Relative hour

Hebrew term ascribed to an hour of a 12-hour day and how it is to be reckoned The clock over the Jaffa Gate of Jerusalem in the 1910s. The face on the left shows 10:10 am in the European style that sets 0:00 at midnight and noon. The face on the right shows 4:00 in the Ottoman style, that sets 0:00 at sunset. Relative hour (Hebrew singular: shaʿah zǝmanit / שעה זמנית; plural: shaʿot - zǝmaniyot / שעות זמניות), sometimes called halachic hour, temporal hour, seasonal hour and variable hour, is a term used in rabbinic Jewish law that assigns 12 hours to each day and 12 hours to each night, all throughout the year. A relative hour has no fixed length in absolute time, but changes with the length of daylight each day - depending on summer (when the days are long and the nights are short), and in winter (when the days are short and the nights are long). Even so, in all seasons a day is always divided into 12 hours, and a night is always divided into 12 hours, which invariably makes for a longer hour or a shorter hour. At Mediterranean latitude, one hour can be about 45 minutes at the winter solstice, and 75 minutes at summer solstice. All of the hours mentioned by t