Qumran 907
examples to the record of scribal practices assembled by Emanuel Tov.5 In addition,
our reconstruction adds several signifcant details about the 364-day calendar, specifcally
about the nature of the Feast of Wood Ofering and about the tәqûpôt, that
is, the days standing at the turn of the seasons. Finally, the reconstruction of 4Q324d
as a single scroll rather than as a collection of six separate scrolls, as suggested in
earlier research, is signifcant for assessing the nature and scope of encryption in
sectarian circles. Te religious phenomenon of secrecy and encryption in the
ancient Near East, Judaism, Christianity, and other late-antique religions, keeps
attracting scholarly attention and will beneft from the fnds of the present project.6
Tese three aspects are discussed below, followed by a detailed edition of 4Q324d.
Te extent of material work performed here requires an extensive technical apparatus,
without which the more general results cannot stand.
I. The 364-Day Calendar Tradition
Te calendar constituted a central part of the sectarian identity. Members of
the Yaḥad adhered to a year of 364 days, which was diferent from the luni-solar
year of the Jerusalem temple and the Hasmonean state.7 Te sectarian calendrical
tradition is well represented in a variety of documents from Qumran and outside
it.8 It is a highly schematic year with ideal relations between its numerical
Chanan Ariel, Alexei Yuditsky, and Elisha Qimron, “Te Pesher on the Periods A–B (4Q180–
4Q181): Editing, Language, and Interpretation” [in Hebrew], Meghillot 11–12 (2015): 3–39. 5Emanuel Tov, Scribal Practices and Approaches Refected in the Texts Found in the Judean
Desert, STDJ 54 (Leiden: Brill, 2004).
6 See, e.g., Alan Lenzi, Secrecy and the Gods: Secret Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia and
Biblical Israel, SAAS 19 (Helsinki: Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2008); Adela Yarbro Collins,
“Messianic Secret and the Gospel of Mark: Secrecy in Jewish Apocalypticism, the Hellenistic
Mystery Religions, and Magic,” in Rending the Veil: Concealment and Secrecy in the History of
Religions, ed. Elliot R. Wolfson (New York: Seven Bridges, 1999), 11–30. 7For the role of the calendar in sectarian polemics, see the ever-relevant Shemaryahu
Talmon, “Yom Hakippurim in the Habakkuk Scroll,” Bib 32 (1951): 549–63. Although much of
the criticism leveled against Talmon by Sacha Stern (“Qumran Calendars and Sectarianism,” in
Te Oxford Handbook of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Timothy H. Lim and John J. Collins [Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010], 232–53) is valid, the core sectarian value of the calendar cannot
be denied. 8Uwe Glessmer, “Calendars in the Qumran Scrolls,” in Te Dead Sea Scrolls afer Fify Years:
A Comprehensive Assessment, ed. Peter W. Flint and James C. VanderKam, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill,
1999), 2:213–78; James C. VanderKam, Calendars in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Measuring Time,
Literature of the Dead Sea Scrolls (London: Routledge, 1998); Jonathan Ben-Dov, “Te 364-Day
Year in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Jewish Pseudepigrapha,” in Calendars and Years II: Astronomy
and Time in the Ancient and Medieval World, ed. John M. Steele (Oxford: Oxbow, 2011), 69–105.
Te Qumran calendrical texts 4Q319–324c and 4Q325–330 were published by Talmon, Ben-Dov,
and Glessmer in DJD XXI.
constituents. Te number of 364 days is neatly divided by seven, a typological
number with signifcant religious connotation. Each 364-day year contains exactly
ffy-two weeks, a fact that allows anchoring the festivals to fxed weekdays, thus
avoiding their coincidence with the Sabbath. In addition, the number 364 divides
neatly by four as well, yielding a good symmetry of the four seasons, each season
containing exactly 91 days. Finally, the synchronization of the 364-day year with a
schematic lunar calendar of alternating twenty-nine- and thirty-day months is easily
achieved, using an intercalation of one thirty-day month every three years (a
triennial cycle of three years of 364 days = three lunar years of 354 days + an intercalary
month of thirty days).
A distinct part of the 364-day calendar tradition appears in a collection of
calendar texts from Qumran that present the characteristics mentioned above in
the form of detailed rosters in addition to the following: the triennial cycle involving
lunar months; a six-year cycle that incorporates the times of service of priestly
families (mišmārôt) in the temple; and a detailed record of lunar phases along the
six-year cycle. Each type of calendrical scroll represents only some of these traits,
and thus a variety of calendrical “genre” is created.9 Te scroll 4Q324d represents
the Sabbaths and festivals as well as a simple record of the names of priestly courses
but does not go into the details of either the mishmarot service or of the lunar
phenomena. It is unique in phrasing a distinct type of formula indicating the dates
of transition between the seasons.10
Te vocabulary and style of the calendrical texts are typically very limited and
monotonous, a fact that eases the task of reconstructing fragmentary scrolls. We
benefted greatly from this characteristic when assembling the jigsaw puzzle of
4Q324d.
Te account of annual festivals recorded in 4Q324d generally agrees with the
record of festivals in other scrolls. An exception pertains to the Festival of Wood
Ofering, as explained below. In this case, a long marginal note specifes some
details about the performance of this particular feast, in accordance with the halakah
of the Temple Scroll and in contrast to other practices refected in Second
Temple literature.11 Te inclusion of this note seems to indicate an awareness of
halakic disagreements and the need of additional clarification.
MoreDetail@：