When Does A Biblical Day Start (PART 1)

Today, we will examine the controversial question of “When does a Biblical day start?” This is PART 1. 

Of course, whether a biblical day starts in the morning or with the previous evening, it has been a topic of great discussion, sometimes heated, for at least twenty centuries, and that is a long time! 

From my research, I have found that both sides (pro and con) present compelling evidence supporting their respective positions. Given this, you might ask, “Why even bring up the dispute if both sides seem to make a valid case for their beliefs?” I have my reasons, which you will learn in this study series. 

To begin, rather than argue about what this or that Bible verse says or does not say, I want to take a different approach to answer the all-important question, “When does a biblical day start?” Let’s begin with learning about the known positions from within cultural Jewish history, then continue with more historical information on biblical authority and prophecy. Today, we will start with a teaching article from the Jerusalem Post published in 2009, "From Sun to Moon," when they interviewed Hebrew University Professor Rachel Elior to learn from her years of research and scholarship in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Please join me for today's Real Israel Talk Radio biblical study, Episode 175 PART 1. 

Transcript

Today, we will examine the controversial question of “When does a Biblical day start?” This is PART 1. 

Of course, whether a biblical day starts in the morning or evening has been a topic of great interest for at least twenty centuries, and that is a long time! As I previously mentioned, through my research, I have found that both sides present compelling evidence in support of their respective positions. Given this, you might ask, “Why even bring up the dispute if both sides seem to make a valid case for their beliefs?” Would it not be simple to choose the side of the argument that best expresses the evidence and then leave it, so we can all put down our swords and stop continually arguing about biblical calendar issues? Well, I wish it were that easy, but it’s not because even though we live among people who sincerely want truth in scholarship, others love to argue for the sake of engaging in arguments. So, we have this written warning from 2 Timothy 2:15-17.

• (NKJV). Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. But shun profane idle babblings, for they will increase to more ungodliness. And their message will spread like a disease.

For today’s study, rather than spend time arguing about what this or that Bible verse says or does not say, I want to take a different approach to answer the all-important question, “When does a biblical day start?” Let’s begin with the positions in Jewish cultural history, and then continue with biblical authority and prophecy. We will start with Hebrew University Professor Rachel Elior and her scholarship, as discussed in a 2009 Jerusalem Post article. In 2021, I had the privilege of speaking with Professor Elior, who proved that she still maintains her studied opinions. I will read the article as it appeared in the Jerusalem Post.  

The scene could be out of the Haggadah—a group of rabbis sitting on the floor in a circle through the night, probably reclining on pillows, scrolls scattered about them, engaging in heated disputation until the pale light outside signals that a new day is upon them. The fact that this particular gathering, mentioned in the Talmud, is held in an attic (aliyat gag) might suggest to a modern reader that there is something clandestine about it, perhaps a desire to take distance from Roman ears or even from the surrounding Jewish population. Clandestine or not, this meeting, along with all the similar gatherings that preceded and followed, contained the seeds of revolution—the radical restructuring of Jewish religious thought and practice that followed the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. 

According to Prof. Rachel Elior of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the rabbis were involved in nothing less than "a reinvention of Judaism... They were closing an old world based on prophecy and angelic revelation and opening the sacred canon to human reinterpretation." A glimpse into that intellectual ferment is provided in the brief depiction in the Talmudic tractate Shabbat (13b) of the rabbinic gathering, perhaps in Yavne, which had become the major center of Jewish learning after the destruction of Jerusalem. "That man should be remembered with favor," the passage says in reference to one of the participants in the meeting, "his name being Hanania son of Hezekiah, for if it were not for him, the Book of Ezekiel would have been suppressed and withdrawn as its teachings contradict those of the Torah. What did he do? They brought him jugs of oil [for lamps], and he sat in the attic and expounded upon the texts [through the night]." What Hanania and his colleagues were engaged in was a compilation of all the Hebrew religious texts composed up to that time. The works they would choose from this library would constitute the Jewish canon, which henceforth would be the only texts deemed to have divine authority. 

In the end, a consensus formed around 24 works, including the five books of the Pentateuch, which together comprise the Bible. But what of the works excluded from the canon? Many were of comparable literary and religious quality to those chosen, says Elior, a professor of Jewish philosophy and Jewish mystical thought. "To many of the Jews of the first millennium BCE, all the texts had been equally holy," she says. "The [excluded] Book of Enoch or Book of Jubilees was certainly not considered less sacred than the [canonical] Book of Judges or Esther or Daniel." Yet the excluded texts - close to a dozen major works - were not just abandoned but excised as if they were a malignant growth. "Whoever reads them," declared Rabbi Akiva, one of the foremost sages involved in the process, "will have no place in the world to come." Left to die, some of the expelled texts were rescued and adopted by another religion. Newborn Christianity, which regarded itself as the successor to Judaism, incorporated these texts into its own corpus of holy works, along with the Old Testament, as the Hebrew Bible came to be known. 

In time, Jewish scholars would rediscover the repudiated texts of their ancestors in Greek, Ethiopian (Ge’ez), Syriac, Armenian, and Slavic church translations. These writings, known as Apocrypha ("hidden scriptures" in Latin), would never be reincorporated into the Jewish library but would remain for scholars to puzzle over as they tried to understand by what criteria the texts had been rejected. HALF A century ago, another lost library with a mystery attached surfaced on the shores of the Dead Sea, this one having been literally lost for 1,900 years after being hidden in the caves of Qumran. Many of these Dead Sea Scrolls would have been suppressed, says Elior, for the same reasons that the previously known apocryphal books were suppressed. In her recently published (Hebrew) book, Memory and Oblivion - The Mystery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, she offers a bold and coherent narrative to explain events about which scholars have long held contrary views. 

The short reason for the canon/Apocrypha divide, she suggests, was a dispute over the calendar. The more profound explanation involves a power struggle between the old priestly order, which believed its rulings to be divinely inspired, and an emerging class of rabbis espousing a different narrative —one that gave human reason and laws a role in shaping the religion. Elior demonstrates how mystic notions, such as cosmic calendars and heavenly chariots, were part of a power struggle whose outcome would affect how Judaism is practiced to the present day. For centuries, the Israelites had marked time according to a solar calendar drawn up by the priestly caste, but regarded as divinely inspired. 

The calendar emulated the pattern set by God when He created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. The number seven would become a mystic measure of Jewish time. The Israelites adopted a seven-day week, apparently the first people in the world to do so, and they, too, rested on the seventh day. Every seventh year was designated a shmita year when the earth itself rested and lay fallow. Each cycle of seven times seven years, totaling 49 years, would be followed by a jubilee year, a new beginning when indentured servants were freed and leased land reverted to its original owners. The time between the exodus from Egypt to Moses's meeting with God on Mount Sinai would be remembered as seven weeks. Joshua would lead the Israelites across the Jordan in a year of jubilee. There would be, until this day, seven days of mourning, seven days between birth and male circumcision, seven days of female menstrual impurity. 

Elior terms the priestly calendar an exceptional mathematical construct that reflected a presumed cosmic order revealed to Enoch (Chanoch, in Hebrew), an intriguing biblical figure central to the priestly narrative but shunted aside by the rabbis. 

In Genesis (5:18), he is mentioned briefly in the long list of descendants of Adam - the seventh generation of the patriarchs of mankind, and thus safely distanced from the incest that necessarily marked the earliest generations - but his listing is unique. As with all the others, it gives the number of years he lived - 365 in his case, not coincidentally the number of days in a year - and tells whom he begot, Methuselah, who lived 969 years and in turn begat Noah. However, the thumbnail biography of Enoch does not end like all the others with the words "and he died." Instead, it says, "And Enoch walked with God, and he was not; for God took him." The Bible does not elaborate on this, but the Apocrypha does. Several versions of the Book of Enoch preserved by the church have been found in different languages. (Several scrolls of Enoch turned up in Qumran as well, in Aramaic.) They describe Enoch being brought up to heaven and granted immortality along with a two-way ticket. At God's direction, he is taught by angels to read, write, and calculate numbers—the first human being given this knowledge. He then returns to Earth to share with humankind what he has learned, including the solar calendar.  

The priests, wrote Elior in an earlier book, The Three Temples: On the Emergence of Jewish Mysticism, viewed this calendar as "a cyclic reflection of an eternal divine order." The priests were the guardians of the calendar, privy to secrets imparted by angels, and, like Enoch, would serve as conduits between the heavenly and the terrestrial. It was members of the priestly caste and prophets, many of whom were priests, who wrote the books that would form the Bible, as well as the books that would become the Apocrypha. Everything the priests wrote was considered sacred because they were, in effect, taking dictation from the angels. They regarded the angels as their heavenly counterparts and saw themselves as working with them to ensure a synchronization of the cosmic order in heaven and on earth. THE MOST tangible earthly manifestation of the solar calendar was the priestly work roster on the Temple Mount. Twenty-four priestly families, the same number as the number of hours in a day, took weekly turns attending to animal sacrifices and other Temple rituals. 

Like army reservists today, members of one of these families would go up to the Mount on Sunday morning and officiate until relieved by the next family a week later. These priestly "watches" gave a time frame to the life of the entire community, says Elior.  

From the time the Temple was built by Solomon in the 10th century BCE, the High Priest was chosen from a family line descended from the priest Zadok, who had carried the Ark of God in David's time and anointed David's son, Solomon, as king. The last Zadokite (Sadducee) high priest was ousted during the political chaos that preceded the Hasmonean revolt in the second century BCE. The Hasmoneans, a priestly family but not of the Zadokite line, expelled the Hellenizers from Jerusalem; instead of restoring the Zadokite line, they installed their own members in the high priesthood. Some of the Zadokites and their followers challenged the legitimacy of the Hasmonean priestly leadership and seceded from Temple service. This conflict between the Zadokite "secessionists," as Elior calls them, and the Hasmonean usurpers is a recurring theme in many of the most interesting scrolls found at Qumran.  

Elior views the Qumran scrolls as a Zadokite library, not an Essene library as has been the consensus view. Amid the chaos and intense religious ferment of the Hasmonean period (152-37 BCE), new voices began to be heard - those of scholars known as Pharisees who disputed the legitimacy of the Hasmonean priests and kings and who argued with the Zadokite priests about the solar calendar and their claims to possess an open line to the divine. These scholars, who would later become known as rabbis or sages, were dissatisfied with the exclusiveness of the priests and the power they had acquired through their claims to esoteric knowledge as confidants of angels. In a game-changing move, the rabbis declared that the age of prophecy had long since ended and that the priesthood had been severed from ongoing access to higher authority. 

According to one rabbinic tradition, prophecy had ended with the destruction of the First Temple in the sixth century BCE. According to another, it ended when Alexander the Great and the Hellenizers arrived two centuries later. The priests vigorously rejected this downsizing. The rabbis favored a lunar calendar, says Elior, because they saw it symbolically freeing the nation from dependence on a closed priestly caste locked into the solar calendar and claiming divine authority. They wanted to symbolize instead man's share in determining time and his own fate.

"They declared that human understanding of sacred writings was a legitimate source of authority." The month would now not commence according to a solar calendar precalculated for eternity but by mortals scanning the sky for the new moon, perhaps disagreeing about the sighting among themselves, perhaps even erring. A MODERN-DAY reminder of the rabbinic victory in their epic struggle with the priests can be witnessed outside Orthodox synagogues one night a month when the congregation emerges to pronounce the prayer for the new moon. In choosing the works that would comprise the biblical canon, Elior says, the principal criterion of the rabbis was to exclude those that invoked the solar calendar and endowed the priests with ongoing divine authority. "They were saying by this, 'The old age has ended and a new age has begun.'" 

Similar symbolic moves followed the French Revolution, when a radically new calendar, including a 10-day week, was adopted. A similar shift occurred after the Russian Revolution, when the Gregorian calendar used in the West was substituted for the Julian calendar followed by the Russian Orthodox Church. The issue was less the measure of time, notes Elior, than the measure of man's sovereignty. Alongside the texts that the rabbis accepted into the canon, they created a parallel framework of oral law that they, not the priests, would develop and become ever more relevant over the centuries to the evolving circumstances of Jewish life.  

The first major compilation, the Mishna, would be completed by 200 CE. In the following centuries, sages in Palestine and Babylonia would complete the Talmud. These compilations would remain oral - the ancients having a capacity for memorizing enormous texts - until the eighth or ninth centuries when they were finally put into writing. The sages represented a strongly democratic strain. The study was open to all Jewish men, regardless of dynasty and inherited privilege. Rabbi Akiva had been a shepherd. Other sages had been farmers and craftsmen. Resh Lakish was a reformed bandit. The Oral Law, says Elior, was "open to study and interpretation by the entire male Jewish population." The meritocracy that emerged displaced the hereditary leadership of the priestly clans, which had traced their dynasty, link by link, back to Moses's brother, Aaron. "The rabbis transferred the center of gravity," says Elior, "from a regular, priestly ritual, anchored in holy time and holy place, to an ever-changing order entrusted to sages from all classes of the population, who took charge of humanly declared time and taught a new perception of holiness." The debate between the sages and the priests ended abruptly with the Roman conquest. 

Following the destruction of the Temple, the priestly order was shattered, and the rabbis were free to reconfigure the playing field. They not only discarded the apocryphal texts but, according to Elior, probably amended some passages in the books they would include in the Bible to minimize references to the solar calendar, to angels, and to the story of Enoch. By doing so, the sages prepared the Jewish people for the long haul through the ages. The conduit to the divine was no longer a monumental building in Jerusalem served by a priestly caste. As they went into exile, the Jews took with them the Sabbath and the Bible, but were no longer dependent on a specific holy place or on priestly intermediaries. From now on, a quorum of 10 ordinary Jews assembling in the humblest of rooms, or in no room at all, could, anywhere in the world, talk directly to God.

Rabbi Israel Drazin – Received Semicha in 1957. Ph.D. in Judaic Studies. Author of 54 books, including a series of five volumes on the Aramaic translation of the Hebrew Bible. A Master's Degree in psychology. A Master's Degree in Jewish Literature. An attorney and a rabbi):

• “It is well known that Jews begin their day in the evening at sunset, not at midnight and not at daybreak, but this was not always so. Many scholars are convinced that the biblical Israelite day started at daybreak. It seems possible that the Judeans who were exiled to Babylon accepted the Babylonian practice of beginning the day with the prior evening. We know for certain that the day began in the Temple at daybreak, and it is assumed that the priests in the Temple retained the ancient practice for as long as the Temple existed. When the Bible states, “there was evening, and there was morning, one day” in Genesis 1:5, its meaning is literal: God completed what was stated earlier during the “daylight period,” and this was followed by evening, and when morning came, the day ended – “one day.” The Hebrew is erev and boker. The first means “evening,” and the second “morning” or “daybreak (Shachar) 

Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, wrote:

• …Finally, the festival calendar clearly alludes to a division of time that regards the evening as part of the day just ended. ... Second, the Talmudic innovation of reckoning a day from the eve before suggests a larger view of life. While we may never know what prompted the Rabbis to reconfigure the day, the existential benefit is indisputable.

See 2 CORINTHIANS 6 about the Temple. 

On today’s show, I read an article published in The Jerusalem Post in 2009, which presented historical information about the development of ancient and modern Judaism, as taught by Hebrew University Professor Rachel Elior, based on her scholarship of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In 2021, I had the privilege of speaking with Professor Elior, who demonstrated that she still maintains accurate opinions. In our next episode – Part 2 - we will continue to examine Judaism’s history as it relates to biblical authority and prophecy from the late Second Temple Period and into the years of Yeshua’s first-century public ministry. Thanks for joining me today. I’m Avi ben Mordechai, and this is Real Israel Talk Radio.