Pentecontad calendar

The Pentecontad Calendar is a unique agricultural calendar system thought to be of Amorite origin in which the year is broken down into seven periods of fifty days, with an annual supplement of fifteen or sixteen days. Identified and reconstructed by Hildegaard and Julius Lewy in the 1940s, the calendar's use dates back to at least the 3rd millennium BCE in Western Mesopotamia and surrounding areas. Used well into the modern age, forms of it have been found in Nestorianism and among the fellaheen of modern Palestine.cite book|title=Calendar, Chronology and Worship: Studies in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity|author=Roger Thomas Beckwith|publisher=BRILL|year=2005|page=26|isbn=9004125264]

Overview

In Akkadian, the pentecontad calendar was known as "hamšâtum"cite book|title=Hebrew Union College Annual|author=Hebrew Union College|year=1924|page=75] and the period of fifteen days at the end of the year was known to Babylonians as "shappatum".cite book|title=Standard C Date/Time Library: Programming the World's Calendars and Clocks|author=Lance Latham|year=1998|page=37|publisher=Focal Press|isbn=0879304960] The religious injunction to "observe the Sabbath" is thought to derive from the injunction to observe the "shappatum", the period of harvest time at the end of each year in the pentecontad calendar system. Each fifty day period was made up of seven weeks of seven days and seven Sabbaths, with an extra fiftieth day,cite book|title="Social Sciences"|author=Pi Gamma Mu|year=1981|page=25] known as the "atzeret".cite book|title="The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week"|author=Eviatar Zerubavel|year=1989|publisher=University of Chicago Press|page=8|isbn=0226981657] Used extensively by the various Canaanite tribes of Palestine, the calendar was also thought to have been used by the Israelites until the official adoption of a new type of solar calendar system by King Solomon.cite book|title="The Rites of Birth, Marriage, Death, and Kindred Occasions Among the Semites"|author=Julian Morgenstern|year=1966|publisher=Hebrew Union College Press|page=282]

The liturgical calendar of the Essenes at Qumran was a pentecontad calendar, marked by festivals on the last day of each fifty day period such as the Feast of New Wine, the Feast of Oil, and the Feast of New Wheat, etc.cite book|title="The Dead Sea Scrolls in English"|author=Geza Vermes|publisher=Continuum International Publishing Group|year=1995|page=54|isbn=1850755639]

Philo expressly connected the "unequalled virtues" of the pentecontad calendar with the Pythagorean theorem, further describing the number fifty as the "perfect expression of the right-angled triangle, the supreme principle of production in the world, and the 'holiest' of numbers."cite book|title="The Jewish Sect of Qumran and the Essenes: New Studies on the Dead Sea Scrolls"|author=André Dupont-Sommer|year=1956|publisher=Macmillan|page=1]

Tawfiq Canaan (1882 - 1964) described the use of such a calendar among Palestinians in southern Palestine, as did his contemporary Gustaf Dalman who wrote of the practices of Muslim agriculturalists who used Christian designations for the fiftieth day, "which in turn overlaid far more ancient agricultural practices: grape-watching, grape-pressing, sowing, etc."cite book|title="Jewish Women Philosophers of First Century Alexandria"|author=Joan E. Taylor|year=2003|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=0199259615]

Julius Morgenstern argued that the calendar of the Jubilees has ancient origins as a somewhat modified survival of the pentecontad calendar.cite book|title="The Dead Sea Scrolls"|author=Millar Burrows|year=1955|publisher=Viking Press|page=241]

ee also

*Thursday of the Dead

References