The Books of Enoch, Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4

THE SYNCHRONISTIC CALENDAR 275
third lunar years. He must have confined himself to some kind of summary,
the remains of which, mishandled by the translators, are contained in En.
74: 10-17 and 79: 3-5. Was this calendar simply omitted by the Greek
translator of the astronomical Enoch, or is the resume of it to be found in
En. 73: 1-74: 9, or only in 74: 3-9?
We should note, finally, that the description of a lunar year synchronized
with a solar year of 364 days was valid, and even then only in theory, merely
for the single, first year of a great cycle, at the time when the New Year,
i/I, coincided with the ist day of the ist lunation, the ist Nisan. Consequently
there was an inevitable alteration in relation to the astronomical
year of 365J days.^
We have suggested that the Greek translator of the Astronomical Book of
Enoch in Aramaic omitted, or at the very most summarized very briefly,
the full calendar describing in detail the movements of the moon in relation
to those of the sun. None the less, it seems to me that this complicated
Aramaic calendar did not disappear completely from Graeco-Jewish literature
or from the Christian literatures which depend on it. Indeed, I find traces of it
in Ethiopic literature.
MS. 64 of the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, a collection of chronological
and astronomical tables, contains a short treatise on celestial physics and
on the calendar, containing a development and application of the data from
En. 72-6. The title of this part as it appears at the beginning of fol. 34^
is an approximate repetition of the title of En. 72: i: 'of Enoch the prophet:
book of the revolution of the lights of heaven according to their order, their
time, their classes, their names, their origins, and their months, composed by
Enoch, son of Yared, the prophet, which the angel Uriel showed to him'.^
In fol. 37^^-38'^ can be read the table of the variations of the duration of
days and nights for each month of the year (Gr^baut, loc. cit., pp. 429-32);
Tn Miyazya (8th month of the Abyssinian calendar corresponding to the
ist month, Nisan, of the Jewish calendar), 10 parts day and 8 parts night.
'In Genbot, 11 parts day and 7 parts night. . . .
'In the month of Magabit there are 9 parts day and 9 parts night. (There is)
equality.'
' For this problem, and for the astro- ^ Edited in part by S. Grebaut, Revue de
nomical and astrological calendars and texts rOrient Chretien, xxi (igig-zo), 422-32. Other
of Qumran in general, see Milik, Ten Years of extracts from the same manuscript, ibid. 323-30
Discovery in the Wilderness of Judaea, pp. 170-3 and xxii (1920-1), 212-20. For the Weeks of
and p. 152 note 5. Enoch see above, p. 258.