Calendar and Community

This book traces the development of the Jewish calendar from its origin until it reached, in the tenth century CE, its present form. It draws on a wide range of sources - literary, documentary and epigraphic; Jewish, Graeco-Roman and Christian. The unification of the calendar is seen as an element in the unification of Jewish identity.

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Calendar and Community traces the development of the Jewish calendar from its origins until it reached, in the tenth century CE, its present form. Drawing on a wide range of often neglected sources - literary, documentary, epigraphic, Jewish, Graeco-Roman and Christian - it is the first comprehensive work to have been written on the subject.

It will be useful not only to historians and epigraphists for the interpretation of early Jewish datings, but also as a historical study of early Judaism in its own right. Its main theme is that the Jewish calendar evolved in the course of this period from considerable diversity (with a variety of solar and lunar calendars) to unity (with the normative rabbinic calendar). The unification of the calendar was one element in the unification of Jewish identity in later antiquity and the early medieval world.