Introduction
Part One: Biblical Authority
Part Two: Authority from Tradition - The Jewish Sages and Early Church Fathers
Part Three: The Weight of Traditional Views
Part Four: "Man's Fallible Opinions"
Part Five: Clues in the Text
All in a “Day’s” Work
While
old-earth creationists break down into several sub-categories depending on
their view of the Genesis text,[1]
the dominant old-earth position is probably what is known as the “day-age”
view. This is the idea that the days of Genesis are actually representative of
long ages of time. Hugh Ross is probably the best known expounder of this position,
the strongest textual evidence for which comes from Genesis 2:4: “This is the
account of the heavens and earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made earth and heaven.”[2]
While Genesis 1 refers to creation
taking place over a period of six days, this passage would appear to argue that
everything was actually done in one day. Unless we are prepared to accept a
contradiction in the text, we must conclude that either the “days” of Genesis 1
or the “day” of Genesis 2:4—or perhaps both—are figurative to some degree. As I
noted previously, this was the conclusion of men such as Clement and Augustine,
who believed that God actually created everything instantly but chose to reveal
creation in the form of a six-day chronology for the benefit of our
understanding.
As anyone who is familiar with the
creation controversy is probably already aware, the Hebrew word translated
“day” in Genesis 1 is yom. While this
word can indicate a twenty-four-hour period of time, it is used in various
other ways in scripture as well. One example of this is Genesis 31:39, where,
in defending his service to Laban, Jacob says of the flocks, “That which was
torn of beasts, I did not bring to you; I bore the loss of it myself. You required
it of my hand whether stolen by day [yom]
or stolen by night.” Here, yom can
only refer to the daylight hours. Another occurrence can be found in 1 Samuel
27:1, where we read: “Then David said to himself, ‘Now I will perish one day [yom] by the hand of Saul. There is
nothing better for me than to escape into the land of the Philistines.” As used
here, yom is clearly a generic
reference meaning “someday” or “at some point.”
Young-earth teachers often argue that
when the word yom is accompanied by
an ordinal number in scripture, such as “first day,” “second day,” etc., it
always refers to a twenty-four-hour day. A few observations are in order here:
First, the claim is untrue. Genesis 1 is
not the only Old Testament passage where this usage appears. In Hosea 6, the
prophet urges Israel to return to God, declaring: “He will revive us after two
days; He will raise us up on the third day” (v 2). This is clearly a poetic
form of expression, appearing to signify completion, and is similarly used by Jesus
himself with regard to his ministry in Luke 13:32: “And He said to them, ‘Go
and tell that fox, ‘Behold, I cast out demons and perform cures today and
tomorrow, and the third day I reach my goal.’”
Second, as Norman Geisler points out,
there is no rule in Hebrew grammar “demanding that all numbered days in a
series refer to twenty-four-hour days. Even if there were no exceptions in the
Old Testament, it would not mean that ‘day’ in Genesis 1 could not refer to
more than one twenty-four-hour period.”[3]
Even apart from Hosea 6:2, the creation days describe a unique time in history.
Other passages of scripture refer to it, but no other scriptural context is
comparable with it. Even the celestial bodies that serve as timepieces in
scripture were not ordained for that purpose until Day Four, a fact that has
perplexed both ancient and modern Bible scholars as they’ve labored to
understand the text. A “day” before the appearance of the luminaries appears to
be the same as a “day” after their creation; no qualification is provided in
the text to indicate a distinction.
Third, as noted by Gleason Archer, the
underlying Hebrew of Genesis 1 shows that the days of Genesis “are well adapted
to a sequential pattern, rather than to strictly delimited units of time.”[4]
In other words, the days of Genesis are arranged in sequence, but nothing about
this tells us how much time they actually represent. Archer also observes that
the phrases “the first day,” “the second day,” etc., in Genesis 1, are
incorrect translations, as the Hebrew does not contain the definite article in
these instances:
Hebrew
expresses “the first day,” by hayyom hari’son,
but this text says simply yom ‘ehad
(day one). Again, in v.8 we do not read hayyom
hasseni (“the second day”), but yom
seni (“a second day”).[5]
Consequently, “a second day” or “a third day” could simply refer to the second and third days in a series of days spent on a process of some type. Archer notes that the definite article is typically used in Hebrew to identify a specific thing, but could be left out “in poetic style,” perhaps suggesting that the creation account may be a type of poetry. If so, this would help to make sense of the structure of the account, including certain repeated phrases and the apparent symmetry between Days One through Three and Days Four through Six.[6]
In light of these considerations, without a grammatical restriction or contextual necessity, it is simply improper to argue that the creation days must be twenty-four-hour days because they are accompanied by ordinals. The standard young-earth argument used in this regard is based on assumptions rather than on the text itself.
Evening and Morning
Even
more so than the term “day,” the terms “evening and morning,” repeated at the
close of each day of Genesis 1, appeal to a solar frame of reference. Young-earth
teachers argue that these terms are strong evidence in favor of the literal,
twenty-four-hour day interpretation for just this reason, although this is
awkward for them given that they maintain that the sun did not exist until Day
Four—no sun, no solar frame of reference. Again, they insert placeholders for
the sun, suggesting that it might have been the light of God’s own glory or, in
the words of Brian Thomas of ICR, perhaps “God had some shining matter balled
up for three days,” which he later “organized…into the sun and stars.”[7]
In light of what we’ve seen already, the
dilemma seems unnecessary. There is sufficient textual evidence to suggest that
the sun and stars did exist on Day
One, and this could account for the use of the terms “day,” “evening,” and
“morning,” even if one rejects the
old-earth viewpoint. But if the days are in fact symbolic of longer periods of
time—perhaps in terms of poetic expression, as Gleason Archer implies—then the
terms “evening” and “morning” would be symbolic of necessity as well. In fact,
there are examples of these terms used as metaphors in scripture, even appearing
closely together just as they do in Genesis:
- In Genesis 49,
Jacob prophesies concerning his sons, noting with regard to Benjamin: “Benjamin
is a ravenous wolf; in the morning he devours the prey, and in the evening he
divides the spoil.” This is metaphorical language referring to Benjamin’s
aggressive nature, which is never satisfied.
- In Job 4:17-21,
Job’s friend Eliphaz speaks of God’s judgment of angels and men, saying: “He
puts no trust even in His servants; and against His angels He charges error.
How much more those who dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the
dust, who are crushed before the moth! Between morning and evening they are broken
in pieces; unobserved, they perish forever.” The phrase “between morning and
evening” appears to be a metaphorical reference to the beginning and ending of
life, during which men endure hardship before “unobserved, they perish
forever.”
- In Psalm 46, David
speaks of “the city of God,” comparing her to a city under siege by an enemy
who plans to attack at dawn. “God is in the midst of her,” David assures us in
verse five, and because of this, “she will never be moved. God will help her
when morning dawns.”
- In Psalm 90:5-6,
Moses—the author/editor of Genesis—says with regard to human beings: “You have
swept them away like a flood, they fall asleep; in the morning they are like
grass which sprouts anew. In the morning it flourishes and sprouts anew; toward
evening it fades and withers away.” Here again, we see morning and evening
compared to the beginning and ending of human life.
While “morning” and “evening” typically do refer to literal dawn and dusk in scripture, these examples are sufficient to establish an occasional metaphorical usage as well, where they appear to convey the concepts of beginning and ending. Having demonstrated this, I will defer further discussion of these terms until chapter five, in which I will outline how I believe the days of Genesis are to be properly understood.
The Endless Seventh Day
However
long one thinks that the six days of creation were, there can be no doubt
whatsoever but that Day Seven does in fact represent an indefinite period of
time. Moses tells us in Genesis 2:2-3, that God “rested on the seventh day from
all his work which he had done,” and set the day apart as holy. Unlike the
creation days of Genesis 1, however, Day Seven has no “evening and morning”
phraseology. The day had a definite beginning, but it appears to have had no ending.
The work of creation is done, so there is no need for work to resume on an
“eighth day.”
In the Old Testament, the seventh day
Sabbath rest is symbolized by Canaan: the Promised Land, as the author of
Hebrews underscores for us in chapters three and four of that book.[8]
Before Canaan, however, there was the Garden of Eden. Man originally entered
God’s seventh day rest in the garden, where he enjoyed full fellowship with
God, but later fell through disobedience in unbelief and lost his place of
divine favor and fellowship, effectively leaving God’s rest. At the return of
Christ—whom scripture calls “the last Adam” (1 Corinthians 15:45)—man will be
able to enter the divine rest once again, having been reconciled to God through
“the obedience of faith” (Romans 1:5).
If Day Seven can be a long period of time—apparently spanning many thousands of years now—why can the other six days not have been long periods of time as well? Apart from the fact that the text does not give us the usual “evening and morning” phraseology, nothing in Genesis suggests that the seventh day is somehow different than the preceding six creation days. Moses uses the same term in regard to it—“Day”—without any sort of qualification. It is not until we consult other passages of scripture that we learn the full story, just as Job 38 helps enlighten us with regard to creation Days One and Four.
“And God saw that it was Good.”
Another perplexing element in the Genesis creation account is the repeated statement, “And God saw that it was good.” This is puzzling given that God knew what he was doing in the creation process and is not capable of error to begin with. Why then does the text speak as if God was evaluating his own work to ensure that it came out well? How could it have come out otherwise? What is this telling us?
Events of the Sixth Day
When
we combine the accounts found in Genesis 1 and 2, a picture emerges that
portrays creation Day Six as a very busy day indeed, if in fact it was a
twenty-four-hour day. On this day, God created various land animals and “creeping
things,” created Adam, placed Adam in the Garden of Eden to care for it,
brought the animals to Adam for him to name, performed surgery on Adam, and
then brought Eve to Adam. But even if we have God performing his creative acts
in a sort of time-lapsed fashion here, we’re not only dealing with divine
activity on Day Six; we have human activity to consider as well.
Many people have the misconception that
Adam was created in the Garden of Eden itself, but Genesis makes it clear that
he was created somewhere else, apparently in the lands to the west of the
garden, as we read in Genesis 2:8:
The
Lord God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden; and there he placed the man
who he had formed.[9]
Young-earth teachers tell us that the entire world was a paradise prior to the Fall of Man, but this is an assumption that is not supported by the Genesis text. Genesis 2:8 indicates that Eden was a particular region, of which the garden comprised only a part. Whatever the rest of the world may have been like at the time, it was not a garden-like environment. The garden was a special place, set apart for God’s special creation. Given that man was commanded to “subdue the earth” (Genesis 1:28), I tend to think that God meant for this world to be a sort of project for humanity, which was intended to spread out and care for the earth and its creatures, armed with the lessons learned in the garden environment.
Genesis does not offer any clues as to
why God created Adam outside of the garden, but it may have been for the
purpose of allowing him to become familiar with the larger world, so that he
would better understand the task for which he had been created, as well as to
better appreciate the blessed ground onto which the Lord was moving him. We’re
not told how much time elapsed between his creation and his move to the garden,
but given that God had some purpose in doing things this way, a passage of at
least some time seems implied here. It’s possible that God used this time to
instruct Adam in some foundational way, although it seems necessary that Adam
must have been created in an intellectually mature state, with a substantial
amount of inherent knowledge. By the time we find him in the garden, he is at a
level where he is able to make evaluations and decisions and to carry out
tasks.
Adam’s first task is to care for the
garden. Genesis 2:15 tells us that Adam was intended to “cultivate and keep”
the garden. Interestingly, the Hebrew word translated “keep” here is shamar, meaning “to keep watch over” or
“to guard.”[10]
To fulfill these duties, Adam would have required some basic instruction at
least, including knowledge of the boundaries of his domain. This did not have
to come to him all at once, of course—it was likely in the form of extended “on
the job training”—but it seems likely that he had some basic idea of what was
expected of him from the beginning. One such instruction that he doubtless
received immediately was the command to not eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of
Good and Evil (Genesis 2:16).
Having placed Adam in the garden, God
observed that “it is not good for the man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18). For me,
this is one of the odder statements in the Bible. God had previously created
all of the animals in sexual pairings and with corresponding roles. Why not man
as well, particularly given that man was to be responsible for overseeing the
creation? Yet, Eve’s creation seems almost like an afterthought. God placed
Adam in the garden to carry out certain responsibilities and then remarked, “It
is not good for the man to be alone; I will make an ‘ezer [aid or helper][11]
suitable for him.” Reading this, I get the impression that God observed Adam
going about his work and effectively said, “This isn’t working out. He needs
help.” Again, the passage of a certain amount of time seems implied here,
although I stress that this is only my impression.
Enter Adam’s second task:
Out
of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of
the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and
whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name. The man gave
names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the sky, and to every beast of the
field. — Genesis 2:19-20a
Here we have what appears to be an enormous task for a single twenty-four-hour day when considered just by itself, let alone the considerations we’ve already seen. Think for a moment how you would evaluate an animal if you were in Adam’s place. For a large animal like a hippopotamus, you might walk all around the animal, observing its small tail and its overall shape, feeling the texture of its skin, examining its enormous jaws, etc. For small animals—a frog for instance—you would probably pick them up and look them over more closely. In all cases, you would spend at least a moment interacting with them to evaluate their personalities. If God brought a mere 100 animals to Adam, and Adam spent only five minutes evaluating each one as I’ve described, that’s eight hours by itself of the roughly twelve hours of daylight that would be available. Five minutes spent evaluating 300 animals would exceed twenty-four hours.
By comparison, AiG appears to have
somewhat more confidence in Adam’s decision-making capacity than I’m allowing
for here. Assuming that Adam named “2,500 proto-species (genera)” at a rate of one every five seconds, AiG calculates that
Adam could have named all of the animals in a mere three hours and fort-five
minutes, “if we include a five-minute break every hour.”[12]
Three hours and forty-five
minutes—assuming Adam could look at each animal, evaluate it somehow, and
decide on a suitable name for it. Even if we increase that allowance to ten seconds,
naming 2,500 genera would have taken him nearly seven hours. Either way, this
seems like a miracle in and of itself, and it is totally unnecessary if one is
not trying to cram the episode into a single dawn-to-dusk period.[13]
The whole scenario becomes even more
fantastic, however, if we consider that Adam was not just stamping creatures on
the forehead with names in some assembly-line fashion; he was also evaluating
their suitability as companions, judging how well they related to him. AiG acknowledges
this, stating that God not only wanted Adam to name the animals but was trying to
demonstrate to him that he was “different in kind from the rest of creation.” [14]
This is a primary factor in why I believe that the process of naming the animals
took a considerable amount of time, perhaps weeks. Further, we’re assuming here
that God brought the animals to Adam all at once. He may not have. He may have
brought only a few at a time. Only a pre-commitment to the twenty-four-hour day
interpretation makes any of this problematic, however.
Eventually, God put Adam into a deep
sleep, removed some amount of material from his side, fashioned Eve from it,
and brought her to Adam. This is a bit of a mystery in and of itself. God
certainly had the power to remove whatever genetic material was required for
Eve’s creation from Adam’s body instantaneously, non-invasively, and painlessly.
Yet, he put Adam to sleep, just as we put people to sleep for invasive medical
procedures today, and then physically opened Adam’s body and removed some
portion of material from him. Why the elaborate process here?
Unfortunately, scripture does not tell
us why God chose to create Eve in this manner, but it does provide us with
Adam’s response upon meeting her, which is interesting in its own right:
The
man said, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be
called Woman because she was taken out of Man.” – Genesis 2:23
The word “now” is translated from the Hebrew word pa’am, which can refer to the “tread” or “stroke” of a foot, “as persons sometimes count by beats of hand or foot,” and often appears in reference to a sequence of events, a particular or particularly significant time, or a thing that has finally come about.[15] This is the word used in Genesis 29:34 when Leah gives birth to Levi and says, “Now this time [pa’am] my husband will become attached to me, because I have borne him three sons.” For another example, consider Genesis 18:32, where Abraham is petitioning the Lord to spare Sodom if only a few righteous people are found there: “Oh, may the Lord not be angry, and I shall speak only this once [pa’am]; suppose ten are found there?”
Upon seeing Eve in Genesis 2:23, Adam’s
remark appears to signify an attitude of “Finally, this is it!” or “At last,
I’ve found what I was looking for,” indicating that he has arrived at the end
of an extensive search, and this is exactly how the quotation is rendered in
some English translations:
Then
the man said, “This is at last bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” –
English Standard Version
And
the man saith, “This is the proper step! Bones of my bone and flesh of my
flesh!” – Young’s Literal Translation
The
man-person said, “At last! This is bone from my bones and flesh from my flesh.”
– Complete Jewish Bible
In summarizing our look at Day Six, it seems to me that we have several good reasons from the text alone to believe that the events of this day likely took place over an extended period of time. It’s one thing to speak of God creating things in a supernatural, time-lapsed fashion, which is exactly what young-earth creationists argue took place on each of the creation days; but once we arrive at Day Six, man comes on the scene, and man cannot carry out his works as quickly as God.
[1] Additional old-earth views of note include: The Gap Theory, the Cosmic Temple View, the Six-Day Revelatory View, the Young-Biosphere View, the Analogical Day View, the Days of Divine Fiat or Divine Proclamation View, the Literary Framework Hypothesis, and the Christ-Centered Model.
[2] I say that this is the strongest textual evidence because it follows immediately on the heels of the creation account, employing the same terminology within the same general context.
[3] Norman Geisler. The Baker Encylcopedia of Christian Apologetics. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Publishing Group, 1999, 2006), p. 271.
[4] Gleason Archer. Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties. (Grand Rapids: MI: Baker Publishing Group, 1982), pp. 60-61.
[5] Ibid. Day Six does have the definite article. Why the difference? I believe this is to offset it from “Day One” because it is the last day in the series.
[6] In the first three days, we see the land, sea, and sky created, and in last three days we see them populated. The symmetry is not exact, however, given the creation of plant life on the third day.
[7] Brian Thomas, “Were There Days
Before God Created The Sun?” Institute for Creation Research. December 29,
2017. Imagine this view being seriously presented to astrophysicists.
https://www.icr.org/article/were-there-days-before-god-created/
[8] Also see Deuteronomy 3:10, 10:12, 25:19, and Joshua 1:13, among other passages.
[9] A surface reading of the text makes it seem as if the Garden of Eden was also created on Day Six, but the Hebrew word translated “planted” (nata’) is in the Qal Imperfect tense, which, as we have already seen, can indicate an action begun sometime in the past. For this reason, the text might be better rendered “had planted,” meaning that the garden predated Day Six. For this reason, I think it’s possible that the garden may have been planted on Day Three, when we’re told that God caused vegetation to sprout from the barren earth (Genesis 1:9-12). Note that Ezekiel 28:13 tells us that Satan (called “the king of Tyre” in this passage) was once “in Eden, the garden of God,” prior to his fall, when he was still a being “full of wisdom and beauty.” Given that Satan must have fallen before man, Ezekiel 28:13 is strong corroborating evidence that the garden was created prior to Day Six.
[10] Strong’s # H8104.
[11] Strong’s # H5882.
[12]Andrew Kulikovsky. “How Could
Adam Have Named All the Animals in a Single Day?” Answers in Genesis. June 1,
2005:
https://answersingenesis.org/bible-characters/adam-and-eve/how-could-adam-have-named-all-the-animals-in-a-single-day/.
[13] Using AiG’s suggested figure of 2,500 proto-species, and allowing Adam a comparatively luxurious two minutes of interaction with each, it would have taken him some 83 hours—over three days—to go through them all.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Strong’s # H6471.
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