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Money and measures
Hours and watches
12 hours of daylight · the third hour ≈ 9 a.m. · three, later four, night watches
People in the Bible counted the hours of daylight from sunrise: “Are there not twelve hours of daylight?” (John 11:9). The third hour was about 9 a.m., the sixth about noon and the ninth about 3 p.m., when Peter and John went up to the temple to pray (Acts 3:1). Because daylight was always divided into twelve, an hour in Jerusalem lasted about 70 minutes in midsummer and about 50 in midwinter. Time was told by sundials and water clocks; 2 Kings 20:11 speaks of a shadow on “the stairway of Ahaz”.
The night was divided into watches, the shifts of the guard. The Old Testament knows three: the first, the middle (Judges 7:19) and the morning watch (Exodus 14:24). Under Roman rule people counted four — evening, midnight, cockcrow and morning (Mark 13:35) — so “the fourth watch” (Matthew 14:25) was roughly 3 to 6 a.m. In Jewish reckoning a new day began at sunset, as in Genesis 1: “there was evening, and there was morning”.
Key verses
Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours of daylight? If anyone walks in the daytime, he will not stumble, because he sees by the light of this world.About the third hour he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. ‘You also go into my vineyard,’ he said, ‘and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. He went out again about the sixth hour and the ninth hour and did the same thing. About the eleventh hour he went out and found still others standing around. ‘Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?’ he asked.One afternoon Peter and John were going up to the temple at the hour of prayer, the ninth hour.Gideon and the hundred men with him reached the outskirts of the camp at the beginning of the middle watch, just after the changing of the guard. They blew their horns and broke the jars that were in their hands.Therefore keep watch, because you do not know when the master of the house will return—whether in the evening, at midnight, when the rooster crows, or in the morning.During the fourth watch of the night, Jesus went out to them, walking on the sea.Sources
Adapted and shortened from the Tyndale Open Bible Dictionary · CC BY-SA 4.0
Tyndale Open Bible Dictionary © 2023 Tyndale House Publishers · CC BY-SA 4.0 — Watch; Day: New Testament
Adapted from Tyndale Open Bible Dictionary: articles chosen, shortened and retold in our own words (history, nature and daily life only) and, in languages other than English, machine-translated. The original work by Tyndale House Publishers is available for free at tyndaleopenresources.com.
