Visiting Cornwall at the end of this month?

The year is beginning draw towards a close, and I (but not my girlfriend) have four days of leave from work still unused. I've been thinking for a while I want to visit Cornwall before I leave this country,* as I've never been.† I appreciate I've left it a bit late in the year for this‡, so I think I probably ought to bite the bullet of expensive train fares and go before this month is out, as I suspect tourism there in the winter will be less than fun.

Would anyone reading this like to go there with me on a mini-break the last week in October? And does anyone who has been there before have any suggestions as to what to see, or whether going in late October is a really bad idea, or whether I can get by there without hiring a car?

* Possibly with only three of those days, keeping the last day back in case I need it for something else.

† Or at least, not since I was born!

‡ This is because I've been too busy organising Grassroots Jews and Succos meals to have had time to organise this too.

Book of Jubilees, פרשת נח part 2 of (probably) 5

Chapter 6

In a similar way to that in which the Pharisees sought to find precedents in the lives of the Patriarchs for their own innovations, Jubilees tries to trace reasons for the Jewish festivals, which God does not give in the Torah (beyond the fact, which is of secondary importance in Judaism, that they are associated with agricultural events), to the lives of the ancients.

In this case, at issue is the date of שָׁבוּעוֹת (Shāvuoth, Pentecost). Nowadays, this celebrates the Giving of the Torah at Mt Sinai, but this association did not exist in Temple times. Rather, it was invented afterwards as a means to justify the continuation of the festival once the Temple had been destroyed, and it was no longer possible to offer its requisite sacrifices.

However, this reason would not have been available at all to the author of Jubilees, because of their differing interpretation of Leviticus 23:15:

Leviticus 23:15	ויקרא כג טו-כג טו
You shall count for yourselves from the morrow after the sabbath, from the day that you brought the sheaf of the wave offering; seven sabbaths shall be complete:	וּסְפַרְתֶּם לָכֶם מִמָּחֳרַת הַשַּׁבָּת מִיּוֹם הֲבִיאֲכֶם אֶת־עֹמֶר הַתְּנוּפָה שֶׁבַע שַׁבָּתוֹת תְּמִימֹת תִּהְיֶינָה׃

Two thousand years ago, this was the subject of sectarian divisions between the Pharisees, who interpreted "the sabbath" here as the first day of Pesach, and the Saducees and Boethusians, who interpreted it as the first sabbath after Pesach. I've become convinced that in their opposition to everything the Saducees stood for, the Pharisees here threw away the baby along with the bathwater, and that the seven weeks of the Omer were indeed measured from the sabbath after Pesach. This would have made שָׁבוּעוֹת fit in with the other two Pilgrimage Festivals and occur at full moon.

At any rate, the author of Jubilees would have certainly gone with the "sabbath after Pesach" interpretation; and here is the justification he places in the mouth of the angel for the date of שָׁבוּעוֹת:

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One of the other divisions between the Pharisees and the Qumran community was the nature of the calendar. For the Pharisees, and their spiritual descendant, rabbinic Judaism, the calendar is lunisolar, based on the sighting of the new moon (with leap months intercalated every two or three years, to keep it synched with the solar year, unlike the purely lunar Islamic year, which creeps forward eleven days each year). For the Qumran community, by contrast, this was rank heresy; they believed that the true Jewish calendar had always been solar, and laid out in a highly structured order. Jubilees continues by laying out this order and its justification in the time of Noah:

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This looks like it's talking about new moons, but it's not, it's just the terminology for the first of each month, as becomes clear from its continuation below, which is incompatible with a lunar calendar:

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(It is thought that they did not actually observe a three hundred and sixty-four day year, which would get out of sync pretty quickly; IIRC, once a while they would have a week which was not counted as part of the year, which would get everything back into sync.)

The above passage then leads into a rant against the Pharisees who, with their lunisolar calendar are causing the Israelites to sin by celebrating the wrong days as yomtov, and that this will lead to mixed dancing eating blood:

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In 1 Enoch it is made clear that the practice of setting the calendar by observations of the New Moon was a practice taught to humanity by the Watchers, and part of their corruption of humanity.

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