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The Essene calendar, the calendar attested in I Enoch and the Book of Jubilees, consisted of a solar calendar of 364 days divided into seven-day weeks, twelve months of thirty days each except for one extra day in the last month of each quarter (Jaubert 1965:27; Pfeiffer 1969:64-65; Vanderkam 1998:55; Finegan 1998:44). The Feast of Unleavened Bread, Feast of Trumpets, Feast of Tabernacles, and Feast of the Great Day (often seen as the eighth day of the Feast of Tabernacles), always began on Wednesday, actually on Tuesday evening as the Jews began days at evening not midnight (Jaubert 1965:10; Simon 1967:73). Trumpets, Tabernacles, and the Great Day always occurred in the seventh month as set forth in the Law of Moses (Leviticus 23:24-44). As Nisan 15, the annual Sabbath, or Passover Sabbath, marking the start of the seven-day Feast of Unleavened bread began at sunset Tuesday night, the Essene observance of the Passover Seder was always on a Tuesday night (Finegan 1998:43, 48).

Jaubert set forth in a simple chart her understanding of the calendar (Jaubert 1965:27) shown below.

David Flusser suggests that the Essene calendar differed significantly from that of the priests in order for the Essenes to distance themselves from the Jerusalem establishment. He wrote:

    The use of their own calendar was the most particular way in which members of the sect differentiated themselves from the rest of Israel. They celebrated their festivals on different dates, with the deliberate intention of differentiating themselves from the other Jews. This is a phenomenon typical of many sects throughout the world. Even among the Jews, the Samaritan calendar is different from the Karaite one, and both differ from the common Jewish one. The calendar of the Sages, of the whole House of Israel, was different from the Essene one not only in the dating of the festivals, but in its whole conception of the year. The Essenes had a sophisticated solar calendar, in which there were fifty two weeks, and the festivals always began on the same day of the week. In this they were different from other Jews, who lived by a lunar calendar.(Flusser 1989:43.)

Jaubert concludes:

it is certain that, at the beginning of the first century, A.D., there existed two liturgical calendars. In one of these the feasts were assigned to days of the lunar month; this was the official calendar, about which we can find information in later rabbinical Judaism. In the second, the feasts always fell on fixed days of the week. The character of this calendar may now be discovered in contemporary Jewish sources. It is witnessed only in its Jubilees-Qumran type; but it is probable that it also existed in modified forms which could have either preserved an intermediary stage of the calendar's development or attempted a certain compromise with official reckoning. (Jaubert 1965:52.)

One of the elements leading to Jaubert's research dealt with the dating of the Last Supper and the day of the Crucifixion. She writes:

The date of the Last Supper is linked with the problem of the day of Jesus' death, a question which has occupied exegetes since the end of the second century. In the present work a new solution is proposed, based on an ancient Jewish calendar, recently discovered, and on an Eastern patristic tradition which has all at once been illuminated by the new calendar. (Jaubert 1965:9.)

Benedictine scholar and archaeologist Bargil Pixner, who lived on Mt. Sion in the Dormition Abby, agreed holding that Jesus' Last Supper occurred on a Tuesday night but adding that it took place in the guesthouse of the Essene community on Mt. Zion in Jerusalem. "To my mind" writes Pixner "this took place in the Essene guesthouse on Mount Zion on the Tuesday night" (Pixner 1992:64; see also Pixner 1976, 1990, 1997).

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