A Timely Post
A Timely Post Pesachim 11-12 Yesterday’s mishnah and today’s daf spend a good amount of time discussing time-related issues. We start off with a disagreement between Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Yehuda about the time limit on eating hametz on the 14 th of Nisan. The Gemara then launches into a discussion about rgw accuracy of witnesses’ testimony regarding time. If one witness says an incident occurred at the 3 rd hour and another says at the 5 th hour, can we synchronize their testimonies and say one meant the end of the 3 rd and one meant the beginning of the fifth? All these discussions are predicated on the fact that people had a sense of time, of the hours in the day. But just how did they tell time before digital watches, cellphone clocks and even Greenwich Mean Time? When the Gemara speaks about hours (the third hour, the fifth hour), it means שעות זמניות , the division of the time between sunrise and sunset into twelve equal pieces. Obviously the length of those