Bible Clocks

What is a Bible Clock?

First and foremost, a Bible Clock is a regular clock. The hour and minute hands are in the same place, at the same time, as on the face of a regular 12 hour, North American style, analog clock.

Anyone able to tell time on a regular, 12 hour, analog clock can tell the regular time using a Bible Clock.

But: The labeling on the face of a Bible Clock has been changed. Instead of telling the time using the common hour-of-the-clock, or "O-Clock" method, the labeling on Bible Clocks indicates the Hour of the Day. The same hours of the day used to tell time in the Bible.

What is the Bible Clocks Website?

This website contains 2 parts.

• The first part is a collection of information about Bible Clocks. In this part we explain the scripture used to deduce the markings on Bible Clocks. We explain how it was discovered. We go through some cool features of Bible clocks. The banner at the left includes links to each of the articles.
• The second part of this website is a catalog of clocks that are for sale. We've taken commerically available regular clocks and rebuilt them so they indicate Bible Time. You can see a sampling on the left and can use the Shop tab at the top to visit the entire collection of available clocks.

Telling Bible Time

In the Bible, the calendar day changes at sunset, on average 6:00 PM. The 24 hours that make up a calendar day are divided, on average, into 12 hours of darkness and 12 hours of daylight.

The first 12 hours of darkness are themselves broken into 4 night watches. In order to keep the face of 12 hour Bible Clocks less cluttered, the 4 watches are not directly indicated.

An easy memory peg for determining the watches is to imagine a cross centered on the clock. The vertical and horizontal members divide the hour hand's nightly sweep into 4 quadrants, and those quadrants are the 4 night watches. Since the hour and minute hands are not changed from a regular clock, the lower left quadrant is the first watch of the night.

The second set of 12 hours in a 24 hour calendar day are the 12 hours of daylight. Those 12 hours begin at sunrise, which is on average 6:00 AM on a regular clock.

Because the first hour of the day begins at what we normally call 6:00 AM, the Bible Clock is marked with Hour 1 at 6:00 AM position, or the bottom of the face of the Bible Clock.

The rest of the 12 hours of daylight procede in an obvious fashion clockwise around the face of the clock.

Interestingly, the 7th hour of the day starts at the top of the clock at what is normally called noon. This lends a second name to Bible Clocks, they can also be called 7 up clocks.

Setting Bible Clocks

Bible Clocks are usually set so they tell Modern Standard Time for the timezone where they're located. If you are setting the time on a Bible Clock you simply set the hour and minute hands to the same locations as on a regular clock. They are set to indicate the current local time.

Most locations in the earth today set all clocks in a region to one of about 500 different local time zones. The system of Standard Time was adopted before the invention of railroad lineside signals. Accurate schedules and keeping trains running on time was how trains were kept from coliding, and people were kept from being killed in train wrecks. The system was so effective that many non-railroad users adopted standard time and eventually it became a worldwide, standard practice.

Before the invention of Standard Time clocks were set locally, using the sun alone for calculating the local time. Using the sun for setting a clock is simple. When the sun is directly overhead, measured using the shadow from a plumb line, the 7th hour of the day, the noon hour, is just beginning.

Setting a clock at the 7th hour, noon, causes the seasonal variablity of sunrise and sunset times to be irrevelvant to the time indicated on the clock.

Throughout the Bible the 7th unit of time is the Sabbath, this goes for both days of the week, and also for 7th years, and the 7th set of 7 years, the Jubilee. The 7th month was also a month for holidays, especially tabernacles, and that sense of the 7th of 12 months shows up in the noon hour even today.

It appears the 7th hour of the 12 hours of daylight is also intended as a mid-day Sabbath. Our bodies are wired to want a mid-day meal at about this same time. Like our natural need for night time rest and for weekly rest, we also need a mid-day, or 7th hour Sabbath rest.

Divisions of the Hour

Modern clocks, when using the hour hand alone, divide the hour into 5 major parts. For convience of reading, those 5 hour divisions are multiplied by the 12 hours of the day to yeild the common 60 minutes used to tell the time with the minute hand.

Just as the hours of the day on a standard clock must be relabeled in order to tell Bible Time, the divisions of the hour must also be adjusted so the clock tells Bible Time at divisions smaller than the hour.

There are no direct references in the Bible about how the Hour should be subdivided. There are at least 2 known indirect ways to show how the hour should be divided. Those strategies indicate that instead of the 5 divisions used today, there should be 7 major subdivisions of each hour.

Of course multipling them out like is done with modern clocks suggests 12 * 7 = 84 divisions of the hour instead of 60. But, those same Bible strategies for dividing the hour also indicate the 7 major divisions of the hour are more important than the 84 smaller values.

Because of this the face of a Bible clock as 7 minor marks in the hour ring between each hour mark. The Bible Clock has a second, outer ring, that indicates the 7 divisions as the minute hand passes around the clock.

Like hours, the first division of the hour is division 1, and starts when the minute hand passes the start of the hour at the top of the clock.