But must the word "day" only refer to daylight? The Disciples of Truth article maintains that the word "day" can only
refer to daylight:
The first mistake that is traditionally made, is to think of a 'DAY' in terms of 24 hrs. which is
man[']s definition, not the Creator[']s! He says that a 'day' is LIGHT, followed by darkness which has a SEPARATE DISTINCTION of night. While it
takes BOTH daylight and darkness to complete a 24 hr. cycle, the application of "DAY" to that complete cycle is only valid to the extent that is
measures the time from one day (i.e. dawn), to the next. (op. cit., p. 21)
But does the Bible agree with this definition? Predicting that Peter would deny Him, Jesus said:
"I say to you, Peter, the cock will not crow today until you have denied three times that you know
me" (Luke 22:34).
Now, since Jesus declared this during the Passover meal during the night portion of Nisan fourteenth, it's
undeniable that Jesus used the word "today" to refer to the "night" portion of a twenty-four hour period. According to Thayer's (p. 574), the Greek
word here translated "today" is "semeron," which means "to-day, this day." So when Peter denied Jesus three times by sunrise, which is when
roosters crow, that included "today" (see Luke 22:60-62). A similar usage occurs in Matthew 27:19 :
"And while he [Pilate] was sitting on the judgment seat, his wife sent to him, saying,
"Have nothing to do with that righteous Man; for last night [semeron] I suffered greatly in a dream because of Him."
As Thayer's (p. 574) comments, this is "where the speaker refers to the night just passed," although
the literal meaning of the word is "today," as the NASB margin notes. Since Pilate was judging Jesus during the morning hours, it's dubious to
assert that his wife's special dream had been during the daylight portion of Nisan 14th. She wasn't just getting up from a siesta! Clearly, the word
"today" can include the night portion of a twenty-four hour period.
But does Scripture provide specific evidence that a day ends at sunset or at nightfall? For example, consider
Joshua 8:29 :
"And he [Joshua] hanged the king of Ai on a tree until evening; and at sunset Joshua gave
command and they took his body down from the tree, and threw it at the entrance to the city gate, and raised over it a great heap of stones that
stands to this day."
Now why did Joshua move to remove the executed king's body by sunset? That was when the day ended, since he
was following the instructions of Deuteronomy 21:22-23 :
"And if a man has committed a sin worthy of death, and he is put to death, and you hang him on a
tree, his corpse shall not hang all night on the tree, but you shall surely bury him on the same day (for he who is hanged is accursed of God), so
that you do not defile your land which the Lord your God gives you as an inheritance."
Similarly, after Jesus was crucified, the Jews requested that Jesus' body be taken down from the stake before
sunset in order to avoid desecrating the coming Holy Day:
"The Jews therefore, because it was the day of preparation, so that the bodies should not remain
on the cross on the Sabbath (for that Sabbath was a high day), asked Pilate that their legs might be broken, and that they might be taken away"
(John 19:31).
Notice that the holy time on the annual Sabbath that year (a Thursday) was to begin at sunset Wednesday, after
the "day of preparation." The holy time didn't begin the next morning at daybreak! If the annual Sabbath, the First Day of Unleavened Bread, began at
sunset, why should anybody believe that the weekly Sabbath doesn't begin at the same time? Why use the same word "sabbath," but believe one (the
weekly Sabbath) is twelve-hours long, and the other (annual) is twenty-four hours long?
Undeniably the most problematic text for the belief the Sabbath is only twelve hours is Leviticus 23:32. Indeed, it's so problematic he
actually never directly quotes it in the article cited above. When describing the Day of Atonement's requirements, Moses wrote:
"It is to be a sabbath of complete rest to you, and you shall humble your souls; on the ninth of
the month at evening, from evening until evening you shall keep your sabbath."
Here again the sacred time extends from sunset to sunset, not just during the twelve hour daylight period.
(Likewise, does God's command "for seven days you shall eat unleavened bread" (Leviticus 23:6) mean we can eat leavened bread for seven nights from
the end of Nisan fourteenth to the end of Nisan twenty-first (Exodus 12:18)?) His main way to evade Leviticus 23:32 is to assert the word "evening" can't
both refer to the end and beginning of a day. But as a comparison of Exodus 12:18 with Leviticus 23:6 shows, the moment that ends a day can also be the
moment that begins the next. In the former text, the number of the Days of Unleavened Bread is described:
"In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month at evening, you shall eat unleavened
bread, until the twenty-first day of the month at evening."
So here, at the end of the fourteenth, we are to eat unleavened bread until the end of the twenty-first day.
But then Leviticus 23:6 says :
"on the fifteenth day of the same month there is the Feast of Unleavened bread to the Lord; for
seven days you shall eat unleavened bread."
Unless someone is prepared to assert the full day of the fourteenth is also a Day of Unleavened Bread, thus
making for eight full Days of Unleavened Bread and a self-contradictory Bible, it's necessary to conclude that the term "evening" can refer to the
moment that both ends and begins a day. Similarly, as a Sabbath-keeping group observes on a related subject:
"This would be similar to our modern use of midnight. It is the demarcation line between two days and
can legitimately be listed as the beginning of one day and the end of another day."
So it is wrong to say
"evening is [only] the tail end of a day, not it's [sic] beginning" (op. cit., p.
35).
The end of the fourteenth day begins the fifteenth. Hence, Leviticus 23:32 doesn't contradict Leviticus 23:27
:
"On exactly the tenth day of this seventh month is the day of atonement; it shall be a holy
convocation for you, and you shall humble your souls and present an offering by fire to the Lord."
The tenth day begins at sunset of the ninth, thus showing also that a "day" includes the "night" by one
definition of the word "day." One major exegetical mistakes is to assume that words in Scripture, such as "day" or "evening,"
can't have more than one meaning. Since Scripture becomes contradictory when assuming these words have only one meaning, which is a principle that
plainly contradicts any Hebrew-English or Greek-English Lexicon's listings of the definitions of words for many entries, it simply can't be
correct.
Several other problematic verses contradict the belief that days begin in the morning rather than at
sunset. Note Judges 19:9 :
"When the man arose to go along with his concubine and servant, his father-in-law, the girl's
father, said to him, "Behold now, the day has drawn to a close; please spend the night. Lo, the day is coming to an end; spend the night here that
your heart may be merry. Then tomorrow you may arise early for your journey so that you may go home."
The way to duck this text is to assert that the word "day" only refers to the daylight portion of a
twenty-four hour period during which the earth spins on its axis once. Hence, when daylight, a "day" ends, the "night" begins, not the next "day"
(i.e., period of daylight)! But as shown in the preceding paragraph a numbered day has to include the night portion in order to be complete. Otherwise, you could eat leavened bread during the nights of Nisan from the fifteenth to the twenty-first! The Day of Atonement
includes the night, or else it couldn't be from evening to evening. It's simply false to assume the word "day" have only the twelve-hour definition
when other texts contradict this meaning, such as Luke 22:34 and Matthew 27:19. For example, when Jesus prophesied that:
"so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matthew
12:40; cf. Jonah 1:17),
could the word "days" in such verses as Mark 8:31 ("after three days rise again"), Mark 9:31 ("He
will rise three days later"), and John 2:19 ("in three days I will raise it up") fail to include the intervening nights? Does anyone
believe the "Six days you shall labor and do all your work" (Exodus 20:9) of the Fourth Commandment excludes all night work in order to
correspond with "the seventh day [being] the sabbath of the Lord your God" (Exodus 20:10) referring only to daylight hours?
Another problematic text is Nehemiah 13:19 :
"And it came about that just as it grew dark at the gates of Jerusalem before the sabbath, I
commanded that the doors should be shut and that they should not open them until after the sabbath. Then I stationed some of my servants at the gates
that no load should enter on the sabbath day."
Now "as it grew dark" would include the period of twilight after sunset, but also the lessening of
light shortly before sunset as well. Since "it grew dark . . . before the sabbath," it has to mean the Sabbath immediately followed sunset,
instead of referring to the daylight period beginning the next morning following some twelve hours of intervening night time. Since workers could
have shut the gates shortly before sunset "as it grew dark," they wouldn't have broken the Sabbath to do so. It was necessary to shut the
gates then, not shortly before daybreak, since that would be holy time (during the Sabbath's night), and they would be doing a significant physical
task then to do that. Saying it would be too dark just before dawn to work isn't persuasive, since even a few lamps or
torches would provide sufficient light to close the gates then. If an enemy army had approached the city at night, would the lack of natural light be
used as a reason not to be able to close the gates?
Above, it's been briefly shown that the view that the Sabbath is only twelve hours of daylight each
week is wrong because it inflexibly assumes the exegetical principle that words in the Bible have only one definition. But since the word
"day" can refer to a twenty-four hour period, not just the twelve-hour light portion of the day, and the word "evening" as it refers to sunset both
ends and begins a day, the interpretation that Scripture supports a twelve hour day simply isn't correct. It is also mistakenly assuming the Hebrew word translated
"until" includes the end marker or component, when often it doesn't, such as when someone was unclean until evening, it didn't require all night to
become clean, but occurred at sunset (Leviticus 11:24-25). God demands that we devote and specially consecrate one-seventh of our time to Him,
one-seventh of the number of completeness, not one-fourteenth. Those half-Sabbatarians who work Friday nights and Saturday mornings before sunrise
are breaking God's holy Sabbath, and will be judged according to their knowledge:
"Those of the Pharisees who were with Him heard these things, and said to Him, 'We are not blind
too, are we?' Jesus said to them, 'If you were blind, you would have no sin; but since you say, "we see," your sin remains" (John
9:40-41).
Written by: Eric V. Snow
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