Bible Time Clock

Background

Early in 2004 I was able to unravel the prophetic time line of Jesus’ passion week. The bottom line structure is this: Each hour of events in that week map to individual weeks in his public ministry. (A 7 day/1 hour ratio) These, in turn, map at 30 historical years to 1 ministry day back to the Bible’s historical time line from Adam. Taken together these ratios imply this: Each hour in Jesus’ passion week matches 210 years in the Bible’s historical chronology. When properly charted and compared against the historical time line it becomes clear that Jesus was adding editorial through the week. In other words Jesus understood this detailed prophetic replay.

That there would be a precise arithmetic ratio between these various time lines is not very surprising, Jesus himself is the Bible Incarnate (John 1:14) so the Bible’s chronology must be Jesus’ chronology.

Building A Clock

After further study it became apparent that these ratios implied the structure of a clock. The clock is not like any used in the world today but based on an exact prophetic map from the fundamental time structure of the Bible.

The clock has two major divisions, and at the risk of over using terms the definitions are this:

• Bible Minutes are exactly 1/7 of hours.

• Bible Seconds are exactly 1/30 of Bible Minutes.

This definition allows Bible Seconds to count out prophetic historical years at the rate of 1 Bible Second to 1 historical year, the same years used to write the Bible. The sub divisions of 7 and 30 reflect the prophetic time used to structure Jesus’ ministry itself, so we could say this is Jesus’ own clock. I abstract this to the general case and call it the Bible Clock because people today, when they are replaying prophetic time likely live out the same ratio.

A Curious Scripture Reference

In support of this structure of the Bible Clock is a reference from the Book of Revelation. This mysterious time reference is one of the rare Bible references that measure time under 1 hour. The following is the reference:

This reference echoes the structure of an hour, by referencing the number 7, in this case the 7th seal. The exact phrase, 1/2 hour suddenly receives multiple additional references. With an hour holding 7 Bible Minutes, the expression means 3.5 minutes, or 3.5 times. This is the same expression used throughout much of the rest of the Bible’s prophetic passages, only here it is at a micro scale.

Of course undoing the structure of prophetic time this passage clocks off at 30 historical years to the minute so 3.5 of those is 105 historical years. Those match to modern end-times at 1 historical year to the day or 105 days. This is 3.5 months of 30 days each.

Note On Modern Minutes

The diameter of the sun as observed from earth is 1/2 of a degree so it moves a distance across the sky each minute a distance equivalent to its own radius. This means that the parallax, or fuzziness of the sun’s shadow is equivalent to a minute, setting the limits on accuracy possible with sun dials. This apparently sets the modern definition for a minute.

The Bible allows the Sun and Moon to be used for setting time, especially the time of seasons. This is because the heat from the sun drives the harvest cycle and calendars built this way are needed in order to determine harvest time. This is not the time used for measuring God’s actions in the affairs of men.

For more information on solar time, please the Wikipedia article read Equation of Time

Setting The Time

Having a clock with 7 ’minutes’ and 210 ’seconds’ to the hour is strange, but not conceptually hard to grasp. The next question that must be answered is how does the time get set? This is not simply a redefinition of standard wall clocks to a specially crafted sub-units of time, the reason comes from the history of Standard Time and Time Zones.

History of Time Zones

For many millennia time was measured locally using sun dials. The local time was adjusted so noon was set when the sun was directly overhead. The shadow cast by nearly any object is smallest at noon. This sets the middle of the day. Time measured this way is called Apparent Solar Time or true local time.

Because of the movement of the earth around the sun, the middle of the day can vary as much as 30 seconds from one day to the next. The cumulative error around the year is as much as 17 minutes, so a further calculation is added, one that averages the time and adds the word ’mean’ to the type of time being described.

Mechanical clocks, introduced in the middle ages, were a mechanical approximation of a sun dial that could be used on cloudy days and at night. Mechanical clocks follow the ’mean’ or average time and so even when they are adjusted to local mean time they can indicate noon as much as 17 minutes away from a sun dial at the same location.

When time is measured by setting noon to the time when the sun is directly overhead, every single town has a different sense of what time it is because the sun crosses exactly overhead at different times. (Unless, of course, two towns are directly north-south of each other.)

Use of local times in different towns was never a problem until the 1800s when Railroads began connecting towns. Until the widespread adoption of this invention nobody much cared about what time it was in nearby towns. Railroads, though, needed to set schedules in order to keep trains from colliding, and adjusting to a local time at each and every town became a major safety problem.

Britain was the first country to adopt a unified Standard time. In November, 1840, the Great Western Railway adopted London Time as the standard time used across its system. By December 1, 1847 the Railway standards office had selected Greenwich Mean Time as the standard time for all railway stations across the country.

By 1855 nearly all clocks across Britain were set to standard time, though some towns used clocks fitted with two minute hands, one for standard time and one for true local time.

Curiously the British legal system used local time until August 2, 1880. This caused election polling places, for example, to open at seemingly odd times (like 8:13 AM instead of 8:00 AM) because the polling laws were written for local mean time.

The first proposal for a standard time system in the United States was presented to Congress in 1809. Another proposal was presented to Congress in 1870 and another in 1872. None of these passed, though the 1872 proposal was the form finally adopted.

Standard time zones came to the United States at Noon, on November 18, 1883. Until this time all towns used their own local time, typically kept by a standard clock, either in a church steeple, town hall, or some other well known clock.

Standard Time was adopted by and for the railroads but not all towns followed the standards. An example was Detroit that kept local sun time (off from Central Standard Time by 28 minutes) until 1905.

The remaining step was to synchronize the time zones into a world wide system. That happened at the International Meridian Conference in Washington DC in October 1884. That conference established the zero point for all time and distance measurements around the world.

The starting point selected was the Observatory of Greenwich. This is where Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) comes from and is why nearly all modern time zones are an even number of hours from GMT. This is also where the zero based, 24 hour day, beginning at midnight, clock comes from. (Further reading on this conference is here.

The effect of this conference was to set the local mean time at Greenwich as the basis for all other time measures around the world.

Is Greenwich Appropriate for Bible Time?

Is the local mean time at Greenwich a reasonable basis for setting a clock that is set to measure prophetic events from the pages of the Bible?

This question actually begs several others, the obvious one is this: Does the Bible provide accurate time-based predictions finer than the hour? Of course the answer to that question is answered by passages like that cited above. Yes. There appears to be prophetic, predictive, time references that are finer than the hour.

So should Greenwich Mean Time, the average time when the sun passes directly over the observatory at Greenwich, be used as the ’ticker’ for all prophetic Bible based time measurements worldwide?

The answer is a rather simple no. Only one city on earth was selected by God himself as the place for his dwelling and the people who tended that dwelling. That city was and remains Jerusalem.

Jerusalem is not a whole number of hours away from Greenwich. In order to properly set a Bible Time based clock the local mean time in Jerusalem must be used as the basis for all measurements. It was the Levites at Jerusalem who kept the calendar, it was also these Levites, if they cared, who kept the clock.

Approximating Jerusalem Time

The Bible sets out the idea that there are 12 daylight hours in a day.

Of course this varies across seasons, and is subject to the same fluctuation of 17 modern minutes around the year. It is very highly unlikely that the Bible would depending on a complex astronomical calculation for any basis for time because it needs no such calculation for the calendar itself.

There does appear to be a way to compute the ’Jerusalem Mean Time’ used to measure Bible Time. On two days each year, the spring and fall equinox, the day really is 12 hours long. These days can be used to find what time in the modern GMT system is actually sunrise, noon, and sunset using local mean time at Jerusalem.

Scan the following table and look for the only day when there are exactly 12 hours of day light. This also shows the time when the sun is directly overhead, or the time between the first half and second half of the daylight hours.

Notice how sunrise on March 16, 2005, is at 5:48 AM, that the sun is ’up’ or immediately overhead, at 11:48 AM and that it sets at 5:48 PM.

These 12 hours are the twelve hours that would have fulfilled Jesus’ reference to 12 hours in the day, provided Jesus was referencing a day in 2005.

This also says that essentially all clocks, everywhere in the world, since they are based on GMT time, are approximately 12 minutes slow.

The previous table is on standard time, 2 hours ahead of GMT. (GMT + 2). After the start of Daylight Savings Time in Jerusalem, April 7 is when that starts, then clocks in Jerusalem move to GMT + 3 hours and become 48 minutes fast.

Checking this Hypothesis

The same thing should be happening in the fall, in September, and the following table presents the same times for September:

The problem here is that the sunrise and sunset times are at 30 minutes past the hour, not 48 like in March. Why?

The answer is described by the Equation of Time that explains how many minutes a sun dial is away from the mean time displayed on clocks. The following graph shows the number of minutes away from mean a sun dial will present through the year.

At the two dates of interest here the Equation of Time indicates that the sun dial is about 9 minutes slow in March and about 9 minutes fast in September. The difference between 48 minutes past the hour and 30 minutes past the hour is 18 minutes, the sum of these two 9 minute values.

In order to get Jerusalem Mean Time, the time indicated by Greenwich and the standard times around the world, must be corrected by 21 minutes. (Or by 39, depending on the hour, see below.)

Handling the Hour

The first table presented above is modern Jerusalem Standard Time for the sunrise, sunset and sun south times for March, 2005. These times do not vary significantly year-to-year, though there is some variation because of leap years.

The second table presented above is modern Jerusalem Daylight Savings Time for September 2005. These times do not vary significantly year-to-year, though leap years do have a slight impact.

The difference in the hour value in these tables is from the change from Standard Time to Daylight Savings Time. In Jerusalem, modern daylight savings time begins in April and typically ends in September.

In Jerusalem, Standard Time is GMT + 2 hours while Daylight Savings Time is GMT + 3 hours. The GMT + 2 hour values were 21 minutes slow, while the GMT + 3 hour values were 39 minutes fast.

This means that the time correction from GMT to Local Jerusalem Mean Time is GMT + 2 hours + 21 minutes or GMT + 3 hours - 39 minutes.

This is the correction needed to turn any GMT based clock, which is nearly every clock in the world, into a clock where the hours properly align with the average movement of the sun at Jerusalem.

Correcting for Other Time Zones

Conceptually it is the clock at Jerusalem that is the ’ticker’ for measuring prophetic time and events around the world. Any attempt to study the exact timing of a prophetic event requires that the local time of the event be restated on Local Jerusalem Mean Time, so GMT + 2 hours 21 minutes.

As an example of how this works, consider one of the most famous times in recent history. At 8:46 AM Eastern Standard Time, United Airlines flight 93 hit the north tower of the World Trade Centers in New York. To convert this time into Jerusalem Standard Time requires knowledge of local time in New York. Daylight savings time was in effect so New York’s clocks were running at GMT - 4 hours. To correct the impact time into a prophetic time, the correction takes several steps.

First, the correction must be made to GMT so the 8:46 AM impact time becomes 12:46 GMT.

Then, the correction must be made to Jerusalem Mean Time so another 2 hours 21 minutes must be added, yielding 15:07 JMT.

Because the Bible’s clock breaks the hours down starting at Sunset, not midnight, another 6 hours must be added, or 21:07 and the :07 is in effect the end of the first 1/7 of the hour. 21:1 This is the end of the into 7ths, this particular time is about