Jayco

While I am almost sure that this Christian is wrong, I don't have the necessary evidence to succeed in his challenge. Can anyone help me out with this using credible sources?

Thanks in advance.

Toto

I think he's right, in that the Hebrew does refer to a day.

It's the liberal Christians who claim that it could be interpreted as some other period of time, and accuse atheists of being overly literal.

GakuseiDon

While the word means "day", it was taken as non-literal by some. Just as the word "horse" in "I could eat a horse!" means a horse, but the sense of the expression is metaphorical.

Some early writers' thoughts from here: Philo about 50 CE:

"It is quite foolish to think that the world was created in six days in a space of time at all. Why? Because every period of time is a series of days and nights, and these can only be made such by the movement of the sun as it goes over and under the earth; but the sun is part of heaven, so that time is confessedly more recent than the world. It would there be correct to say that the world was not made in time, but that time was formed by means of the world, for it was heaven's movement that was the index of the nature of time."

Thus according to Philo, if "day" meant the period that the sun revolved around the earth, and the sun hadn't been created then, then "day" must have meant something else.

The link gives other early thoughts on Genesis.

Adamu

Hi Jayco.

Here is a good paper addressing ninjaearth's misinformation on the seven "days."

To me, it is most clear Genesis (and many other parts of the book) is an edited redacted version of the Sumerian Enuma Elish, also known as The Seven Tablets of Creation or The Chaldean Genesis.

I suspect ninjaearth is unaware of this.

spin

We are into severely crap infested waters when dealing with YWM, "day" in Gen 1.

The first thing to realize with a creation in six days, is that god is instituting the sabbath. If these were not literal days, as the early Jews took them to be, the institution of the sabbath wouldn't make any sense. If god resting on the seventh day is to be meaningful, then they must be ordinary days.

Then the text talks talks about days, along with nights, mornings and evenings. In such a context, one has no reason to read YWM to mean anything other than a 24 hour period. The only reason I have ever seen that one should read YWM in any other way here is because one has an a priori commitment which requires another meaning. There is no way to get anything other than an ordinary day from the text as it is written.

If one wants to propose any other reading of YWM, one has to suggest a means for an ordinary reader to arrive at that reading simply from the text as it is written.

Philo is writing in the context of Greek thought and the idea of the world being created in six ordinary days may have seemed unacceptable to such thought, so Philo who leaned towards metaphorical interpretation looked for such an interpretation here. Still the rule I outlined in the previous paragraph is valid. You cannot read into the text what you want: the text has to explain itself.

Two different aspects of the text point to a literal reading of the word YWM. That's hard to disagree with.


spin

stuart shepherd

Adam was created on the sixth day.
Adam was an ancestor of Jesus. Luke 3:38
So that puts some limitation on a day, since Adam lived 930 years. Genesis 5:5

Adam's children were born after the fall.
Seth was born when Adam was 130 years old. Genesis 5:3, and of course Cain and Abel were born before Seth.

But the Christians will probably say that once Adam was created, the sixth day ended and that we are still in the seventh day???

I feel like there is something here but I can't put my finger on it.

Stuart Shepherd

aa5874

But if a Christian believes their God is omni-everything, then their God could have made the universe in less than 7 nanoseconds. Don't Christians believe in their God anymore? If it wasn't seven literal days, then it was probably a lot less. Give your God the benefit of the doubt.

Tigers!

IIRC it was Augustine who thought that God made the earth/universe instantaneously.
As Spin so eloquently put it the text of Genesis means exactly what it says. Nothing more and nothing less.
God chose to take 6 days. Why so long? Don't know but tell you what - I'll ask him when I see him.

Adamu

Hi Spin.

I suggest the ordinary reader first recognize Genesis as merely a shortened version of a much older epic of creation, the Sumerian enuma elish. Aka "The Seven Tablets of Creation" (a parallel?), it was obviously primary source material for the authors of Genesis. This alone is hard to disagree with, but when coupled with the fact that the Hebrew prefix and numbering systems differentiate the "days" of the creative process from the "days" elsewhere in the text, one understands why the interpretations of "ages" or "extended periods of time" persists.
And rightly so.
The events of the enuma elish cover a broader spectrum of time, more like "phases;" so the creative process in Genesis can be considered "phase one" phase two" etc.
IMO, that is.

Adamu

Hi Stuart.

There is both "adam" the Man and Adam the person which confuses things even more!