ABSTRACT
For the present purposes, since our focus is on calendars, the biblical copies are irrelevant (although a verse or two from Isaiah was mentioned in chapter 1 about biblical calendars), and what survives of the Genesis Apocryphon lacks any calendrical details. The other texts, however, contain comments and sections suggesting that the religious calendar was a matter of no small significance to their authors. A supplement to the information from the four remaining scrolls comes from a text that scholars have named the Damascus Document, a work that was found in the Geniza of the Old Ezra synagogue in Cairo in 1896 and was published in 1910 by Solomon Schechter. Similarities between the Damascus Document and scrolls such as the Rule of the Community were immediately evident, and the connections between the Damascus Document and the Qumran scrolls have since been documented by discovery of many copies of the Damascus Document in several of the caves. A series of passages in Pesher Habakkuk, the Rule of the Community, the War Scroll, the Hymn Scroll, and the Damascus Document suggested to scholars that calendrical issues were important for the authors and that they held views on the subject that conflicted with the opinions of others. These passages are presented and discussed in this chapter, and chapter 5 sketches the earliest expert reactions to the calendrical statements of these five works and to a smattering of others that were slowly becoming available for scrutiny. It should become clear that while no explicit statements about the exact contours of the Qumran calendar(s) were found in these scrolls, they contain enough details and hints to whet the appetite and to permit some well documented conclusions.
