The Hebrew Bible contains lots of severe death penalties. To say that they apply only under certain conditions, or that they are only an expression and the writer actually meant something else, is not the same as what is being discussed here. Because here it is a real dispute about what the writer meant. But what happens when it is known what the writer meant?

In other words, the question is what happens if it is known that according to the Hebrew Bible the 24-hour day begins in the morning, but that contradicts the view of the Sages.

Proof no. 9 undermines the reliability of the tradition, so it is probably not a good source for Jewish law (at least on this issue).

In Jewish law we follow what was established in the Talmud, not what was established in the Hebrew Bible.

This is not even connected to the Hebrew Bible but to the Hebrew language. Language is determined by what is convenient (and it predates the giving of the Torah), and there is no reason people should use terms like “day” or “tomorrow” according to the laws of Sabbath and prayer rather than according to what is more convenient for them. So sections 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8 are not relevant. Section 2 deals with the laws of leftover sacrificial meat, and anyone who looks will see that it too is not relevant. In section 4 there is no argument to begin with. Section 9 really is a strange point ("Something that is practiced constantly and the Sages dispute it?")

Tolginus

You admit that in the biblical period, in everyday life, people related to the day as beginning in the morning, and that this is also more convenient. I would expect that if the Torah wants to establish that for Sabbath and certain laws the day begins at night, then: A. there should be a good reason for the complication.
B. this innovation should appear explicitly in the Torah.

The problem is that according to Genesis chapter 1, the Sabbath is like the other days, and there too you can see that they begin in the morning, and so does the Sabbath (also in section 4: why does Moses say, “today is Sabbath” only in the morning? Why is there no reference at all to it beginning in the evening [such as, for example, an instruction to cook only until evening]? The wording fits much better if the Sabbath begins in the morning).
Section 2 is also relevant. Because the Sages agree that for sacrifices / the Temple, the 24-hour day begins in the morning, so the claim that the halakhic day begins in the evening needs even more factual grounding, because at that point it is already excessive.

You are forgetting something important, namely that according to the tradition the calendar was lunar. In other words, the calendar days, all the dates, began at night. So why would a person who lives his everyday life according to a lunar calendar that begins in the evening speak in the opposite language? And why would God give that person a law that goes against what he is used to, without writing a word about it? Serious revolutions in the Torah usually do get a lot of wording. Sometimes many repetitions.

And it is especially hard to accept this when you take into account the history of the Hebrew calendar, the scholarly view, and section 9…

A. A good reason for the complication is needed even aside from the difficulties from biblical Hebrew usage. Look at what happens nowadays: the day changes “formally” at midnight, and people still use the word “tomorrow” at night to describe the day that will come in the morning. So why are you surprised that in the biblical period they used the language in exactly the same way?
B. The innovation could come through tradition, or be an interpretive innovation of the Sages. There is no basis for the strange expectation that times in Jewish law should specifically match the terms that were convenient for Hebrew speakers in the biblical period. Therefore this innovation does not need to be made explicit any more than other innovations do.

In section 2, from the wording “day” there is, as stated, no difficulty, because maybe that is simply the term in Hebrew. And from the legal side, that one eats until morning is not relevant because there is no basis for expecting the laws of leftover sacrificial meat to be identical to the laws of Sabbath. You think that both the Hebrew terms and the laws of leftover sacrificial meat and the laws of Sabbath and the laws of prayer all depend on the same human concept of “day.” But human concepts are one thing, the laws of leftover sacrificial meat are another, the laws of Sabbath another, and so on.

In section 4 there is no argument at all. The manna fell every morning, and on the morning of the Sabbath it did not fall, so Moses explains to them that this is because of the Sabbath.

[And by the way, maybe one could speculate that the reason they do not set the change of day at sunrise, for example, is that in the morning people get up at different times, and you do not want it to happen that if someone turns over in bed for another five minutes, suddenly he wakes up in the next day. Nowadays the day changes in the middle of the night, which supposedly should be an hour when people have already gone to sleep and have not yet gotten up. So in the past it may have been convenient for the day to change in the evening—because by evening everyone has already come home from the labor of the day, and there is no more business and commerce and so on, so now it does not matter to anyone exactly when the day changes. It is like how at the International Date Line today they make all kinds of deviations so that the “day” gap will not run through the middle of an inhabited place.]

See Rashbam on Genesis 1:5 and Exodus 12:18 (and in Targum Jonathan there).

Tolginus

A. Today too we still use the regular form because it is the most intuitive and simplest, and it remains from the Hebrew Bible. That does not mean the calendar day cannot begin differently; the problem is that it is unnatural and liable to create communication problems. Beginning the 24-hour day at 12 is not problematic in that respect like beginning it at sunset, which is around 6–7, when people are still very active. That is why events in the evening that are written only with a Hebrew date are confusing.

B. The tradition is not reliable.

“There is no basis for expecting the laws of leftover sacrificial meat to be identical to the laws of Sabbath.”
Except for the principle of consistency. And convenience (Occam’s razor). Does it make sense that for every commandment the 24-hour day would begin at a different hour? Or are we actually establishing one 24-hour day with an internal division so that we can plan everything according to it, and not say that every matter begins at the first hour of its own day while each day begins at a different time…
There is no doubt that it is more reasonable that the Torah would not mess with our heads with a different day for every matter.

As for the Sabbath, it is not only the language people speak, but also because in Genesis chapter 1 the 24-hour day begins in the morning.

A. In a world without clocks and street lighting, the available options are what exists in nature: sunset or the appearance of the stars, and dawn or sunrise. It seems logical to me that in practice it is more convenient for the formal changeover to be in the evening rather than in the morning. Just like they do today all over the world (with no connection to the Hebrew Bible at all—what is the connection, anyway?!). But still, in human language when people say “tomorrow” they sometimes mean the daylight hours from the coming morning, even if formally we are already in that 24-hour period. In your opinion, is it more natural and would there be fewer communication problems if formally the day changed for early-rising workers in the middle of their workday? In my opinion, absolutely not.
I do not know whether the Hebrew Bible even contains the idea of a full 24-hour day (composed of day and night or night and day). It may be that they counted only days (even when it says “on the tenth of the month”), without any conception that there is something shared by the day and the night of “that same 24-hour period.” They related to day and night separately, and when they said “tomorrow” they simply meant the next day, not the next 24-hour period.

B. The laws of leftover sacrificial meat are not dependent on a “24-hour day” but on a different period of time that was set as day and night. For some reason you think the eating period should end when the sun sets that same day, and the Torah thinks the eating period ends when the sun rises the next day. The Torah also thinks it is not reasonable to sow wheat and barley in a vineyard because that is mixed species. I do not always water my flowerpots according to synchronized 24-hour periods either. There is no connection to consistency or to Occam. The Torah decides what span of time is relevant to each issue, and it does not have to coordinate that with some abstract term called a “24-hour day.”

C. What exactly are you trying to argue? That the Sabbath day (which appears in the Torah and in many prophets even without the Sages) was not night and day but day and night? Or that it was only day without night?

A. Of course there was the idea of a 24-hour day, because you need to match the night to a particular date. That also follows from Genesis 1.
And if not, then why do you keep the Sabbath from the evening?
B. The verse says it must be eaten on the day of offering, so that none of it remains until morning. Even the Sages understood that this means the night follows the day. In other words, “day” in this verse is in the sense of a full 24-hour period.
C. In my opinion, only day without night (and that makes sense, because what is unique about the Sabbath is only the daytime period, because in any case at night on all days God did nothing).

With God’s help, 23 Nisan 5781

The Torah speaks in human language, in which in ordinary human conduct the night is the continuation of the day: in the day a person goes out to his work and labor until evening, and at night he rests after the work of the day.

So too in the Temple service, the main offering of the sacrifices is by day, and their completion—the burning of the fats and limbs on the altar—is done “all night until morning” (Leviticus 6:2).

But regarding sacred times, the Torah explicitly establishes that they begin in the evening. Thus, regarding the seven days of the Festival of Unleavened Bread, it is explained: “On the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month at evening, you shall eat unleavened bread, until the twenty-first day of the month at evening” (Exodus 12:18).

And so regarding the Day of Atonement, which is called “a Sabbath of solemn rest,” it is explained: “It shall be for you a Sabbath of solemn rest, and you shall afflict yourselves on the ninth day of the month at evening; from evening to evening shall you rest on your Sabbath” (Leviticus 23:32).

The festival is sanctified at night, as Isaiah says: “The song shall be for you as in the night when a festival is sanctified,” and even when Esther commands, “Fast for me for three days,” she clarifies that the three days will be “night and day.”

As for the act of creation, since the light and darkness there were not created by the sun’s rotation around the earth, for the luminaries were created only on the fourth day, there was no difference in light or darkness between the beginning of the day or night and their end. Therefore it stands to reason that all the hours of day and night were equal. All the hours of night were equally dark, and all the hours of day shone equally. Therefore, in the creation narrative the entire night is called “evening,” in which all things are mixed together and not distinguishable, and all the hours of day are called “morning,” because of the ability to distinguish and discern between things.

Only after the “light of the seven days” was hidden away did the distinction begin between different degrees of evening and day; that is why the concept “between the evenings” came into being, between the different degrees of the setting sun. But in the days of creation, the phrase “and there was evening and there was morning” is equivalent to the phrase “and there was night and there was day.”

In any case, on this point—that the Sabbath and festivals begin at night—there is wall-to-wall agreement between the Sadducees and the Pharisees, and between the Samaritans and the Karaites, and even Beta Israel in Ethiopia. Aside from some sources from the sect of separatists in the Judean desert, all branches of the Jewish people, despite their rivalries, agreed on what is explicit in Scripture: that the sacred times begin at night. Who is the magician who managed to plant one single “conspiracy” in all the opposing factions? 🙂

Best regards, Amiyoz Yaron Shenitzlar

Amiyoz, well said.
A.B., in section C you write “only day without night,” and in section A you write that the night has to belong to a certain date. Not clear.