refore, began in the evening,
with sunset. It does not by any means follow that their civil day began
at this time. It would be more natural for such business contracts as
the hiring of servants or labourers to date from morning to morning
rather than from evening to evening. Naturally any allusion in the
Scriptures to the civil calendar as apart from the ecclesiastical would
be indirect, but that common custom was not entirely in agreement with
the ecclesiastical formula we may perhaps gather from the fact that in
the Old Testament there are twenty-six cases in which the phrases "day
and night," "day or night" are employed, and only three where "night"
comes before "day." We have a similar divergence of usage in the case of
our civil and astronomical days; the first beginning at midnight, and
the second at the following noon, since the daylight is the time for
work in ordinary business life, but the night for the astronomers. The
Babylonians, at least at a late date in their history, had also a
twofold way of determining when the day began. Epping and Strassmaier
have translated and elucidated a series of Babylonian lunar calendars of
dates between the first and second centuries before our era. In one
column of these was given the interval of time which elapsed between the
true new moon and the first visible crescent.

"Curious to relate, at first all Father Epping's calculations
to establish this result were out by a mean interval of six
hours. The solution was found in the fact that the Babylonian
astronomers were not content with such a variable instant of
time as sunset for their calculations, as indeed they ought
not to have been, but used as the origin of the astronomical
day at Babylon the midnight which followed the setting of the
sun, marking the beginning of the civil day."

It may be mentioned that the days as reckoned from sunset to sunset,
sunrise to sunrise, and noon to noon, would give intervals of slightly
different lengths. This would, however, be imperceptible so long as
their lengths were not measured by some accurate mechanical
time-measurer such as a clepsydra, sandglass, pendulum, or spring clock.

The first obvious and natural division of the whole day-interval is into
the light part and the dark part. As we have seen in Genesis, the
evening and the morning are the day. Since Palestine is a sub-tropical
country, these would never differ very greatly in le