Dead Sea Scroll tract was precursor to Jewish calendar

An obscure Babylonian document from the world famous Dead Sea Scroll collection was almost certainly a precursor to the Jewish calendar according to University of Manchester research. Helen Jacobus, a part-time doctoral student who graduated this month, investigated one of the 972 texts found in Khirbet Qumran on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea in Jordan between 1947 and 1956. The Babylonian text known as Qumran scroll '4Q318'and kept at the Israel Antiquities Authority in Jerusalem, is thought to have been written around 2000 years ago. Shown by Jacobus to be a calendar - it contains predictions based on the moon's position in the zodiac when the sound of thunder occurs. The calendar can still be used to find the moon's position in the zodiac on a given date in the Jewish calendar - a calculation no other document in the world is able to achieve. According to Jacobus, the Aramaic month names used in the scroll are the same as those used in the Hebrew calendar today. They are, she says, Aramaic translations of the Babylonian month names.