Control the Calendar, Control Judaism

The Qumran text differs from MT here:

^{נה"מ חבקוק ב:טו} הוֹי מַשְׁקֵה רֵעֵהוּ מְסַפֵּחַ חֲמָתְךָ וְאַף שַׁכֵּר לְמַעַן הַבִּיט עַל מְעוֹרֵיהֶם.

^{MT Hab 2:15} Ah, you who make others drink to intoxication, as you pour out your wrath, in order to gaze upon their nakedness!

The biggest difference is the final word (a resh/dalet graphic switch), since in the MT it is about humiliating the person or gaining prurient satisfaction from them, by getting them naked. In the Qumran text, it is about being able to participate in their feasts. The latter reading fits well into the Pesher’s concept, in which the Wicked Priest disrupts Yom Kippur observance.

Transcription and translation (with some adjustments) are from Timothy H. Lim, The Earliest Commentary on the Prophecy of Habakkuk, The Oxford Commentary on the Dead Sea Scrolls (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 145.   

For more on the centrality of Yom Kippur in this period, see Isaac Kalimi, “The Historical Uniqueness and Centrality of Yom Kippur,” TheTorah (2015).

The Community Rule, another Qumran text, also emphasizes the importance of observing God’s commandments and celebrating festivals at the right times, neither early nor late (1QS 1.14-17).

These texts include the book of Jubilees (which organizes much of biblical history, significant events, and the liturgical year around the solar calendar), the Psalms Scroll (which lists 364 hymns to be recited each day of the solar year and 52 additional hymns recited on the Sabbaths of that year), the Temple Scroll, the Damascus Document, the Sabbath Songs, and the Mishmarot documents.

Translation from James C. Vanderkam, The Book of Jubilees, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalum 511; Scriptore Aethiopici 88 (Leuven: Peeters, 1989), 42.

On the calendar in the book of Jubilees, see Michael Segal, “The Jewish Calendar in Jubilees,” TheTorah (2013).  

Translation from Steven D. Fraade, “Tractate Rosh Hashanah,” in The Oxford Annotated Mishnah, ed. Shaye J.D. Cohen, Robert Goldenberg, and Hayim Lapin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 686-688, with slight alterations. Steven D. Fraade, “Theory, Practice, and Polemic in Ancient Jewish Calendars,” Dine Israel 26-7 (2009-2010): 147-181 explores the similarities between the calendrical disputes in Pesher Habakkuk and Mishnah Rosh Hashanah.

See commentary of Shmuel Safrai, Chana Safrai, and Ze’ev Safrai משנת ארץ ישראל [The Mishnah of the Land of Israel], ad loc. Available online at AlHaTorah and Sefaria.    

The biblical passage does not list the names of the seventy elders of Israel; this interpretation understands the omission of proper names as suggesting that each group of elders that meets as a court has the same authority as the group from the time of Moses. As outlined in the first chapter of Mishnah Sanhedrin, the smallest rabbinic batei din (courts of justice) consist of three judges. This passage in Mishnah Rosh Hashanah thus explains that every beit din must be granted the same authority as the original group of elders or judges established by Moses and that their decisions be similarly respected.

See Sacha Stern, Calendar and Community: A History of the Jewish Calendar, 2nd Century BCE to 10th Century CE (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

See Sacha Stern, The Jewish Calendar Controversy of 921/2 CE (Leiden: Brill, 2019), which compiles all of the available medieval sources that participated in or refer to this controversy.

While Babylonian rabbis generally accepted the role of rabbis in the land of Israel in announcing the calendar, they nonetheless conducted their own calendrical calculations, based on a different set of principles.

This book has been called Sefer ha-Mo‘adim (Book of Festivals) and attributed to Saʿadya, but Stern (The Jewish Calendar Controversy, 89–90) argues that this is a misattribution.

The Geonic court in Israel sat in the area of modern day Ramla/Lod at the time, but the official announcement took place in Jerusalem, where some Rabbinites lived but which was a center for Karaites. 

BCC1 T-S NS 194.92 recto; BCC2 ENA 2555.1 verso and recto; transcribed and translated in Stern, The Jewish Calendar Controversy, 120-123.

The Karaites are a group of Jews who separated from the Rabbanite majority in the 8^th/9^th centuries C.E., emphasizing a return to the Bible as the source for Jewish practice as opposed to the rabbinic Oral Torah (Mishnah and Talmud). For a brief description, see Daniel J. Lasker, “Biblical Exegesis as a Source of Jewish Pluralism: The Case of the Karaites,” TheTorah (2017), and at greater length see Daniel J. Lasker, Karaism: An Introduction to the Oldest Surviving Alternative Judaism (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2022), esp. 100–118 on religious rituals, festivals, and the calendar.

Marina Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate, Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 57; Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, Karaite Marriage Documents from the Cairo Geniza: Legal Traditions and Community Life in Mediaeval Egypt and Palestine (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 247-250. Still, Rustow notes that the idea that Karaites determined their calendar empirically and the Rabbanite calculated their calendar is based more on rhetoric and polemic from subsequent centuries than on early historical developments.

Jacob Qirqisani, Account of the Jewish Sects and Christianity, 11; trans. in L. Nemoy, “Al-Qurqisānī’s Account of the Jewish Sects of Christianity,” Hebrew Union College Annual 7 (1930): 317-197, at 382.

This source was traditionally read to describe historical reality: that members of the Karaite and Rabbanite communities did not marry because of calendrical conflict. Even if overstated, at the very least, Rabbanite and Karaites didn’t see eye to eye on calendrical and festival matters, and such disagreements affected social relations between them. In the early years of scholarship on the Dead Sea Scrolls, example of calendrical disagreements among Rabbanites and Karaites informed how calendrical controversy was understood in the Dead Sea Scrolls as well, on which see Albert I. Baumgarten, “Karaites, Qumran, the Calendar, and Beyond: At the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls and Contemporary Culture (ed. Adolfo D. Roitman, Lawrence Schiffman, and Shani Tzoref (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 603–619.

Qirqisani, Account of the Jewish Sects and Christianity, 11; trans. Nemoy, “Al-Qurqisānī’s Account of the Jewish Sects of Christianity,” 382.

Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community, 239-265; Olszowy-Schlanger, Karaite Marriage Documents, 87–113.

Bodl. MS Heb. a. 3. 42, the manuscript image and transcription from Mordechai Akiva Friedman, Jewish Polygyny (Tel Aviv: Bialik, 1986) are available online at the Princeton Geniza Project; reproduced with translation in Olszowy-Schlanger, Karaite Marriage Documents, 470-478; Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community, 249.