Two Ways of Counting a Day

There are two ways of counting a day, and every one of us lives by both without noticing. One is the day as we live it. The other is the day as the Bible’s calendar counts it. Most of the time they run side by side and cause no trouble, but there is one hour where they part company, and the Gospels place some of their most important events in exactly that hour.

The Lived Day and the Festival Day

The lived day is the day as our bodies feel it. You wake in the morning, you go about your work, you come home, you eat your evening meal, and at last you go to bed. When you sit down to dinner, everything in you says that this is the close of the day. The meal is “tonight,” and tomorrow is still ahead, on the far side of sleep.

The festival day, the day as Scripture counts it, begins at evening and is finished when the following daytime ends. By that count, the same dinner hour falls on the other side of the line. When evening has come on and the family sits down to eat, the biblical calendar has already moved into the next day. The meal that feels like “tonight” is, by the Bible’s reckoning, the beginning of “tomorrow.”

The overlap of these two days is where much of the confusion about the last week of Yeshua comes from. A reader who carries only the lived day in mind sees a supper in the evening, then a night, then a morning and an afternoon, and naturally counts the supper as belonging to one day and the cross to the next. A reader who keeps the festival day in mind sees all of it, supper, night, morning, and afternoon, as one day, because that day began with the evening meal.

Every appointed time of the Lord works by this rule. The weekly Sabbath, the Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and the Feast of Weeks all begin when evening comes. A household that sat down to its evening meal at the start of a feast was already inside the feast while it ate.

The four points belong together:

When these four are held in view, the time markers of the Gospels that have seemed tangled for so long fall into place, as the chapters ahead will show.

Eating, and Not Understanding

The biblical way of counting a day is not only a matter of keeping the calendar straight. It touches the way a person pays attention. If you think the new day begins only at the instant the sun disappears, you can carry on until the last moment. If you know that the new day comes with the coming of evening, you learn to watch the light, to notice when the time is beginning to arrive, and to respond while it is arriving.

Yeshua spoke about this kind of attention when He described the days before the flood.

Matthew 24:37-39 For the parousia παρουσία par-oo-see'-ah(coming-presence) of the Son of Man will be just like the days of Noah. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and they did not understand until the flood came and took them all away — so will the parousia(coming-presence) of the Son of Man be.

The people of Noah’s day were “eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage,” and “they did not understand until the flood came and took them all away.” None of the things named is wrong in itself. People must eat, and marriage was given by God. The trouble was that they were wholly taken up with these things, and so the hour came upon them while they were still at the table.

The word Matthew uses for their eating is worth a closer look. The Greek text of Matthew in the Byzantine Majority Text (Robinson–Pierpont 2018), the reference text of the YLV, has trogontes τρώγοντες tro'-go, from the verb trogo, not the common verb for eating, esthio. Esthio is the plain, neutral word for taking food. Trogo is more vivid: it is the word for chewing, for munching, for the steady working of the jaws. Luke, telling the same saying, uses the plain esthio (Luke 17:27). Matthew’s word paints people bent over their food, and the verse itself says what came of it: “they did not understand until the flood came and took them all away.” They were so taken up with the moment that they did not see that the evening had already deepened around them.

Scripture teaches the opposite habit. It does not wait for the last edge of the sun to vanish before it pays attention. It perceives when a time is beginning to come and turns toward it at once. The biblical day, with its beginning at evening, trains exactly that habit of watching.

The Ground Under the Rest of the Book

This is the end of Part One, and it is worth gathering what it has laid down, because every later part stands on it.

Yeshua gave one sign, and only one: the sign of Jonah the prophet, “three days and three nights” in the heart of the earth (Matthew 12:40). The traditional order, from an afternoon death to a resurrection found before dawn two mornings later, cannot supply three nights however it is counted. In Jonah’s Hebrew, and in the Greek of Yeshua’s words, the count of the sign names the daytimes first and the nights after them. The biblical day begins with evening, “there was evening and there was morning, day one” (Genesis 1:5). When the daytime ends and evening comes, the new day has begun, and the whole evening, before, during, and after the going down of the sun, belongs to that new day. And the day as we live it and the day as the Bible counts it overlap at the evening meal. A supper eaten as evening comes on already belongs to the next day.

With that ground beneath us, we could go straight to the table. But the sign of Jonah is not only a matter of days. The One who lay three daytimes and three nights in the heart of the earth had been given a name before He was born, and that name was chosen for what He would do. Before we count the days, Part Two opens that name, letter by letter, from the angel’s words to Joseph back to the first pages of Genesis.