Three Days in the Tomb

Samuel the Lamanite made this prophecy to the Nephites before the birth of the Savior about His death: “In that day that he shall suffer death the sun shall be darkened and refuse to give his light unto you; and also the moon and the stars; and there shall be no light upon the face of this land, even from the time that he shall suffer death, for the space of three days, to the time that he shall rise again from the dead” (Helaman 14:20).  Here he prophesied that the Savior would be in the tomb for three days and that the people would see the sign of it for that length of time.  Zenos also prophesied that Christ would be “buried in a sepulchre” and “he spake concerning the three days of darkness, which should be a sign given of his death unto those who should inhabit the isles of the sea” (1 Nephi 19:10).  The fulfilment of that prophecy was recorded by Mormon: “And there was not any light seen, neither fire, nor glimmer, neither the sun, nor the moon, nor the stars, for so great were the mists of darkness which were upon the face of the land. And it came to pass that it did last for the space of three days that there was no light seen.”  He emphasized again later that “thus did the three days pass away” and only after this was “the darkness dispersed from off the face of the land” (3 Nephi 8:21-22, 10:9).  These passages all suggest that the Savior was in the tomb for three days before His resurrection.

               The New Testament gives the same testimony that the Savior spend three days in the tomb.  Well before His death Jesus prophesied, “For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matt. 12:40).  He also alluded to the same time period when He said, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”  The people thought He was talking about the physical temple, but John clarified that “he spake of the temple of his body” (John 2:19-21).  This statement was remembered when He was on trial in front of the Sanhedrin: “We heard him say, I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and within three days I will build another made” (Mark 14:58).  Again the period of three days was emphasized as the time that Jesus would be in the tomb before He was resurrected.  The problem with this is that traditional understanding of the final week of the Savior is that He died on a Friday before the Sabbath started that evening and was resurrected by Sunday morning.  That would put the time in the tomb as less than two days even—so how do we reconcile that with these passages of scripture?

               There are a few possibilities that might help explain this.  One is simply that the time in the tomb was part of three days—Friday, Saturday, and Sunday—and so in one sense it was three days.  Elder McConkie seems to have suggested something along these lines when he said that it was “thirty-eight or forty hours—three days as the Jews measured time.”  But that’s a little unsatisfactory because of the Book of Mormon reference to three days specifically and that the Savior said not just three days but three nights as well—Friday to Sunday morning is only two nights.  Another way to resolve the difficulty would be if Christ actually died on a Thursday (or Wednesday) instead of Friday as is traditionally believed.  This author argued for a Thursday crucifixion, citing confusion about what a “sabbath” meant and how the gospel writers’ reference to the Savior’s body being taken down before the sabbath could have referred to the “sabbath” of the Passover and not necessarily the Sabbath day (i.e. Friday night to Saturday night).  Certainly, a Thursday death and Sunday resurrection would give three days and three nights to fit the prophecies.      

Another potential way of understanding this is that the death and crucifixion of the Savior was counted as part of His time of three days and during which the isles of the sea were experiencing darkness.  David Scott suggested this: “I see a poetic beauty in considering that Jesus’s night of suffering in Gethsemane might be counted as part of his prophesied ‘three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.’ It was in Gethsemane that Jesus began his descent into ‘the heart of the earth,’ for this is when the sins of humankind were swallowed up. This descent included both the agony of Gethsemane and the Crucifixion, immediately followed by his ministry in the spirit world while his body lay in the tomb. If the Crucifixion occurred on a Friday, including Thursday night in the reckoning would make the time of suffering three nights as well as three days.”  It does make sense that the periods of storm and darkness would include the period of suffering, the night and day leading up to His actual death, and does seem in line with the Book of Mormon statement that during the time of destruction (a part of those three days), “many of the kings of the isles of the sea shall be wrought upon by the Spirit of God, to exclaim: The God of nature suffers” (1 Nephi 19:12).  If the storms and darkness started when Christ started suffering in Gethsemane on Thursday (and not a day later when He was buried) then the present tense here would be exactly correct: “The God of nature suffers”—He would have been suffering at the very moment.  Ultimately it is not crucial to know exactly how long He was in the tomb; what is imperative is that we know that He did suffer and die for us, was buried in the tomb for some period, and He did rise again in a glorious resurrection.