Quote:
Originally Posted by rstrats
re: "Sorry. You may not find any examples of what you're looking for at all."
Then I wonder what those who say that Matthew 12:40 is using common idiomatic language are basing their assertion on?
If you're looking specifically for something that cites exactly "day and night" as a descriptor AND has a specific event that's measured in precisely the way you're looking for, you're unlikely to find it. The number of available writings from the time are rather limited, and the recording of events in a purely literal manner as you're looking for just wasn't something people did. It's kind of like asking for birth records from ancient times. It just wasn't a habit of people at that time to write such things.
I can't speak specifically to this situation, but the understanding of phrases is generally born out by trying to understand what people said, under the assumption that they're not stupid. I've used the word "cool" in the past as an example.
Let's say we're talking to someone who is looking at a fire for the first time. He says "That's cool!" We can, for example, assume that the guy is a moron because fire is obviously hot and not cool. Or we can look at the situation and say, well, he's probably not taking the literal meaning of "cool" because that's just stupid. So instead, that word is more likely to represent some sort of expression of interest, awe, or amazement.
In the book of Matthew, there's one other usage of "X days and X nights" and that was used in Matthew 4:2, talking about Jesus in the desert. Do you worry about whether that time period started in the late afternoon, after sundown, or before sunrise? Probably not. So an analogous statement simply may not be as temporally dependent upon the exact start and stop times. We can ask about the symbolic meaning of the number 40, and whether it's a literal 40, and all that stuff, but you'll see that we're not asking about whether it was 40 days and 39 nights, or actually 40 24-hour days.
You also have to consider that you're not the first person to ask the question. In particular, people from around the time it was written did not seem to take issue with it. So if they didn't have a problem with it, it's likely that they understood it in a way that was logical. That is, there's no reason to write a lot about it because it already made sense to them.
When reading ancient texts, you should always be working under the assumption that they meant something meaningful. Otherwise, you can end up with all sorts of conclusions. Think about the word "butterfly." If you were some person from the future looking back at this word, would you think that the people today thought that churned milk had the capacity for flight?