Enoch and the Calendar
The Genealogy of Adam
New to the column? We’re doing a close reading of Genesis, which started in September 2022. Visit the Archive and plunge in, or look here to get oriented.
I have spent a lot of time exploring what we know about Enoch — much of it invented by later readers of the Bible who thought that someone who “was gone, because God took him” must have done something remarkable. His departure for parts unknown was understood as including some sort of metaphysical transformation.
What we haven’t done yet is try to understand why such a remarkable individual would be given such short shrift in The Genealogy of Adam (or perhaps I should say in the version of the Genealogy included in Genesis 5). That’s what we’re going to look at today. To do so, we turn back to the expanded Enoch entry in the genealogy presented in Jubilees:
Jubilees 4:17 This one was the first who learned writing and knowledge and wisdom,* from (among) the sons of men, from (among) those who were born upon earth. And he wrote in a book the signs of the heaven according to the order of their months, so that the sons of man might know the (appointed) times of the years according to their order, with respect to each of their months. 18 … And their weeks according to jubilees he recounted; and the days of the years he made known. And the months he set in order, and the Sabbaths of the years he recounted, just as we made it known to him.
That is, Enoch was the guy who first set up the calendar. James Kugel explains what kind of calendar he set up, according to Jubilees:
Months are (as in today’s civil calendar) arbitrary units of days with no connection to the moon; every month must consist of exactly 30 days, so that 12 months equal 360 days. The Interpolator [who created a 2nd edition of Jubilees] further specified that the official year is to consist of 364 days; that is, to the 360 days of the 12 months were added four apparently extramensual days (i.e., free-floating days outside the regular sequence of months) at equal intervals, one apiece after the 3rd, 6th, 9th, and 12th months (see 6:23–31). The official year thus had exactly 364 days or—more to the point—exactly 52 Sabbaths.
You can read about this in more detail here, and in far greater detail in works by a scholar named Sacha Stern, who has written extensively on the subject. The calendar that seems to us so stable and predictable was anything but during the biblical period.
Sure enough, the “Astronomical Book” of 1 Enoch (chs. 72-82) describes the equinoxes and solstices, summing things up this way:
1 Enoch 72:32 And on that day the night becomes shorter, and amounts to nine parts, and the day amounts to nine parts, and the night becomes equal with the day.* And the year amounts to exactly three hundred and sixty-four days.
Lest you think the idea of Enoch as knowing the secrets of the calendar is strictly heretical, to be found only in the material that didn’t enter Jewish tradition, there is this, from Pirqei deR. Eliezer (as translated in Kugel’s Traditions of the Text):
"And Enoch walked with God" [Gen. 5:24] [this means] Enoch acted in keeping with the methods of calculation that God had given to Adam. And Enoch passed on the secret of intercalation to [Methuselah and Methuselah to] Noah and he intercalated the year and said, "Yet all the days of the earth, seedtime and harvest and cold and warm, and summer and winter, day and night shall not cease" [Gen. 8:22].
It’s not as if our own calendar has existed since dirt was new. You may have learned, as I did, that George Washington was born before England adopted the Gregorian calendar. His Feb. 11th birthday “became” Feb. 22nd, and people rioted with the demand, “Give us back our 11 days!” It was not until the 20th century, after the revolution, that Russia adopted that calendar. Jewish newspapers published in the 19th century that needed to advertise a secular date had to give two of them: one on the Gregorian calendar for readers in central Europe and one on the old Julian calendar for readers in Russia.
So it should be no surprise that there were calendar disputes in ancient times as well. The fact that the Bible uses three different systems for naming the months tells you right away that things were not set in stone. (See pp. 289–291 of The Bible’s Many Voices for a listing and discussion.)
If you’ve ever wondered why the Jewish New Year begins on the 1st day of the seventh month, you realize that when the year starts is another source of calendar disagreement. David Clines notes:
A long debated question in studies of the Israelite calendar and of pre-exilic chronology is: was the calendar year in Israel and Judah reckoned from the spring or the autumn?
Compare these two biblical verses, and you too may wonder about this:
2 Sam 2:11 The length of time that David reigned in Hebron over the House of Judah was seven years and six months.
1 Kings 2:11 The length of David’s reign over Israel was forty years: he reigned seven years in Hebron, and he reigned thirty-three years in Jerusalem.
Now. As we’ve said, with Genesis 5 we are back to reading a section of the Bible, like Genesis 1, that’s under heavy priestly influence. Compare the distinctly patterned 7-day creation of Version 1 with the loosey-goosey Version 2, in the J voice, that follows it. As we’ll see when we read the story of the Flood (coming soon!), priestly texts like to be precise, including the dates when things happen.
The Jewish party line is that the months are lunar but the years are solar (more on this when we get to Gen 7:11). The Enoch who was so associated in the late Second Temple period — the period of the Dead Sea Scrolls, when so much of the Apochrypha and Pseudepigrapha were written — could not be allowed advertising space in the book of Genesis for a 364-day solar year, unconnected to the moon.
Those who have not yet (!) had enough of Enoch can look here on the Bible Odyssey site and follow the links there and (of course) those in earlier posts in this series. Next time we’ll turn to Enoch’s son Methuselah, who has been kicking his heels for upwards of nine centuries waiting for us. See you then.