As far as I can tell the real problem is, What is the Word of God?
If the Word of God is the Bible, then science has a serious problem. May be you think that as all Evangelicals must believe that the Bible is the Word of God, even though the Bible says the contrary. The Word of God is Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the Second Person of the Trinity.
The word Logos is important because it indicates that God trusts people to make sense of the Bible. God give the Hebrews God’s understanding of cosmology, which was done on the basis of the science of their day. It is the cosmology that is important and it is the cosmology that is the basis of Western science and Western life, the science of the ancient Near East.
It is the cosmology that says that the universe has a Beginning and God created matter, energy, time, and space out of nothing. The first day is important, not the length of this day.
God communicated God’s Truth in Genesis 1. Some humans tell the story the way they wanted to hear it. God told it the way the Hebrews needed to hear it. Not everything is about us.
But when Job describes God as having treasure houses of snow and hail … orbiting around the Earth … to use whenever he needs to … sometimes it is pretty clear that the limits of human understanding went into the Writing of Biblical Text as much as these same limits confine our comprehension.
Job 38:19-
“What is the way to the abode of light? And where does darkness reside?
Can you take them to their places? Do you know the paths to their dwellings? . . .
“Have you entered the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of the hail,
**which I reserve for times of trouble, for days of war and battle?. . . . **
Here’s a nice mention of God making rain … Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain, and a path for the thunderstorm, to water a land where no one lives, an uninhabited desert, to satisfy a desolate wasteland and make it sprout with grass?
Exodus 11 is not saying that the days of Genesis 1 were literal 24 hour days either. The only one of the creation days from Genesis one that has a definite article (thus referencing a specific day) is the sixth day, where heaven and earth were at last moving in one accord. There was a “morning” where things on earth were lined up with things in heaven. Then the fall happened.
The Seventh day? Genesis chapter one is both history and prophecy.
The way that YEC do exegesis on “yom” in Genesis chapter one is about the worst possible way to do it…
Sorry, I’m not convinced a lack of a definite article is exactly relevant. “The sixth day” or “six days”, it’s really all the same. The fact that “there was evening and morning” is lacked on the seventh day may open up questions for the seventh day, but its presence in the first six days should close that up, at least it does for me.
And this is not about “YEC exegesis”. I’m not a YEC. This interpretation is a YEC-netural interpretation, YEC’s just happen to find it convenient for their position.
Definiteness isn’t necessary to refer to a specific day in many languages, nor does definiteness have anything to do with primary or secondary senses of words.
“On a special day in September, I got married.” Specific
Whereas “back in the day” is unspecific and idiomatic.
Sorry, but that doesn’t sound like an actual linguistic argument.
You can have your figurative meaning of “evening” being disordered and “morning” being some pre-fall Shalom without pretending the meaning is there in the grammar. It isn’t. That isn’t how metaphorical language works.
It is only a small part of my total argument, which is split up between about five chapters. One of which, and I think theologically the most important, is the point that the seventh day did not even begin on earth (though was completed in heaven) until after the Crucifixion. Thus when it says in Exodus “For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day” if I show that the seventh day referred to is not a literal 24 hour day, then the assumption must be that the six days are NOT 24 hour days as well. The first six days and the seventh are treated as individual instances of the same category in that passage.
That things which have not yet happened on earth are spoken of as already being completed in heaven is a common theme in scripture, and one cannot properly understand Genesis chapter one without seeing how that theme is being established there. Thus there is no one “right” answer about how long the “days” of Genesis 1 took, it depends on where you are asking from- heaven or earth. This short video was meant to be supplemental to the diagrams in the book but most people here are very good at science and can probably see the point without them…
That is only a small part of my total argument, perhaps the weakest point I have. Please see post above for details.
I do think that grammar matters. It may or may not in this instance and as I say, no big deal to the total position either way. I do notice that Christ used what amounts to an argument from grammar when He said that when the LORD spoke to Moses from the burning bush He said “I AM the God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob.” So I don’t think its wise to discount such arguments completely.
What is relevant is that half of those six days occurred without any way to determine or measure exactly how much time elapsed.
There were no human witnesses.
There was no pendulum swing of lightness and darkness by which any witness, if there had been, could have measured time.
And if there had been witnesses, with a swing of lightness and darkness, this would presume the ANE world view that the sky itself was the source of daylight, coordinated by the creator to coincide with the movement of the sun.
This is an erroneous view. The sky is not the “mysterious source of light and dark” that even the book of Job hints at!
Even if
a. there were human witnesses; and
b. If we ignore any hints of references to this mysterious quality of the sky to cycle light and dark;
c. There was still the absence of the sun to provide the alternate means of measuring the
passage of light and dark as a day.
It’s a total bust!
It really doesn’t matter how the Hebrew word for day is interpreted.
There’s only three of them that get close to fitting the definition established by the YECs.
Sure there is. The story tells us there were six days with evening and mornings. So, according to the story, six days elapsed. Yom is used the same way almost every single time in the entire OT, even though it’s used hundreds of times. No reason to consider Genesis 1 an exception.
It appears to me as if that the sabbath rest day of God doesn’t “end” or “start” on Earth or heaven, God simply rests in His sanctuary (which in ancient near eastern literature was a holy mountain/sanctuary of some sort, Garden of Eden was probably a holy sanctuary on Earth belonging to God.
Well, I am not convinced by your theory. By any chance, does your claim appear in the scholarly literature?
The first three days of Genesis are unlike any days of existence at any other time – there is no way to measure how long the “day” is … only that a day has elapsed.
The number 7 is used in the Bible to symbolize completeness or that something is finished. Perhaps the authors use of the number 7 has more to do with the symbol of completeness than an actual period of time. Just a thought.
Did you all see today’s blog post on the numerology of Genesis 1. Good stuff. I guess there is a distinction between numerical meaning and numerological meaning.
To us a day is 24 hours because thats how it take the earth to turn on its axis as it rotates around the sun. The author of Genesis may not have had the concept of a 24 hour day in mind when he was using the number 7 because for him it may have just been used as a symbol of completeness. The first three days of creation had no sun or moon, so there would be no reason to even impose the literal interpretation of a day as 24 hours.
Time is also a construct of man because we are temporal beings, time does not apply to God because He is eternal. When man was first created he was eternal too, he had full access to the tree of life - he did not age or die. It was only after the fall of man that man, whose days were now numbered, became aware of time. During the creation week time did not matter so the number 7 may have more signifigance in a symbolic sense than a literal one.
I agree that various numbers play important symbolic roles in the NT. So while the days are regular days, the reason why there are seven of them is for biblical symbolic meanings. So the Genesis text does not espouse a literal 7-day story, but perhaps an allegorical one. That is my view.
Because there is no set time for a day/night. 24 hours is the average that we use. But the only way to separate day and night, and separate one day from another is to use the sun.
Also I was just thinking about Genesis 1:4-5
God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.
Evening and morning are defined as when the sun sets or rises, but the sun hasn’t been created yet. For there to be a literal evening and morning the earth must be rotating into and out of the light, whatever that source might be.
24 hours (or, according to the author of Genesis, the period that constitutes an evening and a morning) was indeed the set time in the days when Genesis was written for the length of a day.
Indeed. But we have either a fictional alternation between dark and light from some unknown source … or nothing. God provides no benchmark for providing a credible time keeper of a day …
