In this verse foretelling the tenth plague, we learn when it is to take place: kachatzot, “at (or toward, or around) midnight”. But a chapter later we find it occurred bachatzi halaylah, “in the middle of the night’”(12:29).
Are these just different ways of saying the same thing? "In the middle of the night” seems rather vague, whereas perhaps “midnight” is a precise moment.
The medieval bible commentators compare the two terms, chatzot and chatzi halaylah, but Ibn Ezra makes an additional comment about the time. He notes the difficulty of knowing exactly when midday occurs, but that the precise moment of midnight is even harder to discern.
Ibn Ezra, who lived in the early 12th century, was a Bible commentator, poet and a grammarian, but here his science is pretty good too. In theory, midday is when the sun is at its highest point in the sky. Ignoring the fact that if the sun is directly overhead for you – what you might call “noon” – then a few miles west of you it won’t be noon by that definition for another minute, at least something notionally happens at midday, when shadows are shortest.
But nothing happens at midnight. Midnight is the moment when the sun is directly overhead at the place on exactly the other side of the world from where you’re standing. How do you see when that happens?
Some moments are self-evident. Something happens and we give it a name. Sun-rise is sunrise. But other moments, as Ibn Ezra teaches us, are harder to pinpoint.
The clocks and watches that rule our lives fool us into thinking that mid-day is at 12 noon, and that mid-night is more than our own invention. But just because we have to invent midnight, perhaps arbitrarily define it, that doesn’t mean that that there isn’t a moment that really is the middle of the night. Even if we aren’t aware of it, at some point during the night, next morning becomes closer than last night.
There’s a certain arbitrariness about when we say midnight happens but that doesn’t mean there’s no midnight. Some people can point to the moment at which they fell in love yet for others there’s a certain arbitrariness to saying when it was, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t fall in love.
And there’s a certain arbitrariness about how each of us tries to conceive of God, but that doesn’t mean there’s no God. Not being able to pinpoint something doesn’t mean it’s not there.
