Jesus was not in the tomb for three days and three nights?
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| Haman Begging the Mercy of Esther, by Rembrandt (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
But Jesus was not in the tomb three days and three nights? If you were a 1st century Jew and heard someone utter the phrase “three days and three nights” you would never expect precisely seventy-two hours. Remember that you would have no wrist-mounted method of measuring hours after sunset anyway.
The correct way to interpret Scripture is to employ the historical-grammatical hermeneutic. That just means we interpret the Bible by understanding the language the Bible writers used in their own historical context. Two thousand years from now sociologists will examine flat screen relics from the 21st century and will ponder why people all over the Western world referred to Saturday and Sunday collectively as “the weekend.” Sunday is not at the end of the week, but the beginning. Odd.
Those scrutineers will be similarly perplexed by our celebration of a “birthday.” It’s not the day of your birth you celebrate, but the date, irrespective of the day. And yet, to us users of our daily clocks, these idioms are so natural that we don’t even register them as linguistically inept.
When you use the phrase “next Wednesday.” Next Wednesday means, not this coming Wednesday but the following one. We ought not hold Jesus and his contemporaries to a 21st century vernacular standard.
In those days, in that culture, it was common practice to use “three days and three nights” as argot or jargon referring to any period longer than two days and shorter than four.
In Esther 4:16 the former debutant tells Mordecai: “Go, gather all the Jews to be found in Susa, and hold a fast on my behalf, and do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. I and my young women will also fast as you do.”
When you use the phrase “next Wednesday.” Next Wednesday means, not this coming Wednesday but the following one. We ought not hold Jesus and his contemporaries to a 21st century vernacular standard.
In those days, in that culture, it was common practice to use “three days and three nights” as argot or jargon referring to any period longer than two days and shorter than four.
In Esther 4:16 the former debutant tells Mordecai: “Go, gather all the Jews to be found in Susa, and hold a fast on my behalf, and do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. I and my young women will also fast as you do.”
But then in 5:1 we are told “On the third day Esther put on her royal robes and stood in the inner court of the king’s palace, … And Esther said, “If it please the king, let the king and Haman come today to a feast that I have prepared for the king.” [She ate the feast with them (vs 6)].
Esther’s timetable was not a contradiction of her commitment to fast for three days and three nights because Jews consider any part of the day to count as a duration known as a “day and night.”
