Subject: Documentation Request |
Bible Note: Moran61, re: "I was reviewing one of the articles that Doc provided for you, and it did indeed include historical references to the practice of counting any part of a day as a full day." Indeed it did, but that is not what I am looking for. As regards the Jewish practice of counting any part of a calendar day as a whole calendar day I would agree, but when "nights" is added to "days" to yield the phrase "X days AND X nights" it normally refers to a measurement of a time period where "day" refers to the light portion of a 24 hour period and "night"refers to the dark portion of a 24 hour period. No one In the history of apologetics as far as I know has ever presented any historical documentation that the phrase X days AND X nights was a unique first century idiom of Hebrew/Aramaic/Greek which could mean something different than what the phrase means in English.. If you have such documentation, I would very much like to see it. That is what the OP is requesting. re: "The Jerusalem Talmud quotes rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah, who lived around A.D. 100, as saying: 'A day and night are an Onah [‘a portion of time’] and the portion of an Onah is as the whole of it' (from Jerusalem Talmud: Shabbath ix. 3, as quoted in Hoehner, 1974, pp. 248-249..." Azariah's interpretation of the meaning of the phrase, "A day and a night make an Onah, and a part of an Onah is as the whole" doesn't seem to make any sense. On the one hand he is saying that a day AND a night define an Onah and then he turns right around and says that a day OR a night define an Onah. What makes more sense is that the rabbi is saying that a day is an Onah and a night is an Onah but that any part of a day can be counted as a whole day and any part of a night can be counted as a whole night. And that interpretation is supported by Rabbi Ismael, Rabbi Jochanan, and Rabbi Akiba, contemporaries of Azariah, who all agree that an onah was 12 hours long, either a day OR a night. "Commentary on the New Testament from the Talmud and Hebraica". Also, a definition of Onah from "The Jerusalem Center for Advanced Torah Study" says: "The word onah literally means 'time period.' In the context of the laws of niddah, it usually refers to a day or a night. Each 24-hour day thus consists of two onot. The daytime onah begins at sunrise (henetz hachamah, commonly called netz) and ends at sunset (shekiat hachamah or shekiah). The night-time onah lasts from sunset until sunrise." re: "This article also lists several great examples of this practice from Scripture...http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/570" I'm sorry, but I don't see where the link shows an actual use of a phrase from the first century or before where a period of time is stated to consist of a specific number of days and/or a specific number of nights where the period absolutely couldn't have included at least a part of each one of the specific number of days and at least a part of each one of the specific number of nights. |