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Hi Daniel, nice article.......... How do you respond to folks who claim that [Matthew 12:40] must be 72 hours.....and not one minute more....or one minute less?

I been wanting to write this explanation to show how that can be accomodated for some time, but now you give me a good excuse to do it

Was Yeshua in the heart of the earth 72 hours?

I have explained in various places how "three days and three nights" means six onot. A Onah is a period of time amounting to a half day, i.e. a day or night, and a part on an onah can be couted as the whole of it. Yeshua was in the grave for 1/6th of the first Onah, 4 full onah, and maybe 99/100ths of the final onah. Let the π· mean a part of and τ be time in the grave. Therefore: τ = π·day + night + day + night + day + π·night. This is shown in the chart:

From the death on the cross to the resurrection is shown by the upper red line extending through "three days and three nights". There is little doubt as to the near completeness of the final night. Hosea 6:3 tells us, "His going forth is fixed at the dawn"; The word used for dawn in the Hebrew is (Shakhar). This word means the earliest possible hint of dawn in the east. It means the reddish light detected indicating the coming day, but before there is any other evidence of day. Technically, it only means the coming day, it is still night, and there is no evidence of twilight over the land, except coming from far away in the east. This is why John 20:1 says it was "yet dark" "on the first of the sabbaths" at the "sepulchre". The precise definition of Shakhar is found in HALOT (Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament).

On the other end of things we have some ambiguity. Does Sheol in Jonah 2:2 represent the literal grave or does it represent the state of death itself? If the former then the π·day will be smaller, but if the latter then π·day will equal exactly 3 hours or 1/4 of a day as we know that Yeshua died at the 9th hour (which is the same as our 3 p.m.) Stated another way: 3 hours > π > 1/2 hour. The most literal sense of (Sheol) would be to equate it directly to the physical grave.

However there is also a 72 hour interpretation of the matter that will also make sense of the language. First we note that Yeshua said "heart of the earth". These words were constructed out of the Hebrew word underlying "midst" in Jonah 2:3 (KJV) and the Hebrew word underlying "earth" in Jonah 2:6. It seems that Yeshua might be covering the whole period of his suffering as well as death in the phrase "heart of the earth". The "belly of the whale" and "belly of sheol" can be conceived of as Yeshua's suffering in Jerusalem, at the heart of the land, earth, world.

It is without a doubt that Jonah was swallowed by the whale rather quickly. Otherwise he would have drowned. The experience in the whale was likely a brief conscious period lasting say many hours of the first day, and then unconsciousness would overtake Jonah for the remainder of the "three days and three nights". The conscious period goes with Messiah's sufferings and the unconscious period with his death.

That (Sheol) in Jonah 2:2 could cover the sense of suffering is within the meaning of the word. For example RSV Psalm 18:4, "The cords of death encompassed me, the torrents of perdition assailed me; 5 the cords of Sheol entangled me, the snares of death confronted me. 6 In my distress I called upon the LORD; to my God I cried for help. From his temple he heard my voice, and my cry to him reached his ears." This is remarkably similar to Jonah 2:3-4, "For thou didst cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood was round about me; all thy waves and thy billows passed over me. 4 Then I said, `I am cast out from thy presence; how shall I again look upon thy holy temple?'" (RSV). If we regard this as within the fish, then it falls inside the "three days and three nights"; Yet we know that neither the Psalmist nor Jonah is dead. Also Psalm 116:3-4, "The snares of death encompassed me; the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me; I suffered distress and anguish. 4 Then I called on the name of the LORD: "O LORD, I beseech thee, save my life!"

We should also note that in Jonah 2:2, the prophet places his "affliction" in the whale. That belly was no holiday inn with a king sized bed. In 2:3 Jonah refers to the seas raging outside, with perhaps the whale regurgitating some more water every now and then. He is in fear of this. In 2:5 he refers to the sea weed wrapped around his head. It appears here that the sea weed remained wrapped around Jonah in the whale as the whale swallowed both Jonah and the weeds wrapped around him. This probably help minimize the stomach acids of the whale on Jonah. Nevertheless, the acid would have caused some intense suffering until Jonah slipped into an unconscious state.

How does this apply to the chronology? While the literal physical grave aspect of the belly of the whale is highly significant, it need not be the only meaning of the prophetic figure. We may include all of Yeshua's suffering in the heart of the earth as the "cords of Sheol" and link this with "belly of sheol" (Jonah 2:2) and the "three days and three nights" (Jonah 1:17). Yeshua's sufferings began in the morning, just before the cock crow, when one of his best friends denied him. This would have been at the crack of dawn. Either a rooster crowed then, or the morning watch sounded. In Luke 22:61-66 the beginning of his physical sufferings is placed with the end of the watch and the break of day. John 18:22, when Yeshua is struck, might be placed right at dawn. So then the whole belly of the whale experience can be regarded as 72 hours, lasting from dawn on Wednesday, Nisan 14 to dawn on the Sabbath, Nisan 17.