While we take for granted that time is divided into units of minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years, as well as an annual calendar of twelve months, when considering biblical chronology we cannot assume that our understanding of the passage of time is the same as that of the biblical writers.
Moreover, since the various books of the Bible were written over a number of centuries and in different places, we cannot assume that every biblical author was referring to units of time in the same way. Therefore, we must first familiarize ourselves with the reckoning of time at various times and places in the ancient world.
Units of Time
Day
The unit of time we refer to as a day—that is, a 24-hour period of light and darkness—is, perhaps, the most familiar and most easily observed passage of time. The Hebrew word יוֹם was often used to refer to such an astronomical day. However, יוֹם was also used to refer to the part of a day that was light as opposed to לָילָה , “night.” In Greek, the corresponding words have the same possible meanings, with ἡμέρα referring to an astronomical day or to the period of daylight as opposed to nighttime, which is called νύξ. In addition, Greek can refer to an astronomical day as νυχθήμερον.
The reckoning of the beginning of the day could come at dawn or sundown or some other arbitrarily chosen point, such as the modern practice of reckoning it at midnight. In Mesopotamia and in Greece the day began at sundown. The Egyptians most likely reckoned dawn as the beginning of the day. The Romans followed the modern practice of reckoning the day as beginning at midnight.
Ancient Israel reckoned the day as beginning at sundown. The purity laws of Leviticus make this clear, since a person who becomes ceremonially unclean often remains unclean for the rest of the day but becomes clean again at sundown at the end of the day. Thus holy days, such as Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, or the Day of Atonement, began in the evening.
Parts of a Day
During the eras covered by the [Old Testament], the daylight period was not generally divided into set hours. Midday (צָהֳָ רֳַ יִַםִ) occurred around noon, with morning (בְֹּק ֶר) before this and evening (עֶֶ רָ ֶב) afterward. The night was divided into watches (א ַשִׁ ְמִ ֻרוֹת ) for military purposes. Two of these are mentioned by name: the middle watch and the morning watch. Since there is a middle watch, it appears that the night was normally divided into three watches. Beckwith has argued that the Hebrew phrase “between the evenings” refers to the first watch of the evening.
During the [New Testament] era, daylight could be divided into twelve hours that were usually referenced using ordinal numbers. The Jewish practice, as followed in the Synoptic Gospels and Acts, was to measure these hours from daybreak. The Roman practice, as followed in John’s Gospel, was to measure them from midnight.
Luke and Acts only mention daytime hours that correspond to quarter days: the third hour, the sixth hour, and the ninth hour. Mark also appears to follow this scheme. Most likely these are references to quarter days, with the second quarter of the day beginning with the third hour (i.e., about 9 a.m. to noon), the third quarter of the day beginning with the sixth hour (about noon to 3 p.m.), and the fourth quarter beginning with the ninth hour (about 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.).
Nighttime was divided into four watches called “evening” (ὀψέ), “midnight” (μεσονύκτιον), “cockcrow” (ἀλεκτοροφωνία), and “early morning” (πρωΐ). It appears that the watches could also be referenced using a system of twelve nighttime hours, with nighttime watches referenced by one of the hours that occurred on a quarter of a night. Thus Acts 23:23 refers to “the third hour of the night” (τρίτης ὥρας τῆς νυκτός), which probably means the second watch (about 9 p.m. to midnight).
Week
A week is seven consecutive days. In Hebrew, it is called ַַשִׁ ְב ֻע and the seventh day is called Sabbath. In Greek, the word σάββατον, a borrowing of the Hebrew word Sabbath, can signify either a Sabbath day or an entire week.
Since the Sabbath was considered the last day of the week, the day God ceased from creating, the days of the week were numbered beginning with Sunday as the first day.
In Greece and Rome, the days were eventually named after the gods of the sun, moon, and five visible planets, as evidenced in wall inscriptions at Pompeii. Modern English day names are derived from the Latin name or its English equivalent (Sun: Sunday; Moon: Monday; Saturn: Saturday) or derive from Norse or Anglo-Saxon gods who were viewed as equivalent of the Roman gods (Tiw/Tyr: Tuesday; Woden: Wednesday; Thor: Thursday; Frigg: Friday).
Month
Months originally were reckoned from one new moon to the next. This can be seen in the Hebrew wordִׁ חֹד ֶש , which can mean “new moon” or “month.” Similarly, one of the Greek words for moon, μήνη, is related to the word for month, μήν. This period, known in modern astronomy as a synodic month, is about 29½ days. Thus there are just more than twelve synodic months in a year.
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