Scientists may have solved a 2

Researchers may have solved a long-running mystery surrounding the Dead Sea Scrolls by proposing that the Qumran sect really did use its distinctive 364-day calendar. Its perfectly ordered 52-week system kept holidays on the same weekdays, but it slowly drifted out of sync with the seasons because it was shorter than the true solar year. Scientists may have solved a 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls mystery.

Researchers have debated for decades whether the Qumran sect actually followed its unusual 364-day calendar or whether the system existed mainly as a religious and theoretical ideal. A study from Tel Aviv University argues that both possibilities may be partly correct. According to the proposed reconstruction, the sect likely used the calendar during its early history, when disagreements over religious dates contributed to its separation from the Jerusalem establishment.

Later, however, the system may have been abandoned because of a fundamental astronomical problem and changing political relations with the Hasmonean leadership under Alexander Jannaeus. Eshbal Ratzon of the Department of Jewish Philosophy and the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at the Entin Faculty of Humanities. The findings were published in the Tarbiz Quarterly for Jewish Studies.