Hebrew Voices #154 – Reaping the Benefits of the Medieval Aviv Calendar: Part 1

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Nehemia: Just like I would write something in English, I can write in Hebrew. I famously… well not famously, it's famous for me. I wrote my master’s thesis in Hebrew, and I wanted to write it in English, and they said, “Well, this is the Hebrew University.” And it took me longer to write it in Hebrew than it would have been in English. And then when it came to my PhD dissertation, I said, “Okay, am I going to write it in Hebrew?” They said, “We prefer you write it in English.” And that's because, over those…

Nadia: It changed!

Nehemia: It changed to where they're like, “Look, you can write it in Hebrew, but no one will read it. And the people who are going to read it, they should know English anyway.” But there's a famous joke at Hebrew University about why God never got tenure, and one of the reasons is because all of His works were in Hebrew.

Nadia: That’s funny!

Nehemia: Anyway!

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Dr. Nadia Vidro of University College London. And you’re one of the most fascinating guests for me that I’ve ever interviewed, because you spent years reading medieval Karaite Jewish literature on the calendar.

Nadia: Shalom, Nehemia. Thank you for having me here. Indeed, I had a three-year project at University College London that was all about the Karaite and Rabbanite calendars, and my job was to read Karaite literature on the calendar.

Nehemia: So, your job all day was just to read these texts talking about the Karaite calendar.

Nadia: Absolutely.

Nehemia: Wow!

Nadia: The Fritz Thyssen Foundation was very generous to fund this three-year research to just read… well, not just read, but to read those manuscripts.

Nehemia: Well, read and study and decipher.

Nadia: Read and study and decipher and analyze the manuscripts on the Karaite calendar… medieval Karaite calendar.

Nehemia: Wow. It doesn't even seem fair that someone should be paid to do that. That seems too good to be true!

Nadia: Yeah, I agree.

Nehemia: That's amazing. Wow. So, you may be one of the world’s foremost experts… No, I would probably say you are the world's foremost expert on the Karaite calendar as it was practiced in the 10th and 11th century. Would you say that’s fair?

Nadia: I've done a lot of research on this, yes.

Nehemia: Okay. Alright, so you have a couple of articles that are coming out, and I always like to refer the audience to research so they can read more. Where can they read these articles that you've written about the Karaite calendar?

Nadia: So, the article that is already out has been published in the Journal of Jewish Studies. You can find it under my name, Nadia Vidro.

Nehemia: That's the Oxford Center for Hebrew and something or another.

Nadia: Yes.

Nehemia: That’s their journal?

Nadia: They're publishing it, yeah.

Nehemia: Okay.

Nadia: And at least two more articles are forthcoming. One, about the Karaite calendar in the Diaspora, which will be coming in Aleph, that's the journal about Judaism in science.

Nehemia: Okay.

Nadia: And another one about the moon and how months were set in the Karaite calendar, and that's coming out probably next year, probably not this year, in Jewish Studies Quarterly.

Nehemia: Wow! Okay. So, this is a deep and broad topic, and I do want to get into the weeds, maybe that's kind of a pun there. I want to get into some detail, because in your article… the one article that I had the chance to skim through… I haven't had a chance to read the whole thing. I'll definitely go back and read it in more detail - you call it, Aviv Barley and Calendar Diversity Among Jews in Eleventh-Century Palestine, and Palestine, that's what I would call Eretz Israel, “the Land of Israel”.

Nadia: Yes.

Nehemia: So, what is this calendar diversity that took place in the 10th and 11th century?

Nadia: Do I need to introduce Aviv barley, or shall I start with…?

Nehemia: Let's assume the audience knows nothing, although I imagine that's not the case. But some people watching this will know absolutely nothing. If they know the word aviv, they might think that means, “spring”.

Nadia: Yes. It does mean “spring” in Modern Hebrew, but it is absolutely not the way the term aviv is used in medieval literature on the calendar.

Nehemia: I once looked up when aviv took on the meaning of “spring” in Ben Yehuda’s Dictionary. And what he does there is, he brings examples of how the word’s used throughout the centuries, and I believe it's someone like Abarbanel, or somebody like that, who's the first one to use it to refer to what earlier was called, tekufat Nisan, what we would call “spring”.

So, it's quite late that this term takes on the meaning of spring. And certainly in the Talmud, and I would say even more so in the Tanakh, it's an agricultural term.

Nadia: Absolutely, aviv is an agricultural term. In the Bible, it describes a certain state in the development of crops, and in particular, barley. We're not entirely sure what this stage in the development of barley is, and neither were medieval Karaites.

Nehemia: Okay.

Nadia: It is some sort of stage in the development of barley where it is developed enough to be damaged by hail. I can give you some verses, but I'd need to look them up.

Nehemia: That's okay. It's Exodus 9:32, but it's fine.

Nadia: Thank you! And it is also a state of barley where the seed can be parched in fire.

Nehemia: That's Leviticus 2:14.

Nadia: Thank you.

Nehemia: So, you're not just saying this as your opinion of how you understand the biblical text, or are you? In other words, what are you presenting here? Is this the opinion of the Karaite sources that you read? Or is this disputed by rabbinical sources?

Nadia: What exact stage the Aviv is?

Nehemia: No. Those two criteria you just described for barley.

Nadia: This is in the Bible.

Nehemia: Okay.

Nadia: The term Aviv appears in context where it is clear that it refers to some stage in the development of barley, where it can be destroyed by hail and parched by fire. Which means that it is some sort of relatively ripe, but not yet entirely ripe, stage in the development of barley. But that's as far as the Bible will go.

Nehemia: So, let me ask this question, because you also studied the Rabbanite calendar in that period. Are there Rabbanite sources, do you know, that say, “Oh, the Karaites are wrong, it has nothing to do with crops. Aviv is something to do with something completely…” Are there sources like that?

Nadia: No, I don't think so.

Nehemia: Okay.

Nadia: Not as far as I know.

Nehemia: So, this isn’t a matter of dispute?

Nadia: No, this isn’t a matter of dispute. Everyone agrees that Aviv is a stage in the development of barley.

Nehemia: Okay.

Nadia: The dispute is about whether Aviv is a criterion for setting the calendar because the Rabbanites set the calendar by calculation, whereas the Karaites set the calendar by observation of natural phenomena. They set months by observing the first appearance of the new crescent, and they set years. They decided when to intercalate, when to insert a thirteenth month, by how progressed the ripening of barley was in that given year.

Nehemia: Okay. And then in the Talmud it talks about how they would use… they actually talked about three criteria and then there's different passages. Have you studied any of that? Because one of them that they mention is Aviv.

Nadia: Yeah, the Talmud also mentions empirical intercalation on the basis of various criteria, one of which is Aviv, but it also mentions the ripening of the fruit of the trees, and how the lambs and different young…

Nehemia: Right, there’s a bunch of criteria.

Nadia: Yeah, a bunch of criteria.

Nehemia: And then there's one statement that says, “When Aviv is one of them, everyone is happy.”

Nadia: Yeah.

Nehemia: Hakol smechim.

Nadia: They like it when Aviv is one of them.

Nehemia: Yeah. And that was probably for some practical reasons of when you could then start selling and eating the crops, I would imagine. But anyway…

Nadia: But also because it's in the Bible. Because in the Bible it says, “Observe the month of Aviv and keep Passover.”

Nehemia: So, would you say that was - and maybe this is outside your field, because you said 10th, 11th century - but in the Talmudic period and the Second Temple period, would you say that was maybe a populist position? That it was maybe easier to convince the masses when Aviv was one of the factors versus - and I guess I'm just thinking out loud here - versus the equinox, which isn't mentioned in the Bible.

Nadia: I wouldn’t know that.

Nehemia: Okay.

Nadia: And I'm not sure we know too well how intercalation worked in Talmudic sources.

Nehemia: Okay.

Nadia: In the Talmudic period.

Nehemia: Well, Talmudic period is different. I mean, these are kind of anachronistic things by the time the Talmud’s written down. In other words, you have this letter of Rabban Gamaliel, who sends an intercalation letter to Babylon… But anyway, let's focus on the 10th, 11th centuries.

Nadia: Yeah, let's do that. Let’s focus on the Karaites.

Nehemia: This is fascinating stuff to me, and I came to many of these conclusions on my own, which sound very similar to your conclusions, but I'm coming at them from a completely different perspective. I'm coming at them from the perspective of a teenager, all I have is Mandelkern’s Concordance of the Tanakh, and I'm opening it up and trying to figure out, “Okay, I know the rabbis changed the calendar, my father told me that when I was a kid. What was the original calendar? And barley? Well, how would that even work?” It took me a long time to figure that out. It took a lot of experience to figure it out, and other people's experience that they shared with me. But let's jump into the diversity part. So, the rabbinical calendar in the 10th century… is there any diversity?

Nadia: A little. The rabbinical calendar in the 10th century is set by calculation. The calculation that is still used today was fully developed and fixed in the early 10th century.

Nehemia: Wait, slow down. It was fully developed and fixed in the early 10th century? Okay, alright. So, the narrative that we're told is that, when the Sanhedrin was abolished in the year 359, that Hillel II and his Sanhedrin intercalated all years until the coming of the Messiah. I was taught that as a kid, and it's still widely believed. Is that not accurate?

Nadia: It isn't entirely accurate.

Nehemia: Okay.

Nadia: The calculated calendar as we know it today didn't appear in a “big bang.” It underwent a development, a protracted development. In the Talmud, you see this progressive development of the calculated calendar. And this is not my research, this is the research of Prof. Sacha Stern.

Nehemia: Who’s written an incredible book about Jewish calendars that we’ll throw up on…

Nadia: More than one, more than one.

Nehemia: Okay, alright. Well, we'll throw up on the screen. One of those books that people can get on Amazon...

Nadia: So, the Jewish calendar… of course, the calculation has various elements. The calculation of the molad, that is the calculation of the main conjunction and the 19-year cycle for the intercalations, and it is very probable that they developed separately and possibly came from different sources.

Nehemia: And it didn't reach its final form until the 10th century?

Nadia: It didn't reach its final form until the 10th century, that's right.

Nehemia: Alright.

Nadia: And actually, even in the 10th century, it wasn’t entirely reckoned the same way by everybody. We know of a big calendar dispute in the Rabbanite community, between the Palestinians and the Babylonians, because they had slightly different rules for the calculation of the molad and the setting of the months. So, in the year 921-922, there was a big calendar dispute between Babylonians and Palestinians, usually known as the Saadya - Ben Meir calendar dispute. But again, Prof. Stern demonstrated that Saadya actually played a minor role in this dispute, and it was more the Babylonian…

Nehemia: Okay. Hopefully one day I'll have a period to speak to him and he’ll tell us that story.

Nadia: Yeah, he can tell us.

Nehemia: So, it comes to a culmination in the 10th century, the rabbinical calendar, but the Karaite calendar had diversity in the 10th and 11th century. And I want to read you a message I got this morning.

Nadia: Alright.

Nehemia: I'm here at Cambridge, and I was standing on a bridge on the Cam River, which is “Cam-Bridge.” I thought it was kind of cool. And I was sharing when I was going to be celebrating Pesach. And I posted it on TikTok… so you're looking at the 10th and 11th century version of TikTok, in a sense. I posted on TikTok, “I'll be doing it Sunday night, April 17th.” No big deal, just people had asked me. And somebody writes, “You're a month late. Barley was Aviv and there was enough ready for wave sheaf a month ago.” So, this is in 2022, and in your article, you bring examples of how this sort of dispute was raging in the 10th and 11th century.

Nadia: Absolutely. Karaites never agreed what the term Aviv actually means in all its details, because the Bible… well, we already discussed what it says but it isn't really enough in practical terms. If you go into the field and observing barley, as you know better than I do, you will find barley in all sorts of different stages, of all different colors and development of its kernels, and Karaites never really agreed what exact developmental stage of barley is called Aviv. They also never really agreed how much of it you need to be able to find in order to declare the month of Aviv, that is Nisan. And also, when you need to find this.

Nehemia: Well, so we've got three different things that you said there, I think. There was…

Nadia: The stage.

Nehemia: The stage.

Nadia: The stage of development. The amount, how much you need to find. And also, when. Whether you need to find it before the beginning of the month or by the time of Passover.

Nehemia: Okay. So, let’s talk about those three things. Let's talk about the stage… what were the different opinions? And here, I know it's very complicated because… and I read in your article how there are technical terms that you disagree with other scholars on, and then some of them are descriptive, like, asfar, as you know, is “yellow”.

Nadia: Yeah, they talk a lot about the colors…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Nadia: About the colors and the three stages in the development of barley that come into consideration. As Aviv is the green barley, the barley that is green, that is a pistatsio colored. They talk a lot about pistatsio colored barley.

Nehemia: That’s pistachio in American English.

Nadia: Okay.

Nehemia: And I was telling you this before the interview, that when I was a kid and I first read that in somewhat later Karaite sources, and it said, “fistaki”, and I thought, “Okay, that's pistachio - red? We're looking for red barley?” Because I grew up in America, when back in the day, in my era, all the pistachios that you bought were red, and they later found out that red dye caused cancer or something and so they don't do it anymore. Now you get natural-colored pistachios, but I really had to ask somebody. They said, “No. It's a shade of green.” And I really got one of these responses from someone in Israel, like, “Red? Like what are you stupid? It's not red, it's green!” I'd never seen a green pistachio!

Nadia: For the Karaites, it is obviously somewhere between green and yellow, because they always mention them in this order.

Nehemia: Well then after… I'm looking here at your article. Let me read this, let me read here what you wrote. You said how there's 15 stages they identified, the first four are before the head of the grain has really come out, so it's not relevant for Aviv. But there's, “Heading, pushing out ears,” that's number five. Six is, “empty”. Seven is, “milky”, and that's amazing because today we still use the term “milk stage”. Eight is, “curdled”, and I'll ask you about that in a minute. Nine is “green and tender”. Ten is, “green and doughy”, and I know exactly what that is, because we talk about “doughy” today as well. It's a term that’s used.

Nadia: Well, I cheated a bit.

Nehemia: Oh, did you?

Nadia: I looked at terminology.

Nehemia: Okay, fair enough. And modern terminology is also a bit complicated because the way they would harvest crops a hundred years ago or maybe still in some parts of the world, versus how you would do it with a combine, is different. Because with a combine you need it to really be bone dry. With the ancient method, if you harvested it that dry, it would shatter, and you wouldn't be able to get it into your barn. So, then we have eleven is “pistachio colored”. Twelve is “yellow”, and that's literally the Arabic word. Asfar is “yellow”.

Nadia: Yeah, absolutely.

Nehemia: That one’s not really subject to interpretation. How it applies, that’s subject to interpretation. Thirteen is “dust color”, I might ask you to talk about that. “White and tender” and “white and dry” is fourteen and fifteen.

Let's start with “curdled”, because you have a little discussion about “curdled”. And I think my audience is interested enough, I think, in these nuances. I don't know if a lot of audiences would be, but my audience has heard a lot of terminology over the years… I mean, I went out for something like 20 years looking at the barley, and we developed our own terminology. We also learned terminology from talking to farmers and agriculturalists, so we didn't entirely invent it ourselves, but some of it was just very descriptive of things that we saw.

And they did some of that too. You quote these calendar reports, and there's this one that I absolutely love, where they're in a field somewhere, and it says here, “A peasant mentioned that it will be ripe in ten days. And a watchman said, ‘Until the middle of the month.’” So, talk to me about that. That's amazing to me! They talk to two different guys in the same field, and they get different stories!

Nadia: They get different stories. Obviously, Karaites are an urban population. They wrote all those huge treatises about Aviv and barley, but they actually live in Jerusalem, and they don't plow, and they don't seed, and they don’t ripe… and they don’t… what is the word?

Nehemia: Harvest?

Nadia: Harvest, exactly. So, for them it's very specialized knowledge. It's not that they live and breathe agriculture, which is why when they went to the fields and then described their experiences, you often find that they had to ask the farmers and the watchmen, and the people who actually are there in the fields what they think about the state of crops and when they'll be ripe.

But they also developed their own expertise, and they sometimes mentioned that this is the kind of expertise that you can't only learn from books. You have to actually go out and see what people do.

Nehemia: Wow!

Nadia: And what it is in the fields. And if you just sit there and think, you won't get to the bottom of it.

Nehemia: That's kind of revolutionary. And I say, “wow”, because I've literally had people over the years who say, “So, tell me exactly the technical definition. What is Aviv? And how do you know what it looks like?” And it's very difficult… well, it’s difficult for me, to explain in abstract terms something that you have to have your hands on, to feel, and you get a feel for over the years. And so, this is kind of revolutionary. Tell me, I might be wrong here… so, we're dealing here in the 10th, or 11th century, and as 21st century people, we take for granted that if you want to know something, you do empirical experiments.

But wasn't there this idea, especially in Greek philosophy, that you should sit and think about things, and the empirical is untrustworthy. I think there was an idea like that. We have the famous story of, I forget, it was Roger Bacon or one of these guys, where he tells the story of how they're debating about how many teeth are in the mouth of a horse. Do you know that story? Have you heard that story?

Nadia: I don’t know.

Nehemia: It's an urban legend. A bunch of monks are sitting around at this great congress discovering how many teeth are in the mouth of the horse, and one says 20, and the other says 21, and they can't agree. And one young neophyte rises up after days of deliberations, and says, “Let's go out and look inside the mouth.” And he is promptly excommunicated and kicked out of the monastic order, because what a filthy heresy to go and look. And so, that might represent, maybe, the Christian dark ages. Is that true for the world in which these Karaites live?

Nadia: So, there's a huge amount of theoretical discussions with biblical verses drawn in and discussions of… if you declare that this stage of barley is Aviv, then what will happen to the harvest stage? Will it be harvested in time? Blah, blah, blah, blah…

Nehemia: The blah, blah, blah is the interesting part for me, so I don't want to gloss over it. Go on, we'll try to circle back to it.

Nadia: So, they're having a lot of theoretical discussion about how these different stages will fit with each other if you declare that, for example, the yellow is Aviv. How soon will it be harvested? Will it be harvested in time to bring the sheaf for the sheaf offering? Or, if a different stage is declared Aviv, will the sheaf offering be in time? So, they're trying to reconcile all those different stages with the timeline of Passover and related festivals, but they'll write those pages and pages and pages, and those treatises run into sometimes hundreds of pages just discussing the Aviv and the various parameters. But then at the end of it, at least some of them will say, “But this is all knowledge that cannot all be passed on through the book; unless you have actual experience, you can't really know all of it.”

Nehemia: Wow.

Nadia: So, they are very aware of the necessity to do it empirically, I think.

Nehemia: So… and I don't know if you know the answer to the question, I'm thinking out loud. So, in other fields of Jewish knowledge, did they also employ empirical observations like this? And one thing that comes to mind for me is there's a discussion in the Talmud about the definition of trefah, or nevelah rather, which in the Tanakh is an animal that died of itself. It talks about how one rabbi went and lived among the shepherds for a few years, and then he came back with this definition of nevelah, which is things that drive shochtim crazy today because like, “Is there a hole in the lungs?” And things like that. But he claims he learned that from living among the shepherds.

Nadia: So, you have an example there.

Nehemia: But that's a very rare example. I'm trying to think if there are examples… and do we have examples from the 10th or 11th century? And it doesn't have to be the Karaite world, even in the broader Islamic world, because they were a minority in the Islamic world.

Nadia: I think in astronomy you probably have astronomical observations, and we know of some Jews who participated in Muslim astronomical observations. So there, as well, astronomy is something that requires observation. It is not only purely theoretical, so Jews participated in that.

Nehemia: And we’ll get to that in the second half, the astronomy and the observations, but that's an interesting point. Okay. So, there were these sorts of observations… okay, interesting.

Alright, so let's go back to these technical terms, if we can, and you discussed some of this in your article. You talked about the “curdled”, mujaban or mujabban in Arabic.

Nadia: Mujabban. So, all this terminology that I worked with is in Judaeo-Arabic in general. The texts that I worked on are in Judaeo-Arabic.

Nehemia: So, let's take a second; why was it written in Arabic?

Nadia: Okay. So, Judaeo-Arabic is Arabic written Hebrew characters. The two languages in which Jews wrote in the Middle Ages were Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic, if we're talking 10th, 11th century, and they wrote in Hebrew when they wanted something for communal consumption, something to be read in the synagogue, or something to convey authority, sort of Jewish authority. The head of the Palestinian community might write an epistle, and that’ll be in Hebrew. But if it was just writing for information, if it was a business letter, if it was a scientific treatise, that kind of writing was normally done in Judaeo-Arabic.

Nehemia: In a slightly later period, not that much later, Maimonides wrote, famously, in Judaeo-Arabic.

Nadia: A lot of Jews wrote in it.

Nehemia: And there's this great exchange he has with, I think it's Judah Ibn Tibbon or someone, who writes to him, and he said, “I have all these questions. I want to come to Egypt from southern France,” from Provence, or something, or wherever he was, “to ask you these questions.” And Maimonides writes back, he said, “If you came, I wouldn't have time for you. I'm so busy.”

Nadia: He was a very busy person.

Nehemia: So, they were trying to translate into Hebrew for the Jews in Europe, who didn't know Arabic.

Nadia: That happened later. That is 12th century and later.

Nehemia: But in this period, this is the language, just like I would write something in English, I can write in Hebrew. I famously - well not famously, it's famous for me – I wrote my master’s thesis in Hebrew, and I wanted to write it in English, and they said, “Well, this is the Hebrew University.” And it took me longer to write it in Hebrew than it would have been in English. And then when it came to my PhD dissertation, I said, “Okay, am I going to write it in Hebrew?” They said, “We prefer you write it in English.” And that's because, over those…

Nadia: It changed!

Nehemia: It changed to where they're like, “Look, you can write it in Hebrew, but no one will read it, and the people who are going to read it should know English anyway.” But there's a famous joke at Hebrew University about why God never got tenure, and one of the reasons is because all of His works are in Hebrew.

Nadia: That’s funny!

Nehemia: Anyway! So, let's talk about “curdled”, mujabban, which is an Arabic term I know nothing about. Tell me what mujabban is… and there's a debate about mujabban, right?

Nadia: So, it was previously translated as something like “light green”.

Nehemia: Okay.

Nadia: With an explanation that maybe it resembled the color of some fermented cheeses.

Nehemia: Okay. Oh! Is this to do with the word, gvina in Hebrew?

Nadia: Jubun. Jubun in Arabic, yeah. Gvina…

Nehemia: Okay. So, it literally would mean something like “cheesed”.

Nadia: Something like “cheesed”, yeah.

Nehemia: Alright!

Nadia: And cheese, of course, is not hard cheese in the Middle Ages, it's sort of cottage cheesy cheese.

Nehemia: It's not Parmesan, it's more like…

Nadia: No, it's more like cottage cheese. More like those soft cheeses.

Nehemia: What do they call it, ricotta or something?

Nadia: Those types of soft cheeses we've got in the Middle Ages.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Nadia: But it never made sense to me in the context of those texts, because this was a stage that appeared before green, and the stages, as you read them out, they sort of progress. That's the progressive ripening of barley, and as that progresses, it goes from green, to pistachio, to yellow, to white, sort of; you see it and we all know it.

Nehemia: I don't think we all know it. You know it and I know it, and farmers know it. But you're saying it's something that's generally known to people who have studied this scientifically, maybe, or through observation.

Nadia: Or at least, if you see fields, you see that it does go from green to yellow…

Nehemia: I wouldn't underestimate the average city slicker.

Nadia: Right.

Nehemia: Who doesn’t have experience, and all that.

Nadia: Anyway.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Nadia: So, when crops ripen, they go from dark green, to light green, to greenish yellow, to yellow, and then what's called white. They're not really white, but…

Nehemia: Yeah. But I think even you have the word “gray” here.

Nadia: Gray.

Nehemia: Or you have “dust” color… okay, which is presumably like a sort of gray.

Nadia: Yeah, a sort of gray. So, this mujabban always came before green, which didn't make sense for it to be light green or yellowish green. And then there was another term which was translated as dark green, but that came after mujabban, after this sort of curdled...

Nehemia: Is that the ahdar ratb?

Nadia: Ahdar ratb means green and moist.

Nehemia: And doughy, or tender.

Nadia: Tender or moist. And then there's the next stage, which is green, and there’s this term, dajn.

Nehemia: Which you translate here as “doughy”.

Nadia: Yeah. Which means sort of starchy, doughy, something like that. And from the position of those terms on the ladder of the ripening stages, it became clear to me which comes first, and which comes later, and so I had to change those translations because in the original translations the light green came before dark green which didn’t make sense.

Nehemia: And the original translator, just to put it in context, he might have been translating… he was, he was translating thousands of different texts that had to do with pirates captured someone and they were ransoming them…

Nadia: Absolutely.

Nehemia: And he wasn't focusing on calendar, per se.

Nadia: Absolutely, absolutely.

Nehemia: And literally stuff about pirates and people being… I've read some of this stuff.

Nadia: Definitely, definitely, all sorts, Moshe Gil is the original translator, he translated all sorts of letters.

Nehemia: And so, he may not be giving a technical definition; you're giving more of a technical definition.

Nadia: Yes, absolutely.

Nehemia: Okay, alright.

Nadia: I had the benefit of studying a lot of those texts and comparing.

Nehemia: Right, wow. This is fascinating. So, there's a debate in these 10th, 11th century Karaite sources about which of these stages is Aviv. Is that right?

Nadia: Yes, there is a debate. Usually the ones they're debating are the green and doughy, or pistachio, or yellow.

Nehemia: Wow.

Nadia: They are debating between these three.

Nehemia: Okay. This is amazing.

Nadia: And they've never decided. Some are very sure that it's yellow, some will accept the green and doughy, some will say, “Well all three is Aviv. It's alright.”

Nehemia: Really?

Nadia: As long as all three are there.

Nehemia: So, it’s not that they didn’t decide, there were different opinions.

Nadia: Yeah, there were different opinions.

Nehemia: And it's not that one of them won in this period…

Nadia: No, that’s it.

Nehemia: Okay.

Nadia: That's it, none of them won. Not in this period, and as far as I can see, not later.

Nehemia: Not even today, apparently, but okay.

Nadia: But Karaites were open to diversity, in this sense.

Nehemia: Talk to me about that. That’s fascinating.

Nadia: Karaites in general were open to individual interpretation and diversity of opinions, and they never said that there should be one opinion that everybody should be following. In Bible interpretation, in their legal texts and in their calendar as well, they were open to this individual interpretation and diversity. So, there were different groups who followed different opinions, and not just theoretically, but really in practice you see it in the texts that people go into the same fields, observe the same barley, in the same stages, and draw different conclusions.

Nehemia: Thank you so much for joining me. This has been an amazing conversation. We're going to come back and we're going to talk more about the calendar, about the new moon, and how that was observed. Thank you.

Nadia: Thank you.

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