The Calendar Before Chaos
The Bible's Flood story preserves a calendar from a more orderly cosmos - before human time went off its tracks
Everybody knows that according to the biblical story of Noah, it rained for forty days and forty nights (Genesis 7:12, 17). Less well-known is that the flood lasted for far longer.
The biblical account relates that the flood began “in the second month, on that seventeenth day of the month” (7:11). After the forty days of rain, the water levels remained elevated so that the ark “drifted upon the waters,” which continued to submerge the mountains (7:17-18, 20). It took 150 days until the destruction was complete and “God remembered” Noah and began the process of lowering the water level (7:24, 8:1). At that time, “in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month,” the ark finally landed on the solid ground on the mountains of Ararat (8:3-4). It would not be until first day of the tenth month that Noah could see the mountaintops (8:5).
The Jewish medieval commentators are intrigued, and puzzled, by this chronology. Rabbi David Kimchi (1160-1235), noting the number of days and the dates, that the 150 days are equivalent “five months of the solar months, each month 30 days” (Radak to Genesis 7:24). Radak, and other commentators, thus posit that Noah’s calendar consisted only of 30 day months. Thus, a 12 month year would be 360 days. This is neither a solar or lunar calendar. Where did it come from?
There are both ideological and historical explanations for this 360 day calendar. The ideological explanation is that the writers behind this account liked nice, neat numbers. Biblical critics, who have persuasively argued that the account of the Flood as it survives combines two earlier, independent sources, have often assigned the details of the dating to the P source (whereas the 40 days and nights comes from the J source). There is much debate about the provenance of P, but one popular school of thought ascribes it to priestly writers living in Babylonia soon after the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE. Other texts attributed to P show a preference for symbolic numbers. The numbers, such as 7 or 5 X 30, are seen as reflecting cosmic order. A later version of this tendency emerges in texts such as 1 Enoch 72-82, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Jubilees (both from the Hellenistic era) that promote a solar calendar in which the same calendrical date conforms to the same day of the week every year for eternity.
In this case, ideology might be supported by historical context. From well before 586 BCE, there existed in Mesopotamia two calendrical systems. One was a luni-solar cultic calendar that governed most of civil life. The other, though, was an administrative calendar that scholars refer to as a “schematic” or “ideal” calendar that consists of twelve months of thirty days each. There is extensive evidence that such a calendar was used by bureaucrats. As one scholar writes, “In contrast to the irregular lunisolar calendar, the 360-day year is very practical for bureaucratic calculations—it simplifies calculations and at the same time it increases the state’s demands on labour.”1 That is, if one wanted to calculate the amount of food or labor-hours one needed over the course of many months, using a set number of days in a month (30) simplifies the calculation. We have evidence that such a calendar was used from around 3,000 BCE to 300 BCE, and it is possible that it was also used earlier and/or later.
It is plausible, but speculative, that the authors of P were close enough to the scribal and bureaucratic structures of the Babylonian administration that they would have been exposed to the 360 day administrative calendar. Whether or not they did know about this calendar, though, they may have been drawn ideologically, and independently, to their own schematized calendar, at least outside of cultic contexts.
Today, many of us are familiar with calendrical dissonance. We are constantly reconciling our own administrative and official solar calendar to the calendrical rhythms of school, daycare, and fiscal accounting, not to mention those of faith communities (such as Jews, Muslims, and Hindus). There really is no escaping this situation - different modes of timekeeping are better for different purposes. Perhaps our takeaway from the Noah story is that we can always fantasize about a world in which time made sense.
In other news, for all of the fans of Ecclesiasticus (Sirah), an interview with me about the book just went live.
Lis Brack-Bernsen, “The 360-Day Year in Mesopotamia,” in John M. Steele, ed., Calendars and Years: Astronomy and Time in the Ancient Near East (Oxford: Oxbow, 2007), 83-100, at 88.