Clocks

The clock app was updated this week with 2 new faces. This change provides paleo letter based face markings. This update goes with a 3d design for a clock that will go with the other Tabernacle items. This blog explores.

Paleo Clock

The link here is to the clock app at clock.paleo.in. If you have never visited the app it will default with a 12 hour clock using Paleo letters to mark the hours. If you have visited there before you will need to use the top right menu under faces and select the Paleo 12 hour version to follow along with what follows below.

History

For those perhaps new to this project, we have a long history dealing with the clock. It began in the Bible Time days when we started looking at time references that were accurate to the hour.

These usually occur in and around the Passion Week stories. There are a few in other places where hours are used in Bible stories.

The first problem with textual references to hours is that they are counted at the start of the daylight day. The middle of the day is marked by hour number 7. There is a mid-day Sabbath buried within the definition of a day. In Spanish this is called a siesta. This is a time for lunch, a mid-day break. Like the weekly Sabbath, it lines up with the 7th hour in the day.

The text is using a time system that counts 'hour of the day' or O' Day. Our modern system counts 'hour of the clock' or simply O' Clock.

There is a long history, but the change came because astronomers were the first customers for expensive and highly accurate clocks. They needed to count time from noon when every day they manually set their clocks for that evening's observations.

The next day they would set the clock again and measure the error. Every measurement from the previous evening needed to be hand corrected by that day's error in the clock over the previous 24 hours.

Those error corrections needed to be computed against a zero point when the clock was set the previous day at noon. So they needed a face with zero at high noon so they had fewer manual calculations to do later. Remember, at best, this was pencil on paper calculations.

Businesses eventually wanted accurate clocks for payroll timekeeping. So they started buying these same accurate astronomer clocks. Thus the shape of hours of the day was changed.

Conversion Mistakes

There is a common mistake made when converting between the older O'Day hour system and the hours on this new fangled O'Clock system.

The astronomers wanted a 'zero point' at noon. They were using real numbers with a zero point. The older O'Day system was like the calendar.

Think about calendars. Months of the year are counted starting at 1. Days of the month are counted starting at 1. Days of the week are also counted starting at 1. Years from the epoch were also counted from 1, but that fact is also lost to history. Anyone who claims a year 0 does not know history.

The text is not inconsistent here. The old O'Day system counted hours of the day from 1. The text also counts hours of the night, and watches of the night from 1. This is all just like the longer units of time.

So what is the hour correction between the ancient O'Day and the modern O'Clock hour measuring systems?

The same question can be stated slightly differently. At what minute on a modern clock does the first hour of the day begin?

On a traditional O'Day clock, hour 1 beings at sunrise, nominally that is at 6:00 AM on a modern clock.

At what time on the modern O'Clock system does hour number 1 begin?

This is a trick question, of course. By this we mean when does the hour number first become number 1?

Nominally this is 1:00 PM.

What is the difference between 6:00 AM and 1:00 PM? 7 hours.

I do not know how often I have read commentaries on the timing of events in passion week where an incorrect correction of 6 hours was used instead of 7. Getting this right is apparently not easy.

This is one of those points that anyone who has graduated college, especially Bible College, should have learned in their Bible 101 class.

Subdivisions of Hours

The root spelling of the word for hour, Sa-Oo, is very similar to the spelling for seven, Sa-Ba-Oo, or Sabbath Sa-Ba-Ta. The word for hour is missing the Ba from the word for seven. This is already curious.

As I was working out the prophetic timing of Passion Week I found each day in Joshua's ministry mapping to 30 years in the historical timeline. I also found each week in that ministry year was mapping to an hour in passion week.

Without going into the math, the map of 1 week to 1 hour should be evident. These are somehow the same. Any time you read about a week, or an hour, in the text it might apply prophetically in some way. This could be as a parable internal to the text. It could also apply to you personally if you are using the Lots calculator.

Note that by the same math the subdivisions of each of the 7ths of an hour are 30. So passion week was running at 210 years to the hour. A correctly marked clock face that goes down to this level of detail should have 210 divisions around the circle. Most practical clock faces are not large enough for this, but that is the goal when possible.

Paleo Letters

So the update I put online earlier this week adds 2 new clock face styles to the 4 that were already there. One of these new faces places Paleo letters on a 12 hour clock style. The other new face places Paleo letters on a sundial style 24 hour clock face.

What I have done on these new faces is change the O' Day hour number to the corresponding Paleo letter.

We once called these cocks '7 up clocks' because the number 7 sits at noon at the top of the 12 hour dial. Jo is the letter that became the number 7. So this update simply places Jo at this location on the clock face without needing to mentally convert.

So far, this change does nothing particularly new.

But now watch the letter Wa. The star. The Wa is technically a Sundial. It is a device for tracking the sky, and idiomatically often just means star in English. Ancient watches, which would be spelled Wa-Jo, or star-balance, combined the sundial with a compass. Together they provided direction to someone traveling across land. That letter now shows up on the paleo version of the clock face at 6:00 AM and at 6:00 PM.

The Wa letter is marking the start of the calendar day, at 6:00 PM, when the stars come out. It is also marking 6:00 AM, when the sun rises and first hour of the work day begins. This is the point in the day when sundials start to function.

This is just a cool new thing to note. Now, look at a parable based on the alphabet and the clock.

Parable of the Laborers (Matthew 20, BRB)

In this parable, a master of a house went out early to hire laborers for his vineyard. He bargained with them and sent them to his vineyard.

The Wa is the start of the day, and this is happening in hour Wa. Note the sense of Wa for starting something, but also for providing direction or inspiration. Given the letters to come I suspect their specific task is to shine light on or what we might call survey the vineyard. They will be figuring out what needs to be done where.

At the 3rd, 6th, 9th and 11th hours the master of the house does the same. But, troubling, the text does not say what each cohort was hired to do. Of course they went to work in the vineyard in a general sense. There are no more details given.

We normally think that they all did the same thing, just for shorter amounts of time. The interpretation at the end of the parable suggests this, but of course interpretations in their own book are suspect.

Is there a way to break this down? Is there a way to fill in what the workers were doing? If we could figure this out maybe we could crack the story, it is a parable after all.

In the general sense, all parables come to life by mapping from the stated domain to some other domain. There is usually a simple mapping rule for any given parable that cracks the parable. A day for a year, for example, is the interpretive key to many timeline parables. All other parables have similar simple keys that map the stated parable story to some other domain.

Turns out, the time of day when each group is hired provides a map to the Paleo letters and through them to their precise definitions. Those definitions are found by inspecting items at the Table Tabernacle item. Those letter definitions will tell us what each successive group of laborers was hired to do. Let me explain.

At hour 3, the 'Ge' letter on the clock, we see a scythe. This is a large hand tool with a blade. These laborers where hired to cut things. Vineyards need pruning on certain types of new shoots so that the vines better produce fruit. The growth energy of the vine, like that of an apple tree, needs to be directed into fruit and not into growing more vine. This pruning is what that group was hired to do.

At hour 6, the 'Ve' letter on the clock, we see a tent peg. A stake that goes into the ground with ropes that tie off things above. Young apple trees are tied off to the ground, just like a tent peg. Depending on the type of vine, they might be tied off in other ways. They might be tied off to a truss or they might be tied within. These are also the letter Ve. This group of laborers was hired to tie off the vines, to anchor them.

At hour 9, the 'The' letter on the clock, we see a wheel. This group of laborers is going to be moving stuff around using a cart of some sort. Maybe hauling away the shoots that were cut off earlier.

At hour 11, the 'Ku' letter on the clock, we see a sprout, or seedling. In a vineyard this would be planting new plants. The vines in most vineyards have a productive life of only so many years, then their production begins to decline. A big vineyard will always be cycling out and replanting some section. This is what this 11th hour group would be hired to do.

The final hour, so presumably hour 12 on the clock is the letter 'Lu,' a shepherd's staff. So what is going on at this point?

This is when the master of the vineyard is settling accounts with those in his flock who had been working the vineyard. This is what a shepherd of people will do, he feeds them.

To crack this parable we needed to know the paleo alphabet. We also needed to know how the letters align with daylight hours. This parable is a proof-text for the letter alignments I have used in the clock. It suggests those letters begin at sunrise, the start of the work day, and not at sunset, the start of the calendar day.

Are there bigger applications to this parable?

When Joshua calls people to work for him full time it will often be in some specific problem domain. The parable is laying vineyard related tasks as examples of what happens with people.

Also, remember, the '7 times' stories of Leviticus 26. Those 7 times are usually years. There are 12 months in common years. So 7 * 12 = 84 common months and then a leap month in a 7 year interval.

But remember, hours break down into subdivisions of 7. So 12 hours * 7 divisions/hour = 84 divisions. This is the same as the number of months in 7 years, shy the leap month.

This parable is explaining what to look for across perhaps any interval of 7 times. It has a math error of missing the leap month, but the start and ends of this parable are fuzzy.

I am inclined to think the leap month represents a 30 day skew. If this applies to world history, this would be calling out 30 year long windows when Joshua does major work in the history of Earth.

Bible Clocks

I thought to look at clocks again as I was inspecting the lid on the Table Tabernacle item. I am printing that in white plastic with black lettering. This in part because the lid is representing lettering on white linen. I will post a picture of that lid to the telegram group when this blog goes out.

That lid reminded me of years ago when we tried making Bible Clocks with the O'Day hour numbering system. (This was summer 2006, a long time ago.) The trouble we had in those days was the need to find clock cases that could be repurposed as Bible Clocks. Otherwise we would have needed a woodshop which we did not have.

We found a few clocks with cases that could be opened. We changed out the faces and sold a few of them at a farmers market to see what we might learn when talking to people. These were great conversation pieces.

People who knew the Bible understood immediately the problem these clocks solved. Our customers either wanted a very cheap clock, as a simple lesson relative to the text of the Bible, or they wanted a big nice clock for a living room. We sold a bunch of 'regulator' style clocks to this end. Clocks mid range did not sell much at all.

These days I am working on 3d printing stuff. The only raw material I need for a 3d printed clock are Clock motors, clear plastic to cover the face and various colors and types of filament for the 3d printers. Maybe a few screws and a battery to put them together.

Compared to most of the rest of the work I am doing on Tabernacle items, simple clocks are fast and easy to design. The 7 parts that make up a simple 6 inch circular wall clock took under an hour to design.

I will post a picture of the first 3d printed copy of the new clock design to the Telegram group. I expect the design to eventually go onto bom.paleo.in for anyone who wants to make a copy. Ryan has been bugging me to design a few others, which I will do.

So is a clock a Tabernacle item?

Am I straying from my task of repopulating David's fallen tent?

Clock In Tabernacle?

The parable I reference above is an example in the text where the system of telling time is needed to understand the simple inspired story. This system is the start for understanding the prophetic use of the text that comes once the text itself is mastered.

So the clock is a lesson that anyone teaching about the text must eventually include in their curriculum. So a clock of some sort is required.

In ancient times this could have been done with a sundial. The Wa letter is evidence it was clearly known throughout any era when the text was known.

So a sundial with the correct markings is a possible way to teach how to tell time. At Joshua's house at Capernaum it is easy to think a sundial was present somewhere on the property. Small sundials are not that large and were often placed on pedestals. That level of artifact is self evident.

Setting up sundials is not easy. The pitch of the gnomon is based on the distance from the equator where the sundial is actually located. So a sundial does not lend itself to being a simple object that can be displayed indoors.

Pendulum clocks are thought to be more modern, only going back several hundred years. The important point here is that any technology known 200 years ago could have been known at any place and time anywhere else in history. So pendulum clocks could go back to the time of Moses.

Pendulum clocks are based on the invention of the 'escapement.' This is the rocker arm that attaches to a pendulum driven gear. The escapement gives clocks their distinctive tick-tock sound.

Past the escapement is a series of gears that drive the hands. Brass gears are known to be ancient tech. Search Youtube for Antikythera Mechanism for proof that very complex geared devices in brass are at least 2000 years old.

The ancient world also had water clocks. These were not based on an escapement, but on the flow of water. These are similarly ancient and do not need an escapement.

I am inclined to think that a mechanical clock of some type is likely a proper component in the set of items that make up the Tabernacle. So I will be looking at a design for a clock with a face large enough that it can be easily seen in a classroom setting. 8 inches across the clock face is about as large as I can print without sectioning given the equipment that I have. Others will presumably be similarly limited, so I will work something out.

The clock app off of paleo.in also has 24 hour faces. One of them simulates a sundial view of the sky. This would also be a very interesting 3d printed clock.

The 12 hour and 24 hour clock faces carry all the details needed to fully explain how hourly time works in the text. They fit easily with the set of other items that go in the Tabernacle. I will play with these designs until I am comfortable that they teach the correct stories. I intend to show them to some friends before the designs eventually go online at bom.paleo.in. This is not going to happen real fast.

More Later,

Phil