Lessons About Prayer: The Times for Prayer

Lessons About Prayer from the Jewish Culture of Yeshua Series

#3 The Times for Prayer

Now Peter and John went up together to the temple at the hour of prayer,

the ninth hour. (Acts 3:1)

What time was the ninth hour? The following information from To Pray as a Jew provides us with important insights about this topic.

The Times for Prayer

When Ezra the Scribe and the Men of the Great Assembly prescribed the number of prayer services for each day, they also fixed the time framework in which to say them. The official time for the various services was set to correspond to the time that the daily communal offerings were brought in the Temple.

An Explanation of the ‘Variable Hour” (Sha-ah Zemanit)

In order to understand how the exact time parameters of the daily services are fixed, one must begin by knowing that wherever the Mishnah or later halakhic sources referred to the time of the day, they were not referring to a fixed hour, nor, when they used the term “hour” did they mean our constant interval of sixty minutes.

They were referring to a certain fraction of the day, and the hour they had in mind is a “variable hour” or “seasonal hour” (sha-ah zemanit) whose length is determined by the length of the day measured from sunrise to sunset, which in turn changes with the seasons. The one constant thing about the “variable hour” is that it is always one-twelfth of the day. The fourth “hour,” for example, always means a third of the day; the sixth “hour” means midday. If we were dealing with a day that has twelve daylight hours beginning at 6 a.m. and ending at 6 p.m. this would mean 10 a.m. and 12 noon respectively. But days are not so perfectly fixed. They are longer or shorter; they begin and end earlier or later.

If one knows the exact time of sunrise and sunset on any given day, the length of the variable hour is easily calculated. Once this is established, it is easy to determine the time of the fourth “hour” or the sixth “hour” or the exact time on the clock that corresponds to two and one-half or one and one-quarter “hours” before sundown.

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Shalom,

Jim Myers

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