This is the second time you have dismissed the Hebrew use of the word “day” to mean the DAYLIGHT part of a 24 hour period.
I think you are going to have to EXPLAIN why the construction is different … WITHOUT using the relatively new Rabbinical “pointings” of Hebrew (for indicating vowels and other semantic flags). Back when the Bible was written, I would suggest that there was virtually NO difference in “construction”.
Please explain…
George
This is not really an accurate description of descriptive linguistics. The whole point of describing a language is to bring to light the “rules” that govern the patterns. “It’s not prescriptive” means you can’t impose arbitrary “correct grammar” rules on a native speaker about which way of saying things is better or more correct, you just describe what native speakers do with their language.
You most definitely can make some general statements about the way human languages operate. @Saito is making a valid point. In order to know what sense of a word is being used in a text where you don’t have access to a native speaker, you need to correctly hypothesize the intended meaning of the entire utterance. Just because “cats” and “dogs” refer to domesticated animals in every other instance in your corpus does not mean that the phrase “raining cats and dogs” must therefore mean “raining domesticated animals” in the same corpus. The sense of the idiomatic expression would have to be deduced from the context.
There is no way to “test” linguistic hypotheses without native speakers. Textual studies on ancient languages have to make do with comparative analysis and reconstructing the context, but there are always limitations.
Rather than resorting to the standard complaint when YOUR appeal to authority fails to pass the most basic procedural standards of research and peer review, this sure sounds like the kind of PROJECTION that is so common in young earth creationist arguments. YOU are depending upon a single authority, McCabe, as if he is the last word, after the traditional appeal to a casual comment in a private letter of James Barr was already presented without success, an argument from authority if I ever saw one!
Wow. You cite McCabe, who wants us to just take his word for it, an alleged rule of Hebrew grammar, EVEN THOUGH HE MAKES NO ATTEMPT TO STUDY HIS CLAIMED RULE OUTSIDE OF THE BIBLICAL CORPUS! That’s why I said that McCabe is still stuck in the archaic “Holy Spirit Hebrew” mindset which presumes that the Biblical text is the end-all of what we need to consider in order to understand ancient Hebrew lexicography and grammar. Just wow.
I can’t help but notice the fact that you totally missed what I wrote in modern English, so why should I be anything but frustrated at your failure to engage the basic linguistic principles involved in understanding an ancient text in an ancient language? I do understand the predicament of the young earth creationist who has to resort to the most obscure and marginal sources in order to find an authority to appeal to. I also understand why you insist on reversing the burden of proof by insisting that it is our job to refute the McCabe Appeal to Authority instead of expecting McCabe to at least go through the bare minimum effort to establish his claims WITH THE KIND OF BREADTH OF EVIDENCE even an undergrad linguistics student would expect. McCabe’s paper has been effectively ignored by the academy outside of a wishful young earth creationist because it is amateurish at best. Can you honestly say that such a paper would ever get past the review board at JBL? (Journal of the Society of Biblical Literature.) I’ve served on editorial review boards. If McCabe would even get a response from the general editor, it would be a list of requirements that the paper would have to meet before he-she would ever forward the people to the rest of the board. As is, it is far too similar to a seminarian’s term paper.
You Americans have a great expression about black kettles. The appeals to Barr and McCabe call for a handwashing before you accuse anyone else of failed appeals to authority. I pointed out the obvious, that an excerpt from a private letter and an obscure paper written by the Registrar at an unaccredited pastoral training school which published his well-intended but amateurish monograph in their non-peer-reviewed “journal”, is a plea of desperation and last resort. Pointing out something so obvious is NOT “an appeal to authority”. argument. It is McCabe’s job to establish his claims, not mine. It is NOT my job to waste my time on ADVOCACY LITERATURE trying hard, but not hard enough, to approach the topic in a scholarly manner but doesn’t get off the ground. Do you honestly believe McCabe had any intention of following the linguistic evidence wherever it led? Do you honestly believe that the school would have published his paper if it failed to follow a traditional party line?
The Space-Alien Linguists story has lots of exegetical fallacy examples that I wish I could remember. The context is that the aliens find the earth’s civilizations destroyed but their archaeologists eventually find a bunker where 66 books in the English language survive. Those scholars of the future set about concording the vocabulary and syntactical structures of the entire corpus. In the years which follow, a few other English language books are found in other piles of rubble, and the reference books published about the original 66 English language books prove very handy in understanding them.
Those newly discovered texts become dissertation subject matter for hopeful doctoral candidates, one of whom studies a book entitled *Great Christian Men & Women of the Church". The Ph.D. student determines that the book is filled with theological topics as well as historical narrative. So he decides that it represents similar genres to those in the 66 books, and that he is thereby justified in depending upon the lexicography and grammar of the English language described in his shelf of reference books. Moreover, his corpus shows a copyright date of 1999, which is very close to the copyright year of the 66 books! Surely he has all the evidence he needs for understanding his ancient text.
One day he comes upon the phrase “Diet of Worms”. Carefully consulting his reference books and exhaustively studying IN CONTEXT the meaning of the words “diet” and “worms”, and most importantly, the Noun+“of”+Noun grammatical construction, he applies this “rule of grammar” to the words at hand. He publishes his careful exegesis which led him to an understanding of the phrase “Diet of Worms”. Clearly, the theologian Martin Luther undertook an most unusual choice of foods, most likely an act of self-discipline and austere devotion. The scholar even found among recently discovered scientific texts (written in the same dialect of the ancient English language) which described in great detail the kinds of worms which Martin Luther might have dined on. And because “The Diet of Worms” always appears with the key words capitalized, the standard reference works demand that the phrase be considered the title of a thus far undiscovered, “lost work” of Martin Luther, where he must have described his wormy diet so that all Lutherans could adopt a similar menu. (As I recall, the budding scholar also managed to detect a copyist error in his subject corpus, declaring that “Martin Luther eventually won the support of the pheasants.[sic]” Yes, textual criticism can be very important to the scholar’s study of ancient literature.)
The Meanng of the Word “Day” in Genesis 1 has been sliced and diced plenty here. So I’m actually more curious to see someone finally answer the question asked again and again: What are some examples of the scientific evidence against evolution and/or many millions of years that scientists are allegedly ignoring?
And IF Genesis 1 truly does demand that all Christians believe in a six, 24 hours days just a few thousand years ago, what do we do about a creation saturated with evidence for a very old universe, and everything within it, which contradict Genesis 1? Are we to simply accept that Genesis 1 is a false history? Does that overturn the Doctrine of Scripture Inspiration? Young earth creationists keep telling us that Christians who accept evolution and billions of years are compromisers and do violence to the Bible. Yet, it is the YEC LITERALISTS who are claiming that Genesis 1 delivers a preposterous message and doesn’t deserve our respect.
Once again, you totally miss the point, as well as display your unfamiliarity with the history of fundamentalist hermeneutics. McCabe makes no effort to investigate his alleged “rule of grammar” outside of the limited corpus of the Hebrew Masoretic Text. This has been a TRADITIONAL APPROACH within fundamentalist scholarship long after the rest of the academic world abandoned the assumption of God imposing SPECIAL RULES on the inspired text of scripture and THEREFORE, IT DIDN’T MATTER how ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek operated outside of the Bible.
Indeed, for many years fundamentalists when forced to consider contradictory examples in extra-biblical literature which debunked various of their interpretations, they adamantly held their ground and said, “That’s irrelevant. That’s not from the Bible. It is the fallible writings of men and you shouldn’t try to hold God to those defective standards.” Some fundamentalists CONTINUE to claim that all languages (outside of that which appears in the Bible) are continually “devolving” as a result of the fall. I again heard this claim by a well known young earth creationist celebrity on a Youtube video just a few days ago.
Whether McCabe actually ascribes to ALL of the hermeneutical and linguistic fallacies of the “Holy Spirit Greek” and “Holy Spirit Hebrew” mythology, I don’t know. But his paper is clearly undergirded by that mindset of young earth creationist, fundamentalist culture, whether he is consciously aware of it or not.
One last fact to consider: The early chapters of Genesis deal with subject matter quite different than the rest of the Old Testament. Most of the HMT deals with specific times in specific situations of human events. Almost all of it is about humans dealing with humans or humans dealing with God. Genesis 1 is quite different. The focus is on God and his creation. It is not good kings and bad kings, or the Children of Israel facing years of travail. So doesn’t common sense suggest that the radically different subject matter in Genesis 1 might not use every word and structure identically to its most common usage elsewhere in more mundane circumstances of daily life?
I was recently reading an old book about the history of a particular county in a Midwestern state of the USA. One chapter of it was entitled, “The Geological History of Kankakee County”. I immediately noticed that there were vocabulary words in that chapter (e.g., ERA, PRIMEVAL, and even words like “slowly”, “gradually”, and “bear witness”) which had very different definitions-meanings from those in the rest of the book. Oh, they were somewhat related. But when I consulted an English lexicon, I confirmed that scholars recognize that different contexts, different genres, and even different social milieus may call for the SAME WORDS, SAME PHRASES, or even the SAME GRAMMATICAL CONSTRUCTIONS to be used very differently.
And that is what amazes me most at naive arguments based on “every other Bible context uses this structure to mean X and therefore it MUST mean X in this context also, despite all of the evidence to the contrary!” The fact that anyone polylingual would be so naive as to find McCabe convincing amazes me more than anything else. Of course, most who cite him are not polylingual! Those who must adapt to bilingual realities are FORCED to deal with the folly of this on a daily basis. (Remember the Russian comedian who made his career out of observations about confusing English sentences like when he opened the door to get out of his new car and it said to him, “The door is a jar! The door is a jar!” Another was “I just don’t know if I want to commit myself.”)
McCabe is an excellent example of preconceived doctrinal demands REQUIRING that evidence be found and cherry-picked to confirm the already reached conclusion. As many scholars have pointed out, McCabe’s “rule” doesn’t even apply to all of the contexts in the Old Testament. When he is shown counter-examples, he can ALWAYS say “But that one’s not really the same”, an excuse which can ALWAYS BE APPLIED because every other context always has elements which can be shown to be non-identical. (No two contexts are EVER totally identical. If you want to find differences in order to dodge contradictory evidence, you always can.) When one starts playing that game, the rule you are trying to established becomes UNFALSIFIABLE, much like so many of the claims of unscientific claim of creation science!
I know I’m not going to change any young earth creationist’s mind on this topic. But that isn’t really my objective. Whenever I write on these kinds of topics, I do so to help those who are trying to help their family and friends get free of what in too many cases becomes a cult-like choke-hold on their lives. It sounds like most of us on these Biologos pages came from YEC backgrounds so we have great empathy for the problems people face when they may eventually struggle with what seems like a crisis of faith in God, when it seems like the Bible can’t be trusted. The stakes can be very high.
[quote=“jammycakes, post:104, topic:4219”]
Are there any sources out there for this rule which can be shown to be independent of, and not influenced by, the young earth movement? Because until and unless I see such sources, I can only assume that this “rule” is a fabrication to make the Bible out to say things that it doesn’t.
[/quote]Why does it need to be independent? The data are available to all and can be tested. Is a young earth kind of person not allowed to study and advance a field of study?
Isn’t this a hypothesis that can be tested and falsified? Why reject simply because you are unaware of anyone who has said it before?
The idea of the days being 24 hour days is not a new one. It has been around for a very long time. Even Waltke still appears to affirm this by saying they are metaphorical, anthropological. So it’s not a new idea.
I haven’t dismissed it at all. It is absolutely true. It’s just not the point of this discussion. The relevant YOM passages in Gen 1 refers to “morning” (the daylight portion) and “evening” (the night portion). So it clearly is different then Gen 8:22.
The construction deal with a singular absolute modified in a particular way with numbers. It’s easy enough to know this if you studied the issue.
Why is it that I don’t give an accurate description but when you say the same thing it is accurate???
[quote=“Christy, post:108, topic:4219”]
In order to know what sense of a word is being used in a text where you don’t have access to a native speaker, you need to correctly hypothesize the intended meaning of the entire utterance. Just because “cats” and “dogs” refer to domesticated animals in every other instance in your corpus does not mean that the phrase “raining cats and dogs” must therefore mean “raining domesticated animals” in the same corpus. The sense of the idiomatic expression would have to be deduced from the context.
[/quote]Exactly my point. Thanks.
[quote=“Christy, post:108, topic:4219”]
There is no way to “test” linguistic hypotheses without native speakers. Textual studies on ancient languages have to make do with comparative analysis and reconstructing the context, but there are always limitations.
[/quote]Actually you can test them with the available data. You can compare the uses of a particular construction with contemporary literature in its context. It’s not hard. It’s actually easier to compare than many things in science.
But here’s another interesting thing: You claim you can’t test linguistic hypotheses without native speakers even though you can suggest a hypothesis and compare all known occurrences of the same construction. You can suggest what a particular construction means. Then you can take that hypothesis to other texts and contexts and see if it hold up. That is the same think you claim you can do with science. So why is it good for science but not for ancient linguistics?
Given your proposition, I don’t think we could understand anything about ancient languages. But that’s simply not the case.
Hi LT_15,
Thanks for your much more helpful response.
You have in nearly completely backward here: I am saying that it is unclear, that there are elements that are compatible with historical prose and elements not found in any historical prose that are more compatible with poetry, ANE cosmoganies, or any number of other kinds of stylized narratives. To me this obviously leaves the question open and I am not entirely sure what was intended by the author on a number of levels, although I think it is difficult to conceive why some of the features would be as they are if the driving purpose was to write straight history (whatever that meant back then). That theological considerations drove at least some of the content seems clear, but this leaves the historical question open. In contrast to this non-assumption, you have stated time and again that it is definitely history. You try to support it (though it has failed to convince), but it appears to be a position that you view as being entailed by an orthodox theology, rather than a position that you just happened to bump into while sifting through the data. If you had a different starting point then feel free to clarify, but yes, I think there might an assumption here after all.
The degree of overstatement in these sentences is impressive. “Screams out historical narrative”?! How does one begin to address a statement like this? I get the impression that your use of the term “screams out” itself seems to scream out entrenchment and hyperbole, but that’s just me.
So the everything that screams out historical narrative would be what? The talking snake? The tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? The rather interesting fact that the name Adam corresponds to the use of the generic noun for mankind (adam) in Gen 1:26 and to the subsequent use of the arthrous ha-adam? The symbolically rich meaning of the roots underlying the names Adam and Eve? The generally recognized literary structures and devices that don’t seem to be glosses, but are intrinsic to the events themselves? The obvious richness in theological content and symbolism? These are paralleled in which sober historical prose from the ANE exactly? For that matter, please identify any sober, unbiased and non-mythological historical prose in the ANE: I would genuinely be interested in informative parallels containing many of these characteristics that I may have not yet encountered. I’m not aware of any such prose in the ANE and I have long been under the impression that there were few serious attempts to write history before Thucydides (I don’t count Heroditus) and that the genre, theory and standards of history writing were only formulated and hardly perfected well beyond the golden age of ancient Greece.
Or getting back to what it is in the text that demands historicity; is it the sweeping conclusions so obviously entailed by the fact that “Situations described with wayyqtl are mostly temporally or logically succeeding” or that the singular yom is tellingly linked to ordinal or cardinal numbers?
I’m amazed at how much needs to be ignored or overlooked and how much weight needs to be invested in minor non-prescriptive grammatical observations in order to sustain such an exaggerated position. The “burden of proof” argument is often a broad-brush strategy for trying to win a debate by fiat, and especially in this case, where it can only mean that you’ve decided your position is a priori correct and where I can only say; well I don’t quite see that.
A scientist who took such an approach to the data would produce seriously unacceptable conclusions, but that’s another story (though an interesting one)…
To get this straight; I specifically request passages in the Bible that demonstrate a surprising focus on the exact duration of a day as opposed to simply meaning “a period of light (or work) framed by an evening to morning period of darkness or an evening to evening framework”, and you instead gives me HALOT, which happens to mention 24 hours without at all responding to my question of where the Bible emphases chronometric considerations. In case this was unclear; I was asking for an example of where the Bible demonstrated that exact duration instead of a night-day cycle was the focus, not an example of where a standard lexicon mentions the number 24.
I was happy to see in the following paragraph that you were beginning to note that it was the fact that YECs keep emphasizing 24 hours where the Bible doesn’t that I found odd. But then you went off track again and started to ask how we can possibly mark days in a month if I don’t accept this. Which is odd, because I don’t find it at all difficult to mark of days of the month using a regular day-night cycle. If I were advocating for days representing thousands of years, I would understand this ongoing pushback, but I’m not, I’m advocating the obvious fact that the Hebrews would not have thought of days in terms of number of minutes and hours, but in terms of dark-light cycles and evening-morning markers, so any emphasis on the exact duration of the days in Genesis is simply an emphasis that would not have been a point of concern for early readers; a huge contrast to the obsessive focus on exact duration that we have today. I sincerely doubt that an early reader would have been particularly interested in any debate as to exact length of time, and nearly the whole focus would have been on the day-night pattern that is framed by evening-morning. That’s it. And no, I don’t believe something like the “fourteenth day of the month” is a reference to the 14th period of 24 hours, I believe it is a reference to the 14th evening to evening cycle or the 14th light period. We would view that as period of 24 hours. They would not. You are performing an act of eisegesis that you seem to be overlooking on a regular basis. And frankly, the whole thing is a fairly minor point since it is irrelevant to whether or not the chapter should be read as history.
No, I’ve read it. He never supports a chronometric emphasis (especially 24 hours) that is not found in the text.
On the whole, I think an Israelite would not think that each day was some indefinitely long period of time, but my point is that they would have far less concern with exactly how long it is and far more concern with the day-night framework that represents distinct periods of creation, being thereby more open to any of the literary features and symbolism that are obscured by a historicizing agenda that plays out the whole scene using a stopwatch.
Yes I studied Hebrew in University and I still make use of it, but I don’t think the arguments in McCabe or Hasel were particularly difficult to understand. They simply did not address the above point and they did not even seem interested in considering what implications the use of apparent symbolism in Genesis might have. The treatment of literary structure was interesting however, though I’m not sure we can reasonable downgrade to “stylization” or remove the possibility of a dichotomy between this structure and the intended historicity.
I think the overall question is complicated, and I think any adamant statement about what purpose the writer had can only succeed by ignoring evidence. And this doesn’t even touch on the scientific question (which is appropriate I think in this context), which is unambiguous in its own right. It is not unreasonable to tentatively shed light on a question containing ambiguous data (authorial or better, divine intent in Gen 1) by considering one that does not (the central scientific consensus on questions of natural history). That said, I went through the exercise of considering how I would look at Genesis if I was convinced of a young earth; for me, the obvious symbolism, the literary structure, and the completely different ancient view on how to approach historical and cosmogonical questions convinced me that I would still be unsure as to what purpose the text had other than addressing theological questions.
[quote=“Saito, post:109, topic:4219”]
YOU are depending upon a single authority, McCabe, as if he is the last word, after the traditional appeal to a casual comment in a private letter of James Barr was already presented without success, an argument from authority if I ever saw one!
[/quote]Not at all. There are actual multiple authorities, not to mention the ability to examine it yourself. Have you done that? Have you examined this in Hebrew? Give us some exceptions to this phenomena from ancient Hebrew literature. Interact with the evidence that he gives. Don’t just tell us it is nonsense. A number of commentators agree that the term YOM in Genesis 1 the numbered day sequences means a normal day. Even Bruce Waltke still appears to agree, based on his commentary on Genesis where he says that the “age” meaning of YOM has textual difficulties.
[quote=“Saito, post:109, topic:4219”]
You cite McCabe, who wants us to just take his word for it, an alleged rule of Hebrew grammar, EVEN THOUGH HE MAKES NO ATTEMPT TO STUDY HIS CLAIMED RULE OUTSIDE OF THE BIBLICAL CORPUS!
[/quote]What other Hebrew texts from c. 1500 BC should we consider?
[quote=“Saito, post:109, topic:4219”]
I can’t help but notice the fact that you totally missed what I wrote in modern English
[/quote]What did I miss?
[quote=“Saito, post:109, topic:4219”]
You cite McCabe, who wants us to just take his word for it
[/quote]No, he doesn’t want you to take his word for it. He provided the evidence and the arguments that you can examine for yourself.
[quote=“Saito, post:109, topic:4219”]
It is McCabe’s job to establish his claims, not mine. It is NOT my job to waste my time on ADVOCACY LITERATURE trying hard, but not hard enough, to approach the topic in a scholarly manner but doesn’t get off the ground.
[/quote]The article does a good job of laying out the claims and the evidence. If you are for peer review, then give us a peer review. Tell us specifically what it’s weaknesses are and what should be done to fix it.
[quote=“Saito, post:109, topic:4219”]
One day he comes upon the phrase “Diet of Worms”.
[/quote]Frankly, this whole section is so silly I don’t think you even believe it is relevant. If you undertook the process that McCabe or Hasel took, you would never arrive at this conclusion. I just googled “meaning of diet in 15th century German” and come up with a very clear definition that has nothing to do with food. The Google search time was 0.80 seconds. That’s not hard. In fact the meaning of a diet in 15th and 16th century German would probably not even have to be documented in a paper because it is common.
[quote=“Saito, post:109, topic:4219”]
What are some examples of the scientific evidence against evolution and/or many millions of years that scientists are allegedly ignoring?
[/quote]This thread is about the meaning of the word “day” in Genesis 1. That’s why those other things might be somewhere else.
[quote=“bren, post:115, topic:4219”]
You try to support it (though it has failed to convince), but it appears to be a position that you view as being entailed by an orthodox theology, rather than a position that you just happened to bump into while sifting through the data.
[/quote]My belief that it is historical has to do with the way that the Hebrew grammar and syntax writes historical narrative. Historical narrative in ancient Hebrew is just like Genesis 1. Other genres (such as law, poetry, wisdom) are different .
Ancient history is limited to be sure for a number of reasons. But at heart what we have here is historiography. Wenham has a good little book entitled Torah as Story about how historiography works. Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative is also a good read.
[quote=“bren, post:115, topic:4219”]
I’m amazed at how much needs to be ignored or overlooked and how much weight needs to be invested in minor non-prescriptive grammatical observations in order to sustain such an exaggerated position.
[/quote]I don’t think the wayyqtl construction is a minor observation. It is well-established as the most normal means of ancient Hebrew narrative. I don’t think that is really debated, is it?
[quote=“bren, post:115, topic:4219”]
We would view that as period of 24 hours. They would not.
[/quote]I confess to still being somewhat confused here, but let me press ahead. Is your contention that they would have thought of YOM as a day-night cycle and we would think of the same day-night cycle as being 24 hours? Is your contention that they would not have known what an hour is? I am not at all clear on the objection. However, I tend to agree that it is fairly minor since the day-night cycle is clearly identified in Gen 1 as the make up of YOM.
You seem to argue that this day-night cycle indicates a symbolism rather than a relatively exact passage of time. Is that correct?
I agree with many that the point of Genesis 1 is not necessarily to answer scientific questions. I think the primary point is theological and it deals with why all creation must answer to God–because he created it. But here’s the question: There are lots of ways even in ancient Hebrew to describe the kind of thing communicated by evolutionary creation (or one of the OEC variants). Why do you think those aren’t used in the OT?
In other words, you consulted native speakers. 
The issue I am trying to get at is that the same word with two different senses can be used in the same linguistic context and in the same grammatical constructions. This is central to the whole gender inclusive language debate. In verses like “entrust this teaching to worthy men,” did the original author intend ἀνθρώποις to mean ‘males’ or ‘people’? The Greek word can be used in both senses, but only one can apply in that verse. All the comparative analysis in the world won’t prove one way or another what was in the brain of the original author. In this case, you don’t make your arguments based on linguistics and word studies, you base them on what meaning makes the most sense and is the most likely in the context. But you can’t prove your hypothesized meaning is right using linguistics.
We understand things about ancient languages because there are links to modern languages and the evolution of the languages can be analyzed and compared with ancient translations into other languages with links to modern languages. But we are talking about meaning, not just understanding how a language works. I don’t understand what you mean by “see if your hypothesis holds up.” What would that look like? Plug your meaning into a sentence and have it make sense? A meaning can make sense but not be what the original author intended. (As in the ἀνθρώποις example above.)
Maybe we don’t have any other examples of a word being used in a secondary sense in our entire corpus and we are unaware of it. Or maybe it’s a low frequency word. How many pages have been written about 1 Timothy 2:12 αὐθεντεῖν? That word only occurs once in the corpus of the NT and 3 times in the entire corpus of contemporary literature. Lots of people have come up with competing hypotheses for what it means, but no one can actually ask Paul what he meant and get a thumbs up or thumbs down, so none of those hypotheses can be proved, they can just be more or less supported by argument. Plus, you can’t ever prove that the number of senses you have identified in your lexicon are the finite number of senses a word had.
It makes most sense to me that the Genesis author was talking about normal days, not eras. It’s really irrelevant whether they were 24 hour or 23.24 hour days. Nobody was timing them with a stopwatch. The semantic domain of the Hebrew word “day” seems to have included the sense of daylight hours and the sense of the unit of time from one day to the next day. The author is using the concept of a seven day work-week to frame God’s work of creation. But you don’t get the meaning of the passage from an exhaustive linguistic analysis of the word day. I’m really at a loss as to why this debate even matters at all.
LT,
I think you are making these “differences” up as we go along. The point of citations is to show that you are NOT making it up.
I think I’ll ignore your posts from now on. You are too difficult to work with.
George
Three words: conflict of interest. Don’t forget that young-earth teaching was a lucrative profit centre to the people who first came up with it.
Because, as I said, there are people who went before who would have jumped at the chance to say it. Atheists (and especially Soviet-era propagandists) would have loved it, for instance, because it would have been a wedge for them to drive between the Bible and scientific evidence. The fact that we don’t see them saying anything about it would be very surprising indeed if it had any validity.
I’m talking specifically about the “yom with a number” argument here, not just 24 hour days.
[quote=“Christy, post:118, topic:4219”]
In other words, you consulted native speakers.
[/quote]Actually a Wikipedia article from about 400 years after the Diet was the first link and the succeeding links were mostly written in English, but … I think the illustration used make far-fetched seem like it’s next door.
[quote=“Christy, post:118, topic:4219”]
The issue I am trying to get at is that the same word with two different senses can be used in the same linguistic context and in the same grammatical constructions.
[/quote]Yes, but generally, when the same word and the same construction is used, the presumption is that the meaning is the same.
To use an example, yom is used twice in Gen 1:5. In the first occurrence, the light ('or) is called day (yom) and the darkness (chashek) is called night (layelah). (I am sure my transliterations are off. But the Hebrew font doesn’t work well for me here.) There, yom (daylight) is contrasted with chashek (darkness) which is darkness. In the second occurrence, “evening and morning” (encompassing both darkness and light) is said to be yom. So we know the meaning is different because the second yom includes both the first yom and something else.
[quote=“Christy, post:118, topic:4219”]
In this case, you don’t make your arguments based on linguistics and word studies, you base them on what meaning makes the most sense and is the most likely in the context. But you can’t prove your hypothesized meaning is right using linguistics.
[/quote]I am not sure if you are saying that I don’t do this, or using you generically as in “this is not the way it’s done.” (And I don’t have any comparisons texts to form a hypothesis. I can however ask you.)
But I think contrasting linguistics and word studies (which are not always valuable) with what makes the most sense and is most likely is the wrong contrast. Linguistics and word studies help us to know what makes the most sense and it most likely. And no, it’s not ironclad., I think we can “prove” it as much as by using models of continent separation from billions of years ago, I would say. We have a pretty good idea, and when you see people from a wide variety of positions (from McCabe and Hasel, to Waltke, to HALOT [which has no dog in the fight … exegete that in a few hundred years], to Leupold to Wenham and on and on) concur, it strengthens it even more.
[quote=“Christy, post:118, topic:4219”]
I don’t understand what you mean by “see if your hypothesis holds up.” What would that look like? Plug your meaning into a sentence and have it make sense?
[/quote]I mean one can hypothesize that the singular absolute YOM modified in a particular way as in Gen 1 means “normal 24 hour day.” Now, let’s take that hypothesis to every other occurrence that matches and see if the meaning makes the most sense there. It is similar to what you said about making a hypothesis about science and that predicting what to expect and where to expect it and then going there and finding out whether what we expect is there. (I know I haven’t put that exactly as you did, but I think it’s close enough.)
The point is that we can test it and see if it holds up by looking at all the similar occurrences. BTW, seeing differences would disprove it since words have a semantic range, but it would weaken it.
[quote=“Christy, post:118, topic:4219”]
It makes most sense to me that the Genesis author was talking about normal days, not eras. It’s really irrelevant whether they were 24 hour or 23.24 hour days. Nobody was timing them with a stopwatch.
[/quote]Exactly. I don’t think the issue was the precise marking of seconds, but rather than day/night cycle that we all know as a day. The emphasis is not on 24 hours as opposed to a few seconds or minutes either way. It is on the normal use of day that everyone understands.
But I think we need more than “It makes the most sense to me.” Why should it make the most sense to someone else? For that, we should be able to present an argument as to why they should accept it as well. That’s the point of peer review: Here’s an argument; you test it and see if it holds up. “It makes the most sense to me” isn’t sufficient for any one other than me.
Here’s why this linguistic debate on Gen 1 matters: People have said (as some here) that YOM has other meanings such long periods of time and therefore Gen 1 is talking about long periods of time because we know that the world evolved over long period of time. We can show from the OT text that linguistically, whenever YOM refers to long periods of time (and there are many times) it never does it the way Genesis 1 uses YOM. To the contrary, every time the Gen 1 construction is used, it means 24-hour days. So the argument here answers an position based on the meaning/usage of the word YOM.
Thanks, Christy.
[quote=“jammycakes, post:120, topic:4219”]
conflict of interest.
[/quote]But analysis of the evidence (i.e., looking up the occurrences) does not partake of such conflict. Anyone can do it.
And remember there were a lot of people who made the same argument that the days were normal days, whether or not they used the grammatical and syntactical argument. Keil made this argument in the late 1800s: “But if the days of creation are regulated by the recurring interchange of light and darkness, they must be regarded not as periods of time of incalculable duration, of years or thousands of years, but as simple earthly days” (Keil, Carl Friedrich, and Franz Delitzsch. Commentary on the Old Testament. Vol. 1. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996: 1:32).
[quote=“jammycakes, post:120, topic:4219”]
I’m talking specifically about the “yom with a number” argument here, not just 24 hour days.
[/quote]I am not sure why that matters. Don’t we all recognize that knowledge develops and builds over time? How far along would science be if no one had ever further developed a thesis, even from a position to gain? Again, if they made millions or made nothing, the thesis can be tested.
Which brings us back to the question: What evidence is there that discounts or falsifies the hypothesis? Do you have any?
For the simple reason that this specific argument appears to be a complete fabrication by the main young-earth organisations to exaggerate the doctrinal importance of a young earth. It wouldn’t be the only example I can cite either – for example, they’ve also been caught redacting the sermons of Charles Spurgeon to remove references to an ancient earth, and making claims that were trivially shown to be untrue about what Jesus said in the Gospels about the matter.
And it is this exaggeration that is shipwrecking the faith of many young Christians. They discover that the scientific evidence overwhelmingly indicates an ancient earth, and that it simply can not be reinterpreted as supporting a young earth without descending into absurdity or dishonesty. And because they’ve been told that the Bible places far more importance on a young earth than it really does, and because they’ve been fed a whole lot of FUD about “compromise” and “faithless so-called Christians” and all sorts of other stuff that has more in common with the Pharisees and Sadducees than with Christ, they end up either losing their faith altogether or else missing out on God’s calling to make a fruitful career in science their mission field. Either way, the end result is that Christians are under-represented in the sciences and we get a reputation for being anti-science reactionaries.
I’ve already told you twice and I’ll tell you a third time because you’re obviously not paying attention. The fact that nobody prior to the 1970s was seriously promoting this hypothesis, despite the fact that it would have furthered their agenda to do so. If it really is a matter of counting the occurrences, as you say it is, then that makes it even more surprising because that kind of study would be well within the capabilities of nineteenth century scholars – making the silence before Whitcomb and Morris even more surprising than ever.
Your attempt to contort what Christy wrote doesn’t help your case. Nobody here has claimed that we can’t “understand anything about ancient languages.” You are playing the game of jumping from one extreme to the other. McCabe and others tries in vain to impose an absolute grammar rule on something which doesn’t even prove true in the HMT corpus itself, while missing completely the fact that it would be totally irrelevant even if it did. Even if all OTHER occurrences (especially when that number is quite modest) of some phenomenon X in the Hebrew text ALWAYS meant Y, that wouldn’t settle the issue and establish a RULE. Everyone has already explained to you why McCabe’s success or failure in that quest SIMPLY DOESN’T MATTER. And the fact that McCabe’s paper has NOT resonated outside of the young earth creationist world despite the passage of time should tell you something.
There you play the same game again: You go to the opposite extreme and pretend that someone is claiming that young earth creationists aren’t allowed to study and publish. (You have a penchant for the logical fallacy of argument from counter-hyperbole, a type of straw man argument, the argument from absurd exaggeration.)
We’ve all noticed how so many young earth creationist ministry leaders like to pretend that EVERYONE is interpreting the evidence to support their own personal agenda. Because it is obvious that they start with particular ideological agendas and then cherry-pick evidence to support them, they often claim that everyone else is doing likewise. (More projection. Hey. I used to do it too.) So we’ll hear them say, “The atheist scientists cherry-pick the evidence to support evolution theory because they want to destroy all belief in God.” It is an argument pretending that only atheists publish scientific papers supporting the theory of evolution, even though the majority of Christians who are scientists, as well as the vast majority of theists in general who are working scientists in relevant fields, have no conflict with the theory of evolution. Again, it is an effort to put both sides on the same playing field, all guilty of the same error of logic. But it simply doesn’t stand, because the real scientists and the Biblical studies academy are operating under very different standards. That’s why the consensus found in the academy is NOT just a matter of shared ideology. Not at all. The interpretations of the evidence converge over time because the evidence and sound methodologies are valued by all. (Have you ever noticed that there are many absolutely-totally-enforced young earth creationist seminaries and Bible colleges, but it is far more difficult to find institutions where ONLY old earth creationists, ONLY gap theorists, or any other sort of origins-position that is rigidly enforced by faculty contracts? In my own seminary background at a well know evangelical university, my professors were of all of those positions. However, I can’t say the same for my Bible college, where the Statement of Faith was not only tighter than a new boot, it had a clause which said NOT ONE WORD of that SOF could EVER be amended, even at the detailed level of the supporting scriptures listed under each theological declaration. This produced the sad conflict where even though the professors PRIVATELY admitted disagreement with some of the proof-texting scriptures that the denomination considered etched in stone in the 1860’s or whenever, they had to lie each year when signing their faculty contract. (I specifically remember some scriptures listed as descriptions of Satan which none of my professors actually believed were attributable to Satan in the OT passages.)
So, yes. If I sound skeptical of professors who HAVE to reach particular conclusions about the evidence or else they will immediately lose their jobs, I am. A scientist who knows in advance that he CANNOT follow the scientific evidence wherever it leads does NOT “love science” or even deserve the description of “scientist”. And I have similar reservations about “Bible scholars” who operate with virtually no academic freedom to follow the scripture evidence wherever it leads.
Yes, if ONLY atheists scientists of some narrow ideological persuasion affirmed the theory of evolution, an observer might be justified in questioning the objectivity and “independence” of their scholarship. Would they not? (Of course, anyone who insists that if the theory of evolution is valid, then atheism is the only logical conclusion, everyone would be justified questioning the logic behind such an assumption.) Yet, with the theory of evolution and the fact of millions and millions of years of earth history, affirming these facts is NOT a matter of narrow ideologies and independence of scholarship. Atheists, theists, agnostics, and scientists of virtually every other self-identification concur on the science because the quantities and qualities of evidence are overwhelming. (As Mr. Molinist emphasized, it is not just the piles of evidence, it is the impressive CONSILIENCE from many different fields and the century and a half of failed falsification testing that establishes the scientific facts of evolution, just as with the germ theory of disease and the theory of photosynthesis.)
So when an obscure, ideologically narrow, employment-contract ENFORCED, small body of poorly constructed irrelevant pleas fails to get any traction within the Biblical studies and Hebrew linguistics academy, the burden of proof is NOT on the academy. It is on the fringe-element who are primarily focusing their publishing efforts on convincing the non-scholars. (And let’s face it: the donors.)
Then why do so few hear that screaming? And how often do we read prose historical narrative that is carefully structured with neatly concise, individual stanzas (six), each followed by a repetition of the chorus: “And the evening and the morning was the nth day.” Doesn’t that SCREAM OUT hymnic structure to you? (Yes, if you can use the “If I say it loudly enough as an adamant declaration, it will become so”, then so can everybody else!)
So what? As so many have posted, it is irrelevant to whether or not Genesis 1 is an “historical narrative” of the type you assume. I have no problem accepting most uses of YOM in Genesis 1 as a “conventional” day. I know Mr. Molinist does also because he was my professor and faculty adviser. What so many of those who have posted have tried to explain to you is that which definition of YOM in the Hebrew lexicons best applies in Genesis 1 does NOT determine whether the passage is teaching that God did a series of creative acts over the course of six successive, conventional days—instead of Genesis 1 teaching particular THEOLOGICAL TRUTHS like God created everything, no other gods did any of the creating, and God is master of each of the domains of the world we observe rather than the pantheons of Israel’s pagan neighbors.
Suppose Aesop’s fables were part of the Bible. You could argue all day long that the words for the mouse, the lion, and the fox were the actual ancient nouns which referred to real animals. Yet that would NOT establish that a particular mouse and a particular lion, for example, had an actual conversation one day that we can learn from. This is akin to the IRRELEVANCE of McCabe’s arguments. He may think it is absolutely vital that no one think that the YOM in Genesis 1 might refer to non-successive days, or vast ages, or whatever, and that’s fine. He is welcomed to publish on that topic. Yet it would still be irrelevant to the fact that none of that establishes once and for all whether or not the Bible would thereby ERR in claiming a “literal creation week” history which contradicts the vast and detailed history God has revealed to us in creation itself! So whether McCabe’s scholars is as obscure and flawed as most of us regard it OR whether there is actual merit to whether EVERY example of Construction XYZ in the Hebrew Old Testament always refers to a solar day is LARGELY IRRELEVANT to whether Genesis 1 is telling us that every Bible-respecting Christ-follower must adamantly maintain that the Bible provides an appallingly false and ridiculous account of how the world came to be as it is today.
Of course, many of us wonder: Why would someone who loves the Bible and believes in the power of God WANT to demand that the Bible says something about science which we know to be false? At the same time, because many of us come from very traditional fundamentalist backgrounds including the entire young earth creation package, we understand WHY it happens and we understand why the cognitive dissonance from our natural love for TRADITION is so strong. But over the course of time and a great deal of study of both the scriptures and of creation, we praise God that has HASN’T GIVEN US A BIBLE WHICH CONTRADICTS HIS CREATION. Sadly, Satan will continue to use the imagined CONFLICT between traditional interpretations of Genesis and what we know from Science to turn many away from the Gospel message. That is probably our greatest concern.
So will we allow the Bible to speak for itself? Or will we impose our traditions and tradition-driven scholarship upon it to make it say what it never meant to say?
Are you telling me that you honestly don’t understand the concept of an ANALOGY or illustration? Nobody said anything about space-aliens in the future having GERMAN texts available to them. Nor Google. If they had ALL of the resources we have, the professor’s analogy wouldn’t have had any purpose! OF COURSE you and I know that Worms was and is a city in Germany. The illustration assumes that most English-speaking Christians know what “The Diet of Worms” mean. The entire point of the analogy was that FUTURE SPACE-ALIEN LINGUISTS wouldn’t already know what “ancient” native speakers of English had known. Perhaps my use of the word “post-apocalyptic” was unknown to you. I apologize if that should have been explained. I had assumed it a commonly understood term. I had assumed that most Christians here would know enough about the history of the Reformation to recognize The Diet of Worms for the important event it was in Luther’s life and in Christian history. I’m surprised that you didn’t follow the purpose of the illustration in explaining what it would be like for scholars from another planet in the distant future to study the ANCIENT language we call English.
Now I understand why it was necessary for Christy to explain to you that the IDEAL would be to consult a native speaker or to wait on future discoveries of German documents left behind native speakers OF THE LANGUAGE MOST RELEVANT to the matter being researched! (It never occurred to me that the illustration would go over anyone’s head, even if the illustration itself is not a familiar one.)
Yet, you have inadvertently illustrated what is so often at work with traditional fundamentalist hermeneutics: Because you know in advance WHAT OBJECTIVE must be reached by the research, you cut to the chase and impose the “answer” from the outside. You went completely around the process which scholars would use in determining the meaning of an ancient text and you essentially said: We would use Google to go straight to the meaning of that Diet of Worms in German. Wow. That certainly DOES make things easier. Just go consult the already written conclusions from your favorite resources. You have demonstrated traditional young earth creationist hermeneutics far better than my professor’s illustration ever could! (It reminds me of the arithmetic teacher asking the student, “How did you go about getting the correct answer so quickly?” He responded, “It was easy. When you stepped out, I looked it up in the answer key on your desk!” I guess, “Teacher, I don’t know why you didn’t look it up on Google in 0.8 seconds rather than asking me to help you with it!”)
Seeing how you moved the ball from English texts to German “originals”, it’s time we also mention the obvious fact that nobody knows the specific content or even the LANGUAGE of the oral traditions which most likely constituted the backdrop to Genesis 1. Tradition has assumed that God revealed the content of Genesis 1 directly to Moses and Joshua. But the Bible never tells us that. Obviously, there is much evidence in the early chapters of Genesis (if not throughout) that various oral traditions were already circulating for some unknown period of time. Perhaps they were already well structured and spoken in the conversational Hebrew of that day, but we don’t really know that either. In fact, the oral traditions might have been past down from ancient poet(s)/storytellers in a sequence of languages. Accordingly, a better understanding of Genesis 1 may ultimately be dependent on some discovery in a cognate language text (for example), just as a better understanding of Jesus’ “feed my sheep” conversation with Peter requires a familiarity with the Syriac Peshitta.
Speaking of the Peshitta, even though I did well on my Hebrew comps, I decided not to complete the arduous process of qualifying for admission to the PhD program in Semitic Languages. I lacked the required breadth of proficiencies in the seven languages required. There is a huge gulf between completing the unaccredited Th.D. that Dr. McCabe earned at Grace Theological Seminary and even being ACCEPTED into the Ph.D. program at the Department of Hebrew and Semitic Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. (I quickly realized that I simply couldn’t have met the demands of a top program without setting aside at least an additional six years of my life.) Those who understand what the academic world is like at the world’s top universities will easily understand why not all “Dr.” titles are regarded with equal relevance. This is an unspoken but an often under-the-surface tension one notices at academic conferences like the Evangelical Theological Society where there are such enormous gaps in academic background, knowledge, and experience, even though to a layperson on the outside, it may appear to be a simple matter of “everybody has a PhD”. (Some theological institutions have retroactively reissued diplomas indicating the Ph.D. instead of the originally awarded Th.D., but top academics are well aware that not all such titles are reflective of top-flight terminal degree work. This becomes very obvious within the AAR/SBL membership where most fundamentalist institutions’ scholars do not participate at all in the peer-review of the Biblical studies world and realize that it would be quite difficult to do so. While I might like to believe that my theological degree is on a par with the more elite degrees of the world’s most distinguished institutions, it is most certainly not of the same caliber as my “secular” degrees earned at major universities.)
The professors and others have already settled the Original Post issue and Christy Hemphill has added further perspective. So unless someone has a question for me, I’m moving on to other things and resuming my usual lurker status here. I do appreciate what Biologos is doing and I enjoy all of the content of the website. Thank you for the breadth and freedom of viewpoint you celebrate here. God bless you.
Okay. But you have presumed not proven. That’s all I’m trying to point out.
I agree with you. I don’t know what that distinction actually buys you though. It still doesn’t do anything thing to further the argument that Genesis 1:1-1 is not poetic, figurative liturgy, but rather non-figurative historical narrative. To further that argument you need to deal with the text at the discourse level, not the lexical level.
I meant “you” generically. People who are making arguments about the intended meaning of an ancient text.
I think this seriously underestimates the complexity of human communication as well as how much we can actually calculate with math in plate tectonics. The meaning of sentences is rarely something you can compute by “adding up” the meaning of the words. Formal semantics tried to account for meaning this way and the field eventually gave way to pragmatics. We still have not been able to teach computers to translate well or consistently understand natural human speech. It takes a really complicated theory to explain how my husband knew that when I said, “Are you cold?” last night, what it meant was, “Please shut that window you opened an hour ago.”
Scientific models are built using known constants and with reference to physical realities that can be measured and submitted to calculations. “Ideas” and how they are transmitted from one brain to another are not something you can do math on. The things that can be modeled in linguistics are things like phonological processes and calculations of grammaticality. Modeling meaning-making moves you out of the science/math domain and into psychology/sociology/philosophy.
Well, I’m with you then that they are wrong. Nothing in Genesis points to evolution or an ancient earth. But that doesn’t mean that therefore, everything in Genesis is obviously literal history and requires belief in a young earth created in 144 hours.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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