Lunar Calendars at Qumran? A Comparative and Ideological Study Jonathan Ben-Dov 173 This article revisits a question that has been discussed by generations of Qumran scholars: was there a role for a lunar calendar in the Yahad community? Despite the dominance of the 364-Day year in the calendar texts from Qumran, there is ample evidence for lunar counts within them too, both in the mishmarot corpus and outside it. 1 How, then, did these two time reckoning systems interact? The present discussion assumes— without defending it in detail—a position that is still mainstream among scholars of the Dead Sea Scrolls, namely that most of the scrolls found in caves near the site of Qumran on the shore of the Dead Sea were either written or col- lected by a sectarian community that had lived in that area around the first centuries before and after the common era. This community (or communities) called itself ‘the YaΩhad’, and will thus be referred here. This is a rather minimal version of the scholarly consensus on the Qumran community. While more far-reaching insights on the identity of the community are defendable, they are not crucial for the discussion and thus not promulgated here. 2 It is important, however, to note that, while some of the Dead Sea Scrolls represent the lit- erature written by Yahad members for their own use, not all scrolls collected in the caves comply with this kind of inner-circle literature. Some scrolls represent earlier or softer ver- sions of sectarianism, possibly of other sects or of predecessors to the Yahad, while others may have originated with other, non-sectarian circles. Had a question about the employment of various calendar systems been raised with regard to other ancient literary corpora, the answer would have come through the meticulous study of administrative texts, loan contracts and temple records, which can shed light on practical aspects of the question at hand. 3 However, the nature of the material from Qum- ran entails a different kind of discussion, since the calendars from Qumran concentrate more on ideal aspects of Time— either ritual or astronomical— rather than on administra- tive and civil usage. Even within the realm of ritual, the texts do not convey administrative scenes from the life of a real temple, but rather literary depictions of the cycle of priests in an ideal temple. The discussion of the lunar calendar in the Dead Sea Scrolls should thus focus on the ideological aspect of calendrical choices much more than we would allow this aspect to appear in other, more mundane calendrical studies. In late Hellenistic and early Roman Judea, as well as in most of the Ancient Near East at that time, life was regulated according to a luni-solar calendar, which served for both sacral and administrative purposes. This calendar (or a very similar one) is reflected in later rab- binic sources, with the year beginning in the autumn and using the Aramaic month names Tishri, Nisan etc. 4 In later times Judea subscribed to the Julian calendar like the rest of the