> I went on to look up "minute," which does not occur in the Bible at all. It's too bad I can't readily tell if "second" is used as a measure of time. Anyone interested would only have to check 173 instances of the word's use, which isn't bad, all things considered.

I don't know what sort of time-keeping system was used in ancient Israel (Nyperold?) but looking up the origin of the English words for "minute" etc. in the Oxford English Dictionary provided some useful information about their uses in the English-speaking world.

We picked up the 24-hour day from the Egyptians (according to the Wikipedia), but for a long time it had no fixed meaning. Actually, it specifically referred to a 1/12 of the "natural day" which meant either the time from morning to night or vice versa.

The "dividing things into sixty" (e.g. sixty minutes in an hour) originated with Babylonian mathematicians, passed to Greek thinkers such as Ptolemy and made its way into post-classical scholarship in Latin (from which we get the word "minute"). The OED notes that even as late as the 13th Century, though, "minute" in the English-speaking world meant 1/10th of an hour -- something that makes more sense given that we, unlike the Babylonians and their base-60 system, have a base-10 system.

"Second" to indicate time is quite new. Being that even minutes were tough to measure accurately until clocks came around, there was no way to measure 1/60th of that. The term originated also from Latin and was applied originally in mathematics: it's the result of dividing something by 60 a second time (a minute is the result of doing it the first time). The earliest English reference to "second" as a measure of time the OED lists is from 1588, contrast this to its use geometric use in Chaucer in 1391.

I think it's interesting how fluid most of our time measurements were until we had both accurate clocks and advanced astronomy with which to calibrate the clocks (which may help explain why we use minutes to divide hours -- because it's the sort of thing astronomers would do). As Howard noted, for the majority of human history knowing the exact time wasn't that important, in part because it wasn't easy to know the exact time.

Stephen