I think you are confused on a basic level about what using a word figuratively means.
The YECs are correct that day means day and never “eons of time.” The word yom can occur in idioms, like “in the day of the Lord” or (if I remember correctly) something roughly parallel to “back in the day” where the whole expression taken together has a meaning that is not the sum of its parts. (That’s what idiomatic expressions are - the meaning of the whole thing isn’t calculable from the meanings of the words that make it up) Those expressions have nothing to do with “24 hours” or units of time. But even when the word isn’t used in an idiom, it can be used in a figurative passage. Using words in figurative texts is not the same thing as a word having a figurative meaning. Yom doesn’t have a secondary figurative sense that I am aware of. (Like head in English is literally a body part, but has multiple figurative meanings that include, leader, mind, and a unit of measurement -heads of lettuce, heads of horses or cattle, etc) So yes, day just means day not some other figurative sense, but the primary sense of day can be used in texts that are intended to be taken figuratively or metaphorically.
Let’s assume it is. So what?
They don’t use the same exact form. They use bayyom.
Genesis is false then? I don’t by that. I don’t consider it to be some made up story
However, they still believe it’s inconsistent, because out of the 230+ times the form is used, only about 10-20 times does it mean anything other than a 24 hour day. What do you think about this? After all, this claim does seem sort of reasonable
You are my sunshine.
The garden grows best in full sunshine.
There is no difference in grammar.
There is no difference in the form of the word.
There is no prefix or suffix or voice to indicate a metaphoric use of sunshine.
You can find hundreds of examples where sunshine is completely literal, but “you are my sunshine” is a metaphor. As I mentioned above, a metaphor is dependent on first having a literal meaning to convey the idea.
You can mount a reasonable argument that the days of Genesis 1 are intended as literal, regular 24 hour days, in space and time, but not on the basis that day or yom was subject to some particular rule that forbade the word to be used in metaphor. Hebrew texts are especially fond of metaphor.
I think they don’t understand how language works. No, it’s not a reasonable argument to anyone who has knowledge of linguistics and translation.
Since you know about language, I would like to ask why it’s a bad argument
Also, what’s the day of the lord in your view, and is it 24 hours long?
Why not? . . . . .
It just seems very odd that the author would make up a story like that, and it would mislead people even today when science contradicts 24 hour days in your view. Also, Mark 10:6 says from the beginning of creation(of humans) male and female they were. This literally says that Adam and Eve were the first people, which you guys said was false on another post.
Because you don’t know what a passage means by doing database searches and counting how many times a word is used. No one is claiming day means something other than day. We are claiming the word day can be used in figurative passages. What they are saying is completely irrelevant to making the distinction between passages meant to be interpreted literally and passages meant to be interpreted figuratively.
Plus the whole insisting on always bringing up “day=24 hours” is just silly. If I say “in my hour of need, I know you will be there for me,” you can’t interpret the meaning of the sentence effectively by yelling “Hour always means 60 minutes!!!” That is irrelevant. If I say “I’ll be there in a minute” it is not relevant to my intended communication to insist “Minute means 60 seconds!”
Does it? Context matters.
Mark 6:5-9
Jesus is speaking about divorce. You might assume “male and female” means A&E since the reference is back to Genesis 2:24 but how could it apply to them? They had no father or mother. So the meaning is simply it is God’s plan for humans to leave home and become monogamous.
We all mislead ourselves unless we’re taught a rational epistemology. Nothing weird about it.
The basic error of this argument is that you do not determine whether the use of a word is literal based on how it is used elsewhere. That’s grammatically ridiculous. It’s as bad as the dismal-quality atheistic “errors in the Bible” compilations that claim that Revelation 1 can’t be true because Jesus couldn’t actually have real stars in his hands. “Door” usually means an actual part of a building, but that does not tell us how to interpret Jesus saying that he’s the door. You determine whether a particular usage is literal based on context and on your knowledge of physical reality. To take the Song of Solomon example above, the context of a love song makes it likely that figurative usage may occur; knowledge of human anatomy lets us identify which statements are figurative.
Yes, those are examples, but there is still a problem. On another forum, many people here said that the context is also different, because the verses they point out in Hebrew use Yom after the number, and in Genesis, it uses yom before the number. However, there still is a problem. Exodus 31:17 uses Yom after the number. The word yom is in the form yamim in this verse. YEC’s who now know this argue that Yom, when used AFTER a number, always means a 24 hour day. Is this claim true?
YECs who argue this are making stuff up about how language works. For like the seventh time, you cannot determine the meaning of a passage based on how a word is used in a different passage, or by coming up with grammar rules, or by adding up the sum of the definitions. That is what they are trying to do. Their whole method is linguistically bogus and frankly laughable. They are chasing tangents that have nothing to do with the actual discipline of hermeneutics. Sure, fine, day means 24 hours. THAT DOESN’T MEAN GENESIS 1 IS LITERAL HISTORY NO MATTER HOW MANY TIMES THEY FIND THE WORD DAY USED IN THE BIBLE OR WHAT OTHER WORDS THEY FIND USED WITH DAY IN OTHER CONTEXTS.
completely irrelevant to how Hebrew numerals work
It is irrelevant? So whether it’s used before or after it don’t make a difference? So, then, this argument is false, because Hosea 6:2 and Zechariah 14:7 both use it with a number, and it doesn’t matter if yom is used after a number or before a number, therefore, there isn’t a big difference between Zechariah and Hosea and Exodus. Is that what you mean?
Having the number before or after yom adds nothing to how to interpret the overall text. It’s not like one is literal and the other is not. Words don’t mean anything apart from context (e.g., sentences, paragraphs, discourses…and, most of all, genre).