ReViews

058

Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, Volume II: The Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian Periods (732–332 B.C.E.)

Ephraim Stern

(New York: Doubleday, 2001), 716 pp., $45

It was not until the 1990s that archaeological histories of the Biblical periods began to better reflect the wealth of new discoveries and improved methodology of the last 30 years. One of the first of this new generation of books was Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000–586 B.C.E. by Amihai Mazar (Doubleday, 1990), published in the Anchor Bible Reference Library. Its 572 pages were a relatively modest number considering the 9,500-year-long span of its subject matter. With extensive archaeological experience in the Bronze and Iron Ages (3300–586 B.C.E.), Mazar was able to craft a highly engaging, thorough and readable book that clearly and concisely explicated the history and archaeology of ancient Israel. Because Mazar covered so much ground, he judiciously selected only the most essential archaeological data to highlight each historical period.

Coverage of the Assyrian and Babylonian periods lagged, however, and was reduced to less than 20 pages in Mazar’s book. It was apparent that a follow-up volume was needed—one that also covered the badly neglected Persian period (increasingly recognized as an integral part of Biblical history). The happy solution to this knowledge gap is Ephraim Stern’s Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, Volume II: The Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian Periods, 732–332 B.C.E. Stern was the perfect choice for the job, having spent much of his career excavating sites associated with the later Iron Age (seventh–sixth century B.C.E.) and Persian period (539–332 B.C.E.). The result, though, is somewhat mixed. While Stern has masterfully brought together a tremendous amount of material, a stronger editorial hand might have eliminated some avoidable errors.

In many respects this new volume is an updated and expanded version of Stern’s earlier, more scholarly Material Culture of the Land of the Bible in the Persian Period, 538–332 B.C. (Aris & Phillips, 1982). Stern now covers some 400 years of history divided among the Assyrian (732–604 B.C.E.), Babylonian (604–539 B.C.E.) and Persian (539–332 B.C.E.) periods, with each period making a separate section or “book,” which is in turn divided into chapters covering regions or peoples (such as Phoenicia, Judah, Ammon), thematic topics (for example, excavations and surveys, Greeks in Judah, trade) and classes of material (seals, pottery, cult objects and the like). Because of this format, the same data is often presented twice—once by site and again by type of artifact. The resulting redundancies add considerably to the length of the volume while hampering the flow of the text.

Nevertheless, this volume does have several strengths. The 45-page bibliography, broken down by chapter and then by sub-heading or category, is a particularly bright spot. Though by no means exhaustive, it is a very useful resource, especially for a popular audience. The conclusions found at the end of each “book” are also excellent. They are important syntheses of critical historical questions, such as the date 059of the reestablishment of the province of Judah in the Persian period. Stern’s summation of the debate and his opinions pertaining to these kinds of issues are perhaps his most important contributions.

Stern also addresses some of the larger historical issues of the later Biblical periods. When considering the process whereby Jews emerged from Judaeans in the Persian period, Stern follows the traditional view that glosses over the complex usage of the Greek term Ioudaios (Yehudi in Hebrew). Scholars must stop assuming that the Judaeans who were exiled in 586 B.C.E. returned to Jerusalem, under the Persians, as Jews. Shaye Cohen in The Beginnings of Jewishness (Univ. of California Press, 1999), concludes that the term Ioudaios cannot be understood as “Jew” until the second century B.C.E.

Unfortunately, there are some concerns about the way Stern’s volume is composed. Unlike that in Mazar’s volume, the “List of Tables, Maps and Illustrations” does not provide page numbers, making it hard to use. Also, for a book that deals extensively with national and ethnic boundaries over three major chronological periods, there are not enough maps. While there is one dedicated to Phoenicia, there aren’t any maps devoted specifically to Judah—which is the focus of much of the volume—or to the Trans-Jordanian states of Moab, Edom and Ammon. Judah is included in a map showing excavated sites of the Late Iron Age and in a map of excavated Iron Age sites in southern Palestine and northern Sinai, but the scale is much too small. Also, I found a number of inaccuracies. The map of “Excavated Late Iron Age Sites” includes Tell el-Wawiyat, which was not occupied in that period. Another map incorrectly labels Bethel as a second Gibeon. Omissions are also a problem: “Excavated Sites of the Persian Period” fails to include Tell Halif, which is mentioned in the text.

The volume has many well-produced illustrations. Unfortunately, some of the photographs are of poor quality (for example, a blurry photograph of faience amulets and an unnumbered and blurry photograph of Edomite pottery). In several places there is no illustration where one would be extremely helpful—at least one plate of Phoenician pottery should have been included, for example.

There are also some lexical and grammatical errors that hamper the flow of the text. Bethsaida is referred to as an Aramaic rather than Aramaean town—Aramaic being the language, not the people or ethno-nationality. The plural of rhyton should be rhyta, and not “rhytas.” Similar errors are scattered throughout the text and should have been caught in editing.

Despite these flaws, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, Volume II is a solid overview of the eighth through fourth centuries B.C.E. Stern has done a commendable job of collecting and organizing an incredible amount of archaeological data, much of which has been unearthed only in the last three decades. For a reader interested in specific topics in these time periods—for example, Judean weights and measures of the Assyrian Period, tombs of the Babylonian Period or Egyptian seals of the Persian period—this volume provides a valuable introduction to the material. However, due to the sheer quantity of data it is more of a reference work than a synthesized archaeological history, as Mazar’s was. Because of the lack of coverage of the Biblical periods until now, this may be appropriate, but the occasional sloppiness in the text and illustrations may ultimately lessen the book’s usefulness.

Discoveries in the Judaean Desert Vol. XXI, Qumran Cave 4—XVI: Calendrical Texts

Shemaryahu Talmon, Jonathan Ben-Dov and Uwe Glessmer

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001) 263 pp., 13 b&w plates, $90.00 (hardback)

This book is a disappointment. It is the final publication of the calendrical texts from Qumran Cave 4. The principal editor of the volume, Shemaryahu Talmon of Hebrew University, is one of the most astute and learned Dead Sea Scroll scholars in the business, and I had always hoped that he would be able to tell us precisely how the sectarians of Qumran determined dates. But these little pieces of parchment—fragments at best—stubbornly refuse to reveal how they did it. As Talmon concedes, “Qumran documents do not provide details on how the required calibration was achieved.”

The main point, however, is abundantly confirmed by these and other texts: The sectarians of Qumran—most probably Essenes—followed a solar calendar of 364 days, divided evenly into an annual cycle of 52 weeks 060or 13-week quarters of three months of 30, 30 and 31 days (Talmon calls the extra day at the end of the third, sixth, ninth and twelfth months an epagomenal day; try to work that into a conversation sometime soon—it isn’t even in my unabridged dictionary). Mainstream Jews, faithful to the priests who controlled the Jerusalem Temple, followed a 354-day lunar calendar—as is true of Jews today. For the Qumran covenanters, light, represented by the sun, was a symbol of good. Darkness, represented by the waning or eclipsed moon, was a portent of evil. Whereas the Qumran texts emphasized the moon’s dark nights, mainstream Judaism, on the other hand, emphasized the bright nights—reflecting the deep divide between these two Judaisms.

One Qumran fragment referring to a solar quarter reads almost like a schoolchild’s ditty:

“[The first (month), in it 30 days, The] second month, in it 30 [days, The third month, in it 31 days,] And completed are the days of [the quarter.]”

The solar calendar has distinct advantages over a lunar calendar: In the former, the sabbath falls on the same date in a given month, year in and year out. And festivals all fall on the same day of the week every year. In the lunar calendar, festivals “wander” from year to year, and sabbaths are not annually on the same day of the month. In the Qumran calendar, Passover always fell on Tuesday, the Biblically prescribed 14th day of the first month (Nisan). (In this scheme, the first day of the first month is always a Wednesday because the sun was created only on the fourth day of creation, which began on a Sunday and culminated with the seventh day, a day of rest, on a Saturday.)

However, the solar year is not 364 days, but 365 and 1/4 days (to be precise, 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds, the time the earth takes to complete its orbit around the sun). That is why every four years we have a leap year in our 365-day calendar, adding an extra day at the end of February (except in centenary years not divisible by 400). (In the lunar calendar, an additional month is periodically added, or intercalated, to “catch up.”) Unless some adjustment were made periodically to the Essene’s 364-day calendar, the time of the observance of the agricultural festivals would get out of synch with the seasons. The Essenes would gradually end up observing the spring festivals in winter, the fall festivals 062in mid-summer, and so on. It would take only a few decades for noticeable calendrical slippage to occur because it was “off” by almost 1 1/4 days a year. Some form of intercalation was obviously necessary. This could be achieved, as Talmon notes, by intercalating an additional week every seven years with an additional two weeks every 28 years.

But is that what the people of Qumran actually did? We have no idea.

The intercalation would be especially important to the Essenes because they had additional agricultural festivals unknown in the literature of mainstream Judaism: a harvest Festival of (First) Grapes and another of (First) Olives (Oil). This was in addition to such Biblical festivals as Shavuot (The Feast of Weeks, or Pentecost). Besides Pesach (Passover) there was also the Feast of Matzoth (Feast of Unleavened Bread)—the latter falling on the 15th day of the First Month, the day after Pesach. Other festivals observed by the Qumran sectarians included Yom ha-Kippurim (Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement), Yom ha-Zikharon (the Day of Remembrance), the Festival of the Wood Offering, the Feast of the (New) Wine and the Festival of the Priests’ Consecration.

The calendar was central to religious observance. Time ran according to a divinely ordained pattern. A solar calendar was used not only by the Essenes (if that is who they were), but also by the authors of the extra-canonical books of Enoch and Jubilees, copies of which were also found at Qumran. In short, the solar calendar was used by several Jewish groups in the late Second Temple period. And as Talmon tells us, Enoch and Jubilees “never tire of proclaiming [the] exclusive authenticity [of their solar calendar]. In Jubilees the introduction of the exclusive legitimate calendar of 364 days is ascribed to the antediluvian patriarch Enoch, to whom it was divinely revealed.”

It is not difficult to imagine the basic conflict between two groups following different calendars and observing festivals at different times. Think of one group fasting on Yom Kippur while the other is going about its workaday activities, including eating. The use of different calendars—solar and lunar—imposed a basic divide between Judaisms of the time. As Talmon states, “The discrepancies between the solar and lunar calendrical schedules inevitably undermined the social order and communal life of Judaism at the height of the Second Temple period, and effected an unbridgeable gap between the ‘Community of the Renewed Covenant’ [Qumranites] and its opponents. It may be said that the calendar controversy was a major cause, possibly the causa causans, of the Yahad’s [Community’s] separation from mainstream Judaism.”

The calendar regulated not only the time for festival observance, but also the time for the various groups who provided service in the Temple. Tracing back to Biblical times, the priests of the tribe of Levi were organized into 24 divisions, or courses (Hebrew mishmar, plural mishmarot). Each mishmar conducted the daily Temple service, including sacrificial offerings, for one week. Each mishmar bore a family or clan name and was assigned a specific week twice a year to perform its Temple duties. Since 24 mishmarot serving twice a week equalled only 48 weeks, four mishmarot served three times a year, making up the complete 52-week year. Every sabbath saw a “changing of the guard.” The new family would enter the Temple on Saturday afternoon, prior to the onset of their week of service the next morning.

The Dead Sea Scroll sect, with some justification, held that the priesthood then serving in the Jerusalem Temple had usurped the Biblically ordained priesthood, which was of course championed by the Qumranites. They looked forward to the day when the legitimate priesthood would once again control the Temple and would faithfully serve in it. In Talmon’s words, “They confidently expected the restitution of a new sanctuary, in which their own priesthood would conduct the holy service in accordance with their solar calendar and ritual rulings.” Hence, the intense interest in mishmarot assignments that we find in the scrolls. Indeed, of the almost 20 texts in this volume designated calendrical, all but five are in the context of mishmarot assignments.

Like the calendar itself, the priestly courses were subject to a divinely ordained schedule and their efficacy depended on precise timing. The Qumran texts include fragments of several tables of the six-year cycle of priestly courses and the families who were expected to officiate in the Temple in weekly turns of duty. (Since in every 52-week year, four families had three, rather than two, mishmarot, it took six years to complete the cycle.)

The minutest details of each fragment are carefully analyzed by the editor—a physical description of the parchment; a paleographical analysis to date the text; a separate section to consider the spelling conventions detected in the fragment; a brief description of the contents of the text; a Hebrew transcription; an English translation; detailed notes on the readings; and further comments on the readings. A concordance in the volume gives a reference to the appearance of each word in these fragments. 13 plates complete the volume. The editor acknowledges the assistance of Jonathan Bar-Lev, also of Hebrew University, in the editing of his calendrical texts. In addition, Bar-Lev edited a separate text in the volume.

The volume concludes with an enormously difficult text edited by Uwe Glessmer, of the University of Hamburg, of a six-year cycle of mishmarot enumerated not from 1 to 6, but from 2 to 7. Was this to accommodate a period of primordial time before the creation of the sun and moon on the fourth day of creation? Again, we don’t know. In any event, as another eminent scroll scholar, James C. VanderKam, has observed, the text probably has “something to do with a system of intercalation to bring the 364-day system into harmony with the true solar year.” Just how it worked remains a mystery.

Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, Volume II: The Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian Periods (732–332 B.C.E.)

Ephraim Stern

(New York: Doubleday, 2001), 716 pp., $45