Genesis 1:23
כג וַיְהִי־עֶרֶב וַיְהִי־בֹקֶר יוֹם חֲמִישִׁי:
Transliteration: Va-y’hi erev va-y’hi voqer yom
chamishi.
Translation: There was evening
and there was morning a fifth day.
Vocabulary in this lesson:
חֲמִישִׁי
|
Fifth
|
I just realized I missed a culture
capsule so I’ll put it here.
On the Jewish calendar, a new day
starts at dark. Whether this is an old
Semitic characteristic or comes from Genesis, I don’t know. Certainly it was well established by the time
of Mishnah, the laws based on Torah but not contained in it. One law says if A buys peas, and thinks he
has been charged too much, he can check it out with “the elders at the gates”
who know how many pounds of peas came in from the fields that day and therefore
what the price should be. But he only
has until the end of the day, which is at dark.
If he doesn’t do it until the next day, he has to live with his bargain.
There’s a practical aspect to
this. The gates of the city states of
ancient times opened in the morning and people with fields outside of the city
would bring in their produce for sale or barter. They then left for home before dark. There
were no streetlights at the time; you could only travel by night from the
waxing half moon to the waning half moon.
People went home before night so they could get supper ready and unhitch
their oxen and feed them without striking a light. Lights were expensive. People went to bed at dark and rose at dawn.
Anyway, if A didn’t check prices
before the farmers all left for home, and tried to do it the next day, prices
might have changed because a different amount of peas might be brought into
town the next day. Maybe none. Maybe A bought his peas from the very last
batch harvested. The elders wouldn’t set
prices for peas if none came into the town.
Even if farmer B did bring in the last of his harvest, how could A prove
that he didn’t buy those peas from farmer B instead of from a different farmer
the day before?
So in the interests of fairness, A
has to check prices the same day he buys the peas, and if he were smart, he
would check BEFORE he made the purchase.
But if A checked prices on time, and
found out that he was charged 1/6 more than the going rate for that day, he
could collect the difference back from the seller. Likewise if the seller realized he had
charged 1/6 less than the going rate, he could collect the difference from
A. Also the seller could have A’s coins
weighed. There was a practice called
“shaving.” Coins in those days were made
of precious metal, more or less, and a cheater could use a harder metal to
shave off some of the coins, keep that, and still use the coins in the
market. If the seller found out that A’s
coins weighed 1/6 less than they should, he could claim the difference in value
from A.
If you look at a dime edge on, those
little ribs you see there are designed to catch shaving. Dimes once were real silver and it
mattered. Pennies and nickels don’t have
this ribbing – although with the value of copper nowadays, maybe pennies
should.
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved
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