Jews and Samaritans not only lived in many of the lands of their dispersion among peoples who used the thirty-day month, but encountered this calendar in commercial centres on the very borders of Palestine with which they had close relations. The advantages of a system in which the festivals came on fixed dates, instead of shifting within wide limits, as they must in the lunar-solar year with its irregular intercalation, are obvious,(79) and an attempt to reform the Jewish calendar accordingly may have been made more than once and in more than one region. The peculiarity of the system of the Book of Jubilees is not the uniform length of the months, but the admission of only _four_ extra days, thus making an even fifty-two weeks (364 days), which was of more concern to the author than the increased error of a whole day in the solar year.(80) We do not know whether the Dositheans of Abul-Fath and the Sadducees of Kirkisani (of whom later) agreed in this point with Jubilees, or counted _five_ extra days like the rest of the world. The former may be thought probable, but it cannot be assumed as certain. The year of 365 days is also found in the Greek Apocalypse of Baruch, c. 6. Dr. Schechter quotes Epiphanius(81) on the Dositheans as saying, “some of them abstain from a second marriage, but others never marry”; and, although “the text is not quite certain on this point,”(82) is inclined to perceive in the statement “at least an echo of the law of our sect prohibiting a second marriage as long as the first wife is alive.” The passage in Epiphanius is more than obscure, and the text is for that reason suspected. The passage runs: Ἐμψύχων ἀπέχονται, ἀλλὰ καί τινες αὐτῶν ἐγκρατεύονται ἀπὸ γάμων μετὰ τοῦ βιῶσαι, ἄλλοι δὲ καὶ παρθενεύουσιν. Whatever this may mean, it certainly is not, “some of them abstain from marriage after the death of their first wives,” nor does anything in the context justify the large changes in the text which would be required to force this sense upon it. Casaubon’s conjecture υἱῶσαι has nothing to commend it. The simplest solution of the difficulty would be to write συμβιῶσαι,(83) “some of them refrain from marital relations after having lived together, others preserve their virginity.” Whether this emendation is right or not, it is clear that Epiphanius describes his Dositheans as a kind of Encratite ascetics, while the prohibition of polygamy—whether contemporaneous or consecutive—by our sect has a totally different ground; of asceticism there is, indeed, no symptom in its ordinances.