By the Numbers · The Whole Old Testament
Why the Third Day?
“On the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures.” Millions of Christians affirm it, and have for centuries. The line comes from Paul, who says he is passing on what he himself received. But ask the obvious question, which Scriptures?, and the easy answers stop. No Old Testament verse says the Messiah will rise on the third day. Scholars have argued to a standstill over what Paul meant.
The answer is not a proof-text. It is a pattern, and it runs through the whole Old Testament. This page lets you run it yourself, episode by episode, to the empty tomb.
1 · The claim
Raised on the third day, according to the Scriptures
Start with the raw data of the claim itself. Paul, writing in the mid-50s AD, hands on the church’s earliest summary of the gospel:
And this was not Paul’s innovation. Jesus himself repeatedly names the third day as the necessary day, and says it is written. Tap any reference for the text:
“This is what is written.” Jesus locates his third-day resurrection in the Old Testament; there was no other Scripture for him to mean. And Paul’s word is plural: Scriptures. Whatever he had in mind, it was more than one verse.
So the problem is set. The creed’s confidence stands on a claim that the Old Testament foretells a third-day rising, and the Old Testament contains no verse that says so in as many words. Either the claim reaches beyond its evidence, or we have not yet understood what kind of evidence it rests on. Before deciding, do what this series always does: look at how the numbers actually behave.
2 · The candidates
The answers that fail
The usual scholarly move is to hunt for a single verse that carries the whole weight. Three candidates hold the field. Test each one:
The favourite: Hosea’s promise
The problem: the “us” being revived and restored is Israel, not the Messiah. Read on its own, the verse promises national restoration after judgment; nothing in it, taken in isolation, points to one man rising from a tomb. The scholars who champion it (Dodd, Wijngaards, and many others) must explain how a corporate promise becomes an individual prediction, and a single verse cannot answer Paul’s plural “Scriptures”. Hold on to this verse, though. It will matter enormously later, once it has company.
The one Jesus cited: Jonah in the fish
The problem: as a sole proof-text, Jonah is a historical narrative, not a prediction. The human author records what happened to a runaway prophet; he does not announce what will happen to the Messiah. Critics like C. F. Evans dismiss Matthew’s use of it as ad hoc for exactly this reason. Yet Jonah is the one candidate the New Testament actually cites (Matthew 12:40), so an adequate answer must embrace it rather than shrug it off. A pattern would. A proof-text cannot.
The dark horse: Hezekiah’s healing
The problem: the same as Jonah’s, only more so. A dying king healed and standing in the temple on the third day is a striking picture of the pattern this page will trace, but as an isolated verse it is narrative, not prophecy, and it concerns Hezekiah, not the Christ. One verse, again, against a plural “Scriptures”.
Some scholars, seeing all this, cut the knot a different way: Bruce Metzger proposed re-punctuating Paul so that “according to the Scriptures” attaches only to “he was raised” and not to “on the third day” at all. But the parallel clause in verse 3 tells against it, and Jesus’ own words in the Gospels teach the very thing the translation is engineered to avoid. If a genuine Old Testament basis for the third day can be found, the escape route is unnecessary.
The German scholar Karl Lehmann came closest. He argued that Paul had in mind not a verse but a pattern of divine action on the third day, and certain rabbinic texts agree, teaching that “the Holy One never leaves the righteous in distress more than three days”; a tradition reaching back at least to the second century AD. The instinct is right. The execution was the weakness: the examples were picked by hand, and critics could answer that other third days bring disaster, not rescue. Cherry-picked evidence convinces no one. What no one had done is run all the data.
3 · The raw data
Every third day in the Old Testament
So run it all. Excluding calendar dates (“on the third day of the month Adar”), the Old Testament speaks of the third day, or of three days, in 69 verses, which group into 43 distinct episodes. That is the complete data set; nothing has been left out. And before any interpreting begins, the Hebrew itself sorts the episodes into two families: a duration, “three days”, and a dated event, “on the third day”, with a handful of episodes using both.
The complete survey: 43 episodes, colour-coded by the Hebrew time margin each uses. Blue cells use the duration “three days”; gold cells use the dated event “on the third day” (with the preposition and the article); split cells use both. The sorting follows the Hebrew; English versions sometimes smooth the second formula (the NIV renders Genesis 34:25 and 1 Kings 12:12 as “three days later”), so a gold cell is gold because of its Hebrew, not its English. The three dim cells stand apart: Genesis 1:13 differs in genre and grammar, and the two Numbers passages sit in day-by-day lists where the third day carries nothing distinctive. Scholars have proposed themes for this material before, journeys (Landes), long-or-short spans (Bauer), preparation (Wenham), ominous events (Hamilton), but each theme, tested against the whole set, covers only a fraction of it. The two families need to be read separately, and each turns out to keep its own rule.
4 · The first pattern
“Three days”: long enough to be sure
Take the duration family first: twenty-three episodes with “three days”. Twice, the text itself states what the three days are for. Moses asks for a three-day journey so that Israel’s sacrifice will be safely beyond Egyptian eyes (Exodus 8:26–27). Rahab tells the spies to hide three days, until the pursuers have given up (Joshua 2:16). In both, three days is the margin that makes a state of affairs certain.
Read the rest of the family with that key and episode after episode opens. Tap each one for what became certain:
Thirteen of the twenty-three “three days” episodes carry this sense, counted honestly (the count excludes supporting cases outside the exact wording, like 1 Samuel 20:5, where three days is explicitly enough to establish Saul’s intent). It is the strongest single theme anyone has found in this family, and it is easy to state: after three days, a state of affairs is certain. What is lost for three days is lost. What has not come in three days is not coming. What has been dead three days is dead.
5 · The second pattern
“On the third day”: run the pattern yourself
Now the other family: the fourteen historical narratives where something happens “on the third day” (the twelve event-episodes and five dual-phrase episodes, minus the three law texts and Hosea’s prophecy, which get their turn below). This is the heart of the page, and you should not take the pattern on trust. Each story follows; read the setup, call what the third day brings, then check yourself against the text.
Episode 1 of 14
What does the third day bring?
The tally so far
God tests Abraham: offer Isaac. On the third day Abraham lifts his eyes and sees the place. The altar is built, the knife is out, and the angel of the LORD stops his hand; a ram dies in Isaac’s place.
Laban learns on the third day that Jacob has fled, and pursues with his kinsmen. Peace reverses into pursuit; Laban says it is in his power to do Jacob harm, but God has warned him in a dream in the night.
On the third day, when the newly circumcised men are sore, Simeon and Levi fall on the unsuspecting city and kill every male. Covenant reverses into slaughter; life into death.
Joseph interprets two dreams of threes: within three days Pharaoh will lift up each prisoner’s head. On the third day the cupbearer is restored to life and office, and the baker is hanged. One third day, both edges of the pattern.
Held three days under a capital charge of spying, the brothers hear Joseph’s verdict on the third day: “Do this and you will live, for I fear God.” Ten men under sentence walk free.
Israel is warned to be ready for the third day, when the LORD will come down in the sight of the people, with death decreed for any who break the bounds. On the third day the mountain burns and quakes, and the people, fenced from death, meet God and live.
A people marked for destruction has tricked Israel into a sworn covenant. Israel arrives at their cities on the third day, and the oath holds: “Joshua saved them from the Israelites, and they did not kill them.”
Two days of battle have cost Israel forty thousand dead. On the third day they set themselves in array again, and the LORD defeats Benjamin before Israel; the war turns from catastrophe to deliverance.
David reaches Ziklag on the third day to find it burned and every family carried off. At God’s word he pursues and recovers all: “Nothing was missing: young or old, boy or girl.” The captives, expected dead, come home alive.
On the third day a man arrives from Saul’s camp with torn clothes and earth on his head: the army is broken, Saul and Jonathan are dead. And death answers death; the Amalekite who claims the killing is struck down.
Two women share a house; one gives birth, and the third day after, the other. In the night one child dies, and the morning brings the Bible’s most famous custody case: a life-and-death story stamped with the third-day margin from its first sentence.
Israel comes back on the third day expecting a lighter yoke, and gets scorpions for whips. The kingdom tears in two, Adoram is stoned, and the king runs for his chariot. The reader who knows the pattern felt lives in the balance the moment the third day was named.
A divine death sentence (“you are going to die; you will not recover”) reverses before Isaiah is out of the middle court: “I will heal you. On the third day from now you will go up to the temple of the LORD.” A dying man stands in the temple on the named day.
Under an empire-wide decree of death, Esther fasts three days and, on the third day, breaks the law that kills uninvited visitors: “if I perish, I perish.” The sceptre comes out; she lives, and a nation’s death warrant begins to reverse.
All fourteen “third day” narratives, classified. Every one resolves climactically on the third day. Nine of the fourteen see a death threat removed on that day; four record death itself (Genesis 40 stands in both columns); the remaining two are climactic reversals of other kinds. The signature is unmistakable: on the third day the story turns, and it usually turns from death to life.
6 · The control
Is this just how stories work?
A fair objection: perhaps any time margin in Hebrew narrative marks a climax. Name a day, and something dramatic happens on it; that is simply what storytelling does. The objection deserves a control group, so here is one: every “next day” in Old Testament historical narrative, twenty-four passages of ordinary time-stamped events, classified by the same criteria.
The control confirms part of the objection, honestly: “next day” events are indeed mostly climactic (22 of 24), half are reversals of some kind (12 of 24), and a third touch life and death (8 of 24). Time margins do mark significance. But the third day’s signature does not wash out: a death threat removed on the day itself occurs in 9 of 14 third-day narratives against 2 of 24 next-day narratives. That eight-fold gap is the pattern, and no generic storytelling gravity explains it.
A second control: if “three” were doing the work as a mere number, its neighbours should behave comparably. They do not. Count the Old Testament’s day-phrases and the anomaly is immediate:
As bare numerals, two, three and four descend smoothly (772, 605, 456), exactly as small numbers should. As day-phrases they run 14, 69, 8: the third day towers five to eight times over its neighbours. And the neighbours defer to it. Nearly every “second day” reference exists to point at a third or seventh day (2 Samuel 1:1–2 is a “second day” that sets up a third-day arrival); the fourth day repeatedly serves to bring a completed three-day period into relief (Judges 14:15; 2 Chronicles 20:26; Ezra 8:33). This is not number-symbolism; standard studies rightly find none for the numeral three. It is a marked phrase: a convention every attentive reader of the Hebrew Bible would come to feel.
So the two families of the survey hold up under control. “Three days” establishes certainty. “On the third day” marks the climactic turn, characteristically from death to life. A reader formed by these Scriptures carries both rules without ever writing them down, the way you carry the rules of your own language. Now put the two together and open the prophets.
7 · The destination
According to the Scriptures
Return to the verse the scholars kept circling, and read it as its first readers would have: as poetry, in parallel lines, by the rules just established. Hosea is promising Israel restoration beyond a judgment described as being torn by a lion (Hosea 5:14), and his poetry moves in pairs: a preliminary line, then the climactic one. Step through it:
“He has torn us to pieces…”
“…but he will heal us”
First pair: the tearing is the setup; the healing is the climax the line exists to deliver.
Hosea 6:1–2, read by its own parallelism. And the restoration is no mild recovery: the Hebrew verb behind “restore us” is literally “raise us up”, used elsewhere of the dead rising (Psalm 88:10; Isaiah 26:19; Amos 5:2), the tearing lion implies a death to rise from, and the goal is to “live in his presence”. Loaded with the narrative pattern, the verse reads as the pattern’s prophetic summary: a climactic reversal from death to life, on the third day, promised by God.
Now run the whole pattern one last time, on the last set of data.
A man is executed on a Friday afternoon and buried before nightfall. By Jewish reckoning, in which days begin at sunset and are counted inclusively, he lies dead through the end of the sixth day, the whole seventh, and into the first day of the week: three days. You know what the convention says three days establishes. What is lost three days is lost. What has not come back in three days is not coming back. The three days in the tomb are Scripture’s own seal of certainty on the death: this was no swoon, no mistake, no lingering hope. He was dead, established beyond doubt, exactly as Jonah, three days and nights in the fish, was established beyond hope. Jesus chose that comparison himself.
And then, on the third day: the marked day, the day every attentive Old Testament reader has learned to brace for. The day Isaac came off the altar and the day the sceptre came out for Esther. The day the doomed brothers heard “do this and you will live”, the day a dying king was promised the temple courts, the day Israel met God at the burning mountain and lived. The day the story turns, and turns from death to life.
Which Scriptures, then? Not one verse, and the creed never needed one. The Scriptures: the whole shelf of them, Genesis to Jonah, keeping the two rules with a consistency you have now checked episode by episode. The patterns alone do not prove the Messiah would rise; that case the apostles argued on other ground (Acts 2:24–32). But grant that the Christ would rise, and ask an astute Old Testament reader the remaining question, when should he rise?, and there is one answer the whole canon has been training them to give: the third day fits the pattern best.
This is the destination the series has been walking toward. The lifespans fall on a curve; the census keeps a ledger’s books; and the third day keeps the oldest convention of them all, the one that runs from Moriah to an empty tomb outside Jerusalem: God lets the darkness run long enough to be certain, and then, on the third day, he turns it. The numbers were never the Bible’s embarrassment. They were its signature. For where the third day points, see A Case for Christ; for how the wing began, see How Many Left Egypt?
The written argument
On the Third Day, According to the Scriptures
The Old Testament basis of 1 Corinthians 15:4b
Paul says the Christ was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and no Old Testament verse predicts a third-day resurrection. The solution is not a verse but two patterns, recovered by an exhaustive survey of every “three days” and “third day” in the Old Testament: a duration that establishes certainty, and a marked day of climactic reversal, characteristically from death to life. Together they answer the question a proof-text never could.
1. The problem everyone recites
The Nicene Creed confesses that Christ rose “on the third day according to the Scriptures”, quoting 1 Corinthians 15:4b. Here the easy answers end, because the referent of “according to the Scriptures” is genuinely hard, and the scholarly literature, such as it is, has reached no consensus. Gordon Fee catalogues five approaches: that the phrase modifies “on the third day” only; that Paul means something other than the Old Testament (early passion narratives, or collections of testimony texts); that it reflects the Jewish belief that corruption set in after the third day, so that Jesus rose in time to escape it (Psalm 16:9–11); that it modifies only “he was raised”; or that it modifies both the raising and the day.
Several of these can be dealt with briskly. Paul cannot mean anything less than the Old Testament, because Jesus himself locates the third-day resurrection in the Scriptures (Matthew 16:21; Luke 9:22; and above all Luke 24:46, “this is what is written”), and for Jesus there was nothing else “written”. The corruption view explains why Jesus should rise within three days, but not why he must rise precisely on the third. And Bruce Metzger’s elegant escape, re-punctuating so that “on the third day” floats free of the Scriptures (“he was raised in accordance with the Scriptures, on the third day”), founders on the parallel in verse 3, where “according to the Scriptures” governs the whole preceding clause, and is in any case unnecessary if an Old Testament basis for the third day can be produced. The question, then, is the honest one: which Scriptures speak of the third day?
2. The single-verse candidates
Most interpreters hunt a sole Scripture. The favourite is Hosea 6:2, “after two days he will revive us; on the third day he will restore us”, championed in various forms by Dodd, Wijngaards, Lindars and others. But the party being revived is Israel, not the Messiah, and in isolation from the wider canon it is not clear how the Christ enters the verse at all. Jonah 1:17 has the unique distinction of being cited in the New Testament itself (Matthew 12:40), but as narrative rather than prediction; C. F. Evans could dismiss the connection as ad hoc. The third candidate, Hezekiah’s healing (2 Kings 20:5, “on the third day from now you will go up to the temple of the LORD”), is narrative again. Against all three stands a simple grammatical fact: Paul’s “Scriptures” is plural. Whatever he received and passed on, it was more than one verse.
Karl Lehmann saw this and proposed the right kind of answer: a pattern of divine action on the third day (Exodus 19:11, 16; compare Genesis 22:4; 2 Kings 20:5, 8; Esther 5:1; Hosea 6:2), following rabbinic texts which teach that “the Holy One never leaves the righteous in distress more than three days”, a tradition H. McArthur traced back to at least the second century AD. The weakness was evidential. The examples were selected, not surveyed, and the critics’ rejoinder was fair: other third days bring disaster, and other rescues come sooner or later than the third day. H. Richards filed the whole question under “difficulties remaining”. What follows is the survey the debate lacked.
3. The survey
Excluding calendar dates, the Old Testament refers to the third day or to three days in 69 verses, which group into 43 episodes. The Hebrew divides them. Twenty-three episodes use the duration three days (Genesis 30:36; Exodus 3:18 with 5:3 and 8:27; Exodus 10:22–23; Exodus 15:22 with Numbers 33:8; Numbers 10:33; Joshua 1:11; 2:16 with 2:22; 3:2; 9:16; Judges 14:14; 19:4; 1 Samuel 9:20; 30:12–13; 2 Samuel 20:4; 24:13; 2 Kings 2:17; Ezra 8:15 with 8:32; 10:8–9; Nehemiah 2:11; 1 Chronicles 12:39; 2 Chronicles 20:25; Jonah 1:17; 3:3). Twelve use the dated event on the third day, with preposition and article (Genesis 22:4; 31:22; 34:25; Leviticus 7:17–18; Numbers 19:12 with 19:19; Joshua 9:17; Judges 20:30; 1 Samuel 30:1; 2 Samuel 1:2; 1 Kings 3:18; 2 Kings 20:5 with 20:8; Hosea 6:2). Five use both phrases in one story (Genesis 40; Genesis 42:17–18; Exodus 19; 1 Kings 12; Esther 4:16–5:1). Genesis 1:13 stands apart on genre and grammar (the phrase lacks the article), and Numbers 7:24 and 29:20 sit in day-by-day lists where nothing distinguishes the third day from its neighbours.
Previous proposals fare poorly against the whole set. Landes’ journey motif captures at most nine of thirty-seven relevant passages; Bauer’s “longer or shorter time span” eight of thirty-eight; Wenham’s “period of preparation” seven of thirty-seven (though it fares better within Genesis, his brief). Hamilton’s “ominous event” and Durham’s “rising anticipation” gesture in the right direction but are too vague to test. The rabbinic “salvation of the righteous” is closer than any of them, and fails only where it overreaches: four of the third-day narratives contain deaths, and the delivered include an Egyptian cupbearer, an Egyptian slave and the Gibeonites, none of them “the righteous” of Israel. The data wanted a fresh reading, family by family.
4. “Three days”: sufficient time for certainty
In the duration family the theme is stated twice by the text itself. Israel must go three days into the wilderness so that its sacrifice is safely beyond Egyptian sight (Exodus 8:26–27); the spies must hide three days, until the pursuers have certainly gone (Joshua 2:16, 22). Read with that key, the family opens. Laban’s three-day gap guarantees separated flocks (Genesis 30:36). Three days of unbroken darkness establishes that the plague will not lift of itself (Exodus 10:22–23). Three waterless days establish real trouble (Exodus 15:22). Three days make the Gibeonite treaty irreversible (Joshua 9:16), the Philistines’ failure at the riddle final (Judges 14:14), Saul’s donkeys genuinely lost (1 Samuel 9:20), the Egyptian slave definitively abandoned (1 Samuel 30:12–13), Elijah certainly gone after fifty men search that long (2 Kings 2:17), Ezra’s caravan safely unpursued (Ezra 8:32), and the absentee from the Jerusalem assembly finally absent, his property forfeit (Ezra 10:8–9). Thirteen of the twenty-three episodes carry the sense, enough for an attentive reader to internalise the rule: after three days, a state of affairs is established. (1 Samuel 20:5–7, where three days suffice to establish Saul’s disposition toward David, corroborates the theme from just outside the exact wording, and is deliberately left out of the count to avoid biasing the sample.)
The rule also works in reverse, as narrative leverage. Jonah’s three days and nights in the fish establish with conventional certainty that he is gone, which is precisely what makes his deliverance shattering (Jonah 1:17). And perhaps the three days needed to gather Jehoshaphat’s plunder (2 Chronicles 20:25) trade on the same convention to say the plunder was beyond reckoning, though nothing below rests on that suggestion.
5. “On the third day”: the climactic reversal
The event family contains fourteen historical narratives (the twelve “third day” episodes less the two law texts and Hosea’s prophecy, plus the five dual-phrase episodes). All fourteen resolve climactically on the third day, and the shape of the resolution is strikingly consistent. Nine narrate the sparing of life under threatened death: Isaac at Moriah (Genesis 22:4), the cupbearer (Genesis 40), the brothers in Joseph’s custody (Genesis 42:18), Israel at the burning mountain (Exodus 19), the Gibeonites (Joshua 9:17), Israel’s army at Gibeah after two days of catastrophe (Judges 20:30), the captives of Ziklag (1 Samuel 30:1), Hezekiah (2 Kings 20:5), and Esther with her people (Esther 4:16–5:1). Four record death on the day: Shechem’s males (Genesis 34:25), the baker (Genesis 40), the news and the messenger of Saul’s fall (2 Samuel 1:2), and the child in the house of the two mothers (1 Kings 3:18). The remaining two are climactic reversals of another kind: Laban’s pursuit of Jacob, peace turned to menace (Genesis 31:22), and Rehoboam’s answer, hoped-for relief turned to scorpions (1 Kings 12).
The pattern trains its readers. Once noticed, it colours the third-day stories where life and death are not explicit: the reader rightly senses mortal danger in a pursuit that begins “on the third day” (and Laban says as much, Genesis 31:29), and feels lives in the balance at Shechem’s assembly (the stoning of Adoram and the near-war of 1 Kings 12:18–24 promptly oblige). A time margin so freighted does not merely date events; it forecasts their shape.
The two themes are not rivals but stages: in many narratives a reversal on the third day crowns a three-day period of establishment, and it is worth noticing that where the two margins combine, the death-to-life direction dominates. The certainty is the darkness the reversal breaks.
6. The controls
Three controls test whether all this is an artefact of storytelling. First, the neighbouring day-phrases. “Second day / two days” occurs 14 times against the third day’s 69, and nearly every occurrence points away from itself, at a third, seventh or twelfth day; strip those and two references remain, no theme at all. “Fourth day / four days” occurs 8 times, and repeatedly functions to bring a completed three-day period into relief (Judges 14:15; 2 Chronicles 20:26; Ezra 8:33). Second, the bare numerals. As cardinal numbers, two, three and four occur 772, 605 and 456 times respectively, the smooth decline any language shows; as day-phrases they run 14, 69, 8. The spike belongs to the phrase, not the number, which is also why the standard verdict of biblical numerology, that the numeral three carries no special symbolism (Davis), is no objection: the claim here concerns a time-margin formula, not number mysticism.
Third, and decisively, a control narrative sample: all twenty-four occurrences of “the next day” in historical narrative. These confirm that Hebrew time margins generally mark significant events: twenty-two of the twenty-four are climactic in some fashion, twelve are reversals, eight touch life and death. But the third day’s specific signature stands clear of the baseline: a death threat is removed on the day in nine of fourteen third-day narratives, against two of twenty-four next-day narratives. Climax is common; rescue from death on the named day is the third day’s own. The refined statement of the pattern is therefore: the most striking element is the prominence of reversals from death to life, with climactic reversal generally, and death itself, as real but secondary notes. This is a partial vindication of the rabbis, corrected in one respect: the third day’s deliverances fall to Egyptians, Gibeonites and Israelites alike. The data points to salvation for members of all nations on the third day.
7. Hosea 6:2 reread
Only now is Hosea 6:2 ready to be read. Four arguments give the verse the full sense of a reversal from death to life. The Hebrew verb the NIV renders “restore us” is literally “raise us up”, used elsewhere of rising from the dead (Psalm 88:10; Isaiah 26:19; Amos 5:2). The judgment being reversed is described as the LORD tearing his people as a lion tears (Hosea 5:14), and one does not ordinarily survive a lion. The chain, raised up so as to “live in his presence”, implies a prior state of death. And the parallel poetry of 6:1–2 sets its weight explicitly: as “torn” is answered climactically by “heal”, and “struck” by “bind up”, so “after two days he will revive us” is answered climactically by “on the third day he will restore us”. The second day points at the third, exactly as it does in the narratives (2 Samuel 1:1–2; Esther 4:16–5:1). Hosea 6:2 is thus the narrative pattern distilled into prophecy: a climactic reversal from death to life, on the third day, as the act of God. What the verse could not do alone, prove a resurrection on a schedule, it does superbly as the pattern’s summary statement.
8. The resurrection of the Christ on the third day
Both patterns now bear directly on 1 Corinthians 15:4b. The three days in the tomb are the Scriptures’ own margin of certainty: long enough to establish beyond convention or quibble that Jesus was dead. (Friday evening to Sunday morning spans three days by Hebrew inclusive reckoning, in which the day begins at nightfall; the counting is the ancient world’s, not ours.) Jesus’ own chosen figure says exactly this: as Jonah was three days and nights in the fish, certainly gone, so the Son of Man in the heart of the earth (Matthew 12:40). And the third day is the Scriptures’ marked day of climactic reversal from death to life: the day of Isaac, the cupbearer, the brothers, Sinai, Gibeon, Gibeah, Ziklag, Hezekiah and Esther, and the day of Hosea’s promise that the LORD would raise his torn people to live in his presence.
Neither pattern, alone or together, proves from the Old Testament that the Christ would rise; that argument the apostles mounted on other texts (so Peter on Psalm 16, Acts 2:24–32). But once the Christ’s resurrection is granted, the patterns close the remaining question with force. Ask an astute Old Testament reader when the Christ should rise, and the answer comes back: the third day fits the pattern best. This reading has the strengths the sole-Scripture proposals lack. It honours the plural (“the Scriptures”), because the referent is a canon-wide pattern rather than a verse. It embraces Jonah exactly as Jesus embraced him, rather than apologising for him. It explains the startling fact that the Old Testament mentions the third day and three days sixty-nine times, five times its neighbours’ rate. And it lets the church say the creed with understanding: he rose on the third day according to the Scriptures, because the Scriptures, from Moriah onward, had marked the third day as the day God turns death to life.
Sources and further reading
This page adapts Michael Russell, “On the Third Day According to the Scriptures”, Reformed Theological Review 67.1 (April 2008) 1–17, where the survey is set out with full apparatus; a scan of the published article is available online. Literature engaged there includes G. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NICNT, 1987); A. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (2000); B. Metzger, “A Suggestion Concerning the Meaning of 1 Cor xv. 4b”, JTS 8 (1957) 118–123; S. McCasland, “The Scripture Basis of ‘On the Third Day’”, JBL 48 (1929) 124–137; K. Lehmann, Auferweckt am dritten Tag nach der Schrift (2nd ed., 1969); H. McArthur, “On the Third Day”, NTS 18 (1971/72) 81–86; G. M. Landes on the three-days motif in Jonah, JBL 85 (1967); J. B. Bauer, “Drei Tage”, Biblica 39 (1958) 354–358; D. Hill, “On the Third Day”, ExpTim 78 (1966/67) 266–267; C. H. Dodd, According to the Scriptures (1952); C. F. Evans, Resurrection and the New Testament (1970); commentaries by G. Wenham and V. Hamilton (Genesis), J. Durham (Exodus), D. Stuart (Hosea–Jonah), and P. Barnett (1 Corinthians); J. Davis, Biblical Numerology (1968); Goodrick and Kohlenberger, Zondervan NIV Exhaustive Concordance (1999); and Midrash Rabbah on Genesis and Esther (trans. Freedman and Simon). Scripture quotations taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version® NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.