TWICE ROUND THE BIBLE CLOCK
Those travellers who have noticed how turbaned or fezzed native merchants will gladly wait for half a dozen hours under the colonnade of some hotel at Tangiers or Cairo on the doubtful chance of concluding a bargain with the errant Englishman, which does not involve half a dozen francs, may have some idea of the small value which the modern Oriental sets upon his time. The sun is his only clock, and even that suits him rather to bask in than to scrutinise. The thoughts and habits of men change even less in the East than the features of Nature, and we are confronted with just the same easy elasticity as regards anything to do with definite hours when we restore for ourselves the sacred scenes of the earlier Bible history, and put back the timepiece of our own contemplation for two or three thousand years. To the Hebrew or Canaanite of Joshua's day the phenomenon of the "sun standing still," conveyed into Holy Writ from the highly wrought poetic imagery of the lost Book of Jasher, would be little of a miracle—that luminary was often stationary for the popular convenience.
Exact notes of time are very hard to discover in the Old Testament. We have for the most part to depend on such expressions as "dawn," "morning," "noon," "heat of day," "cool of day," "evening," "twilight," "night," and no attempt that Hebrew scholars have made to set those terms in their correct chronological order has met with more than very partial success. The word "hour" is itself mentioned only once: Dan. iv. 19. It seems difficult to suppose that some simple method of measuring the hours was not in use, such as the trickling of sand or water from a vessel, but our knowledge on the subject is scanty. We must even resign ourselves to the prosaic probability that the famous sun-dial of Ahaz was a very different contrivance from the lichened stone pillar, with weather-beaten brass face, which we associate in the Western world with the odorous lawn of some sequestered manor garden. It is more likely that Ahaz had upon his terrace a slanting tower, upon a certain number of the steps of which the shadow fell. Such towers were known in ancient India. The only formal computation of time that we can discover in the Old Testament is by three watches. There was the "beginning of watches" (Lam. ii. 19), from sunset to 10 p.m.; the middle watch, Judges vii. 19 (we speak of this incident later), from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m.; the morning watch, from 2 a.m. to sunrise (Exodus xiv. 24), when the Lord looked on the Egyptians, and discomfited them in the midst of the Red Sea.
THE BIBLE CLOCK.