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What was the first calendar created in the Abrahamic tradition?

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  • Anonymous
    3 weeks ago
    Favorite Answer

    From very early times, the Mesopotamian lunisolar calendar was in wide use by the countries of the western Asia region. The structure, which was also used by the Israelites, was based on lunar months with the intercalation of an additional month to bring the cycle closer to the solar cycle, although there is no mention of this additional month anywhere in the Hebrew Bible.

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    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_calendar

  • ?
    Lv 7
    3 weeks ago

    That depends upon which strand of the Abrahamic tradition you're referring to.

    The Book of Enoch claims that the pre-Flood patriarch Enoch devised a solar calendar.  Some scholars have observed that it might not be coincidental that Enoch supposedly lived 365 years, corresponding to the number of days in a solar leap year. This would suggest that the tradition associating Enoch with a solar calendar is several centuries older than the Book of Enoch itself.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enoch_calendar

    The first century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus claimed that Noah and the other (supposedly) long-lived patriarchs in his time together devised the first calendar.

    "Now when Noah had lived three hundred and fifty years after the Flood, and that all that time happily, he died, having lived the number of nine hundred and fifty years. But let no one, upon comparing the lives of the ancients with our lives, and with the few years which we now live, think that what we have said of them is false; or make the shortness of our lives at present an argument, that neither did they attain to so long a duration of life, for those ancients were beloved of God, and [lately] made by God himself; and because their food was then fitter for the prolongation of life, might well live so great a number of years: and besides, God afforded them a longer time of life on account of their virtue, and the good use they made of it in astronomical and geometrical discoveries, which would not have afforded the time of foretelling [the periods of the stars] unless they had lived six hundred years; for the great year is completed in that interval." (Antiquities of the Jews 1.3.9)

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