THE divine origin of time, its sacred cyclic pattern attesting to the eternity of the cosmic order, its regular, cyclic rhythms in time with the changes of nature, are described in the Thanksgiving Hymns. The poet describes a full twentyfour-hour day from end to end, from sunrise to sunrise, picturing the regular, eternal beat of divine time underlying the laws of heaven and earth:

The various time-related terms occurring here, in poetic language, represent the basis for the numerical calculation of the cyclic pattern of divine time: kets = recurrent time unit (such as, in the above passage, a twenty-four-hour day); tekufah = cyclic period (relative to the daily and annual course of the sun); mo'ed = divinely appointed time, attesting to God's decree; moladei et, yesodei kets = measurable and countable units of time: day, week, month, year, and the four intercalary days when the sun turns round in the heavens; ot = sign, a visible divine time marker, such as the sun, or a God-given invisible marker, such as the sabbath, attesting to and designating the fixed, divine, cyclic order; te'udah = preordained heavenly statute, destined to exist for ever and attesting to the laws of nature.