Q: I understand that the Jews mark their day from sun down to sun down. With this in mind, could you please explain Acts 2:15 where Peter is responding to the people that are saying that the tongue talkers are not drunken, seeing it is but the third hour of the day. My King James center margin says that this refers to 9:00 in the morning. My question is if the day starts at sun down how can "the third hour" refer to 9:00 A.M.? Does the first hour refer to the first hour after sun down and so on? What am I missing?
A: The answer to this puzzle is actually fairly simple. In our modern system, how can 3:00 (third hour) be in the middle of the afternoon if the day begins at midnight? It is because the 24 hours are divided into two sets of twelve. One begins at midnight, the other at noon. In Biblical Israel, the day (in the calendrical sense) began at sundown, but night and day were divided into hours independently of one another. Assuming day begins on average about 6:00 AM (on the modern system), three hours later would be about 9:00 am. This is an approximation, however, since unless you live on the equator, the length of a day depends on the time of year. Since an hour was defined as one twelfth of the daylight (as measured on a sundial), an hour was also longer in the summer than it was in the winter.
David
Brown
AMF International
http://www.amfi.org