ii. Hours or THE Day.—1. ‘Hour’ (pa, hora) is a word used in a considerable variety of senses in the NT. The Latin hora was borrowed from the Greek (dpa), and was to a great extent deter- mined in usage by the origin. The Greek word épa meant, in a very wide and general sense, a distin- guishable period of time, a division of time marked oft by a beginning and an end, however vaguely the bounds might be indicated. Thus dpa meant, in the most general way, a measurable or estimable lapse of time; and this sense of the word never entirely disappeared, and is found in the NT, eg. Mk 6° (twice), where it is rendered ‘day’ in both AVand RV; Mk 11", 2 Co 78, where it is rendered ‘season’? in AV and RV. The Gpo ris vuerds and ris quépas in Xenophon, Mem. iv. 3. 4, are not the ‘hours’ of night and of day, but the great ‘periods,’ the watches of night and the forenoon and afternoon of day.
The most characteristic division of time indi- cated by &pa in early time was the season of the year ; and the mythological Horai were personifi- cations of the Seasons. The use of the word in the sense of a division of the day, something ap- proximating to an hour in the modern usage, hardly begins much before the end of the 4th cent. B.C. in the extant literature; but this quickly became the most common and widespread mean- ing of the word; and from some time, probably early in the 3rd cent. B.C. onwards, the Greek word in that sense was adopted in Latin. The division, which was probably of Babylonian origin
* Assuming for the moment that the riot broke out on the last day of Purification ; but we shall see below that it prob- ably occurred on the fifth day.
+ The rendering ‘almost completed’ in AV and RY is too strong for the Greek gueAaoy cuvrersiobos, ‘ bet
t The Bezan text cvvreroumevns db rH EBdouns Hutpas, Which is inconsistent with our rendering, is evidently a later alteration to secure a more precise and definite sense than the true Lukan text.
476 NUMBERS, HOURS, AND YEARS
NUMBERS, HOURS, AND YEARS
a
(Herod. ii. 109), was according to the duodecimal system ; and from an early time in the history of this usage traces occur both of a popular division of the period of light from sunrise to sunset (the natural day) into twelve parts or Spa, and of a scientific division of the double period of light and darkness from sunrise to sunrise, or from sunset to sunset (the civil or legal day), into twenty-four (twice twelve) parts.
Hours of the latter class, one twenty-fourth part of the fixed and unvarying period, a revolution of the earth round its axis, were of absolutely fixed and unvarying length; but the words hora, épa, were rarely employed by the ancients in that sense: it was only astronomers that sometimes spoke of these Gpar lonwepwat, hore cequinoctiales, as they were called. In ordinary usage among the ancients, these words hora, wpa, had a different meaning, which arose out of the only means of measuring hours known and used in ordinary life by the ancients, the sun-dial. The dial, originally a very simple instrument among the Greeks, was improved, until it afforded a means of dividing the time between sunrise and sunset into twelve equal parts or hours, These hours were equal in length to each other during the same day, but varied in length from day to day. The earliest systematic use of this division into twelve hours among the Greeks is said to have been made during the 4th century before Christ.
While hours of this new kind were in common and popular use, the astronomers found it neces- sary for their purposes to use the equinoctial or sidereal hours of unvarying length, which they calculated by means of clepsydre or water-clocks,
There often occur in the N’T examples of a system of numbering the hours of the day. The third, the sixth, and the ninth hour, as the main divisions between the four quarters of the day, occur very often. ‘From the fifth to the tenth hour’ Ac 199 (according to the Bezan text) is a note of the hours of lecturing in a public hall of quite un- usual and even unique character in the NT; ‘the eleventh hour’ (Mt 20°) is proverbial of the ap- proaching end of an allotted time. St. John uses the numbers with exceptional accuracy : ‘the tenth hour,’ 1; ‘the seventh hour’ (in a medical obser- vation), 4°2,
The precise meaning of these expressions in cer- tain cases has been the subject of some doubt among NT. commentators; but there is absolutely no uncertainty as to the meaning in ancient pagan usage, and the doubts expressed as regards the interpretation in a few passages of Christian writ- ings are unnecessary. A certain amount of ob- seurity is introduced into the subject by the use of the word ‘day’ in two different senses: the period of light from about sunrise to sunset is called the natural day as distinguished from the period of darkness or night; a day and a night to- gether constitute the period of the legal or civil Day. In the following remarks we distinguish these two senses by the convention that ‘day’ means the period of light as distinguished from the night (Lichttag in German), and that ‘ Day’ means the legal period of a day and a night.