Strata: Milestones: Shemaryahu Talmon (1920–2010)

Shemaryahu Talmon, J.L. Magnes Professor of Bible at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and one of the world’s foremost scholars on the Dead Sea Scrolls, passed away in December at age 90.

Talmon was an original member of the editorial committee established by the Israel Department of Antiquities (now the Israel Antiquities Authority) to oversee the final publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls and was a strong supporter of the speedy but responsible publication of the scrolls. Talmon himself was assigned the large corpus of calendrical texts from Qumran, which he edited and published in 2001 as part of the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series.^a

The fascinating but fragmentary and poorly understood calendrical documents confirm that the sectarian Jewish community of Qumran—most probably Essenes—followed a 364-day solar calendar, as opposed to the 354-day lunar calendar used by the Temple priests in Jerusalem and still followed by Jews today. The divergent calendars resulted in radically different views about the cosmos and, more importantly, the timing of annual Jewish festivals. The Qumran solar calendar, as Talmon argued, “was a major cause, possibly the causa causans, of the Yahad’s [Community’s] separation from mainstream Judaism.”^b