Where a Biblical Day Begins

Most of us carry a clock in our heads that we never think about. The day begins when we get up, it fills with work and errands, and it ends when we go to bed. The date turns over while we sleep. That clock is so natural to us that we read it into the Bible without noticing, and when we do, the hours of the last week of Yeshua’s life slide out of place.

The Bible keeps a different clock, and it sets it on its first page.

Genesis 1:5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, day one.

“And there was evening and there was morning, day one.” Evening is named first. The first day of creation did not run from morning to night; it ran from evening through the night and into the morning and the light. The same words close each of the six days of creation, and the same order holds through the whole of Scripture. A biblical day begins with evening.

How a Biblical Day Runs

Laid out in order, a biblical day runs like this: evening, then night, then dawn, then morning, then the daytime. When that daytime comes to its end, the next day’s evening begins at once. There is no gap between them and no hour in the dark when the date quietly changes. The day begins at evening and is finished when the following daytime is complete.

This is not only a way of speaking in Genesis. It is the unit by which the Torah counts its holy days. When God set the Day of Atonement, He told Israel exactly how long it was to be kept.

Leviticus 23:32 A Shabbat of Shabbaton it is to you, and you shall afflict your souls (nephesh נֶפֶשׁ neh'-fesh); on the ninth of the month in the evening, from evening to evening, you shall shabbat שַׁבָּת shab-bawth' your Shabbat.

The day was to be kept “from evening to evening.” It began when evening came and lasted until evening came again. The weekly Sabbath, the Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and every other appointed time run by the same rule.

Evening Is a State, Not an Instant

The second step is where many calculations go wrong. Because we are used to clocks that turn over at a fixed instant, we tend to imagine that the biblical day must also turn over at a fixed instant, the exact moment the sun drops below the horizon. That idea sounds precise, but it is not what the text says. “The day begins at sunset” is only a formula, and the idea that a new day waits until the sun has fully gone down is a modern way of seeing. Genesis does not say “there was sunset.” It says “there was evening.”

In that age there were no clocks and no electric light, and people read the day by the slant of the sun. The latter part of the day, which the Greek of the Gospels calls opse ὀψέ op-seh', began at about the ninth hour, 3 p.m., and ran through the afternoon. As the sun declined, the shadows lengthened, the air cooled, and the colors of the sky deepened. When the daytime ends and evening comes, it is a new day, and no part of that evening belongs to the day before.

An evening is never split in half. It has three parts, and all three belong to the same new day: the evening before the sun goes down, the going down of the sun, and the evening after it has gone down. That whole evening is what the Torah calls bein ha-arbayim בין הערבים bane, “between the evenings,” and Chapter 29 is given to that phrase.

One thing follows at once. Anything that must be done as a new day opens has to be made ready in the daytime before. A performance that begins at five in the afternoon is prepared during the day, not after the curtain rises. In the same way, the preparation for an appointed time always falls in the daytime of the day before it. And a person’s “today,” from rising in the morning to sleeping at night, holds two biblical days: its daytime belongs to one, and when its afternoon is over, the next biblical day has begun.

Joseph of Arimathea

The Gospels show this clock at work on the very afternoon of the burial. Matthew tells how Joseph of Arimathea came to Pilate.

Matthew 27:57-58 When it was opsia(the latter part of the day, afternoon~early evening), there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph, who himself had also become a disciple of Yeshua. This man went to Pilate and asked for the body of Yeshua. Then Pilate ordered it to be given over.

The YLV keeps Matthew’s word here, opsia, and explains it as “the latter part of the day, afternoon~early evening.” Joseph went to Pilate in the afternoon, in the latter part of the thirteenth of Nisan. He then had to receive the body, wrap it, and lay it in the tomb, and with Nicodemus he finished all of it by late afternoon. Luke tells us what was pressing on them.

Luke 23:54 It was the day of preparation, and the sabbaton σάββατον sab'-bat-on(referring to every Moed of Leviticus 23) was about to begin.

Luke says that the sabbaton was about to begin. The coming day of rest was at the door. The great feast would begin as evening came on, and with that evening the fourteenth of Nisan had begun. That is why Joseph and those with him laid the body in the tomb in the afternoon and were finished by late afternoon, still in the daytime of the preparation day. The Greek words that these verses use for the latter part of the day and for that day of rest are examined in Chapters 34, 35, and 40. The point here is simpler: the people in the Gospels did not wait for the sun to disappear before treating the new day as come. They watched the light, and they finished their work in the daytime before.

Why This Matters for the Count

This one principle is the key to the timetable of the whole week. The greatest miscalculation in reckoning biblical time is to suppose that a day begins or ends at the moment the sun sets. Worse still is to lay a modern day, running from one dark hour to the next, over the text of the Gospels. Fall into either error and the dates will not come out right, however carefully you count.

Hold to the Bible’s clock, and the count is plain. The Last Supper was eaten in the evening that opened the thirteenth day of Nisan. The night of the arrest and the trial, the morning before Pilate, and the hours on the cross all belong to that same thirteenth day. Yeshua entered death in its daytime, and that daytime is the first daytime of the sign. He was laid in the tomb by late afternoon, and the evening that then opened the fourteenth began the first night. The daytimes and nights follow one another until first light on the sixteenth.

The principle is simple to state, but it does not come naturally, because the day as we live it and the day as the Bible counts it overlap in a way that is easy to miss. The place where they overlap is the dinner table, and that is where the next chapter goes.