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Unfortunately, in so doing they completely overlook the fact that there was a big difference
between Hebrew speech in the first century and English speech in the 20th century. They fail to
make allowance for the fact that in those times, nearly two thousand years ago, the Jewish people
COUNTED ANY PART OF A DAY AS A WHOLE DAY when computing any consecutive peri-
ods of time. Since Jesus was laid in the tomb towards the end of the Preparation Day (day before
the weekly Sabbath), was there throughout the Sabbath, and only rose sometime before dawn of the
first day of the week (the first day of the week having officially started at sunset on the Sabbath ac-
cording to the Jewish reckoning), there can be NO DOUBT that He was in the tomb for a period of
three days.

Writes Samuele Bacchiocchi --

The literal interpretation of the phrase "three days and three nights" as representing an ex-
act period of 72 hours ignores the abundant Biblical and Rabbinical evidence on the
IDIOMATIC USE of the phrase "a day and a night," to refer not to an exact number of
hours or of minutes, but simply to a calendrical day, whether complete or incomplete.
Matthew, for example, writes that Jesus "fasted forty days and forty nights" in the wilder-
ness (Matt. 4:2). The same period is given in Mark 1:13 and Luke 4:2 as "forty days,"
which does not necessarily require forty complete 24 hour days" (The Time of the Cruci-
fixion and Resurrection, chapter 2).

Bacchiocchi goes on to say that "it is important to note that in Biblical times a fraction of a
day or of a night was reckoned INCLUSIVELY as representing the whole day or night. This
method of reckoning is known as 'INCLUSIVE RECKONING'" (ibid.).

The ignorance of the Jewish method of computing periods of days and nights and their con-
temporary colloquialisms lead those who believe in the 72-hour entombment to make a serious
mistake about Jesus' statement, and they proceed to make much the same mistake about His proph-
ecy that He would be three nights in the tomb as well. Notes John Gilchrist: "The expression three
days and three nights is the sort of expression that we never, speaking English in the twentieth cen-
tury, use today. We must obviously therefore seek its meaning according to its use as a Hebrew
colloquialism in the first century and are very likely to err if we judge or interpret it according to
the language structure or figures of speech in a very different language in a much later age" (What
Indeed Was the Sign of Jonah?).

We, speaking English in the 20th century, never speak in terms of days and nights. If some-
one decides to go on vacation for, let's say, about two weeks, he will say he is going for two
weeks, or for fourteen days, or (in the British countries) for a fortnight. I don't recall ever meeting
anyone who speaks the English language say that he will be gone fourteen days and fourteen nights!
THIS WAS SIMPLY A FIGURE OF SPEECH IN THE HEBREW OF OLD. Therefore, right from
the very srart, we must exercise caution because, if we do not use such figures of speech, we can-
not presume that they had, in Jesus' day, the meanings that we would naturally assign to them today.
We must elicit the meaning of Jesus' prophecy in the CONTEXT OF THE TIMES in which it was
given.

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