Calendars and Divination in the Dead Sea Scrolls: The Case of 4Q318: Zodiac Calendar and Brontologion

The corpus of mainly Hebrew texts found in the caves at and around Qumran, by the Dead Sea, known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, consists of the remains of a large body of writings by different Jewish groups who flourished in Israel around 2,000 years ago.There are a substantial number of biblical texts from which scholars are currently learning about the textual development of different books in the Hebrew Bible. The archives of those who wrote or preserved the scrolls also contain a variety of non-biblical texts, these include prayers, biblical commentaries, rules of a community who may have lived at Qumran or belonged to its sect, different kinds of calendars, and two texts which explicitly use the zodiac.One of these is a zodiacal physiognomic text in Hebrew, written in code; and the other is lunar zodiac calendar with a divination text, catalogued as 4Q318 (4Q stands for Qumran Cave 4) with the title 4QZodiology and Brontology ar (‘ar’ denotes that the text is written in Aramaic); this author prefers the title 4QZodiac Calendar and Brontologion, an adaptation of that assigned to the text by Geza Vermes.