The moon can be an absentee ruler: Problems with reading Genesis 1 and 2 as history.

Some Christians believe that Genesis 1 was meant to be read as history, and sets forth events in sequence. (See my previous post for further discussion of interpreting Genesis 1.) 

There are some problems with reading Genesis 1 as history, setting forth events in sequence. Here are some of them:

1) Light appears on the first day, but the sun and moon (which are not named, probably as a warning against worshiping them) are not mentioned until the fourth day.

2) The sun is described as ruling the day, and the moon as ruling the night. Surely the ancient Hebrews (and God!) knew full well that the moon appears during the day on most days, for periods up to almost the entire length of that day, and is not always present during the night. How can the moon rule the night on nights when it doesn't appear?

The above photo, taken in daylight, shows that the moon was clearly visible, and the sun was clearly shining. That means that, on the other side of the earth, neither the moon nor the sun was visible in the sky, at that time. Photo from Laura Suarez (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu).

3) Genesis 1 describes a firmament (or expanse) as being created on the second day. The problem with that is that there is no firmament. Ancient peoples believed that there was one, and supposed that various celestial objects, and clouds, were held up by this structure. There is no firmament. The moon, the sun, the stars, galaxies, planets, comets and asteroids are not held up by any sort of glass sphere, or invisible framework (unless you count gravity as such). They are at distances that vary by orders of magnitude -- the moon is relatively close to us, the Magellanic Clouds much further away, so that there is no way that both of these could be held up by one structure surrounding the earth. The earth is not the center of the solar system.

How do I explain these problems? Is the Bible wrong?

I would argue that the Bible is not wrong. It was not meant to be a textbook of astronomy, or geology, or biology. It was meant to tell us about God, the single wonderful, wise creator, and His sovereignty over the creation. God used the language and ideas of the culture of the time. People of that day believed that there was a firmament, so God allowed the description of the creation to include this. Today, we say "sunset" and "sunrise," even though the sun doesn't really rise, or set -- the earth's rotation makes it seem that it rises and sets. If, for example, a news reporter or a novelist says that an event happened at sunrise, we don't accuse her of ignorance or deception.* These ideas are part of our culture, and communicate within that culture, whereas saying "the earth rotated so that the sun appeared on the horizon in Central Africa," is unnecessarily cumbersome and confusing. The idea of a firmament, in Bible times, communicated with others.

Added Dec 13, 2021: For more on the firmament and the Hebrews, see here.

Thank you for reading!

*There are other examples of this sort of thing, such as acting as if or communicating that gravity is an attractive force, because it's ingrained in our culture. If I understand Einstein, gravity is because of space being warped, so that two objects travel toward each other in space-time, and it isn't really an attractive force. The more up-to-date Einsteinian explanation of gravity was used frequently in Star Trek. ("warp speed") But we write and talk about falling downstairs, for example.

Another example of how culture makes communication unscientific is the use of heart for the seat of the emotions.

It is likely that some current ideas about how things work, from the submicroscopic to the galactic, will seem foolish to people in the future centuries. (If there are to be future centuries.)

Important early theologians didn't believe that creation took six 24-hr days

He Lives quotes from some church fathers, important ones, who didn't believe that creation was in six 24-hour days.

Read He Lives!

"Day" as used in the Bible

A recent post had a comment, which, in part, said this: ". . . why does the Bible say a day and science say millions of years for creation?"

I responded, but perhaps a longer response is in order. One part of the response is to agree wholeheartedly that it is dangerous to ignore the literal text of the Bible. If, for example, the Bible says that Jesus rose from the dead, we need a very good reason to say that this wasn't meant as literal, and that He, in fact, did not so rise. There is no such reason, as far as I am concerned -- Jesus did rise from the dead.

Are there reasons to believe that the six days of creation, in Genesis 1, may not have been meant to be taken literally? I think there are. Am I sure that they were meant to be taken as something other than a literal day? No, I'm not sure.

To quote the King James Version of Genesis 1: "And the evening and the morning were the first day." This language is repeated, being found in verses 5, 8, 13, 19, 23, and 31. Why "evening and morning"? I'm not sure, but would guess that the ancient Hebrews had a different view of when days started and ended than we do. Now, already there is a problem with taking these days as literal days, namely that the sun is said to have been made on the fourth day. How could there have been evening and morning on days one, two and three without the sun? I understand that God could have made evening and morning when there was no sun, but at the least, the listing of days before the sun requires something more than a literal interpretation of the word "day" in the first three instances where it occurs, in Genesis 1.

Then there's Genesis 2:4: ". . . in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens . . ." Here is a case, right after Genesis 1, where "day" doesn't seem to mean a literal 24-hour day, but rather a period of time, of at least a few 24-hour days in length. The phrase seems to be referring to the entire period of creation, based on the context. I'm not a Hebrew scholar, by any means, but if I go to the web page called up by the link for "Genesis 2" at the beginning of this paragraph, then click on the small "c" in the box to the left of verse 4, I get a display of the Hebrew words that the English translations are based on. The word used for "day" is rendered "yowm." Beside that word, there is a number, H3117, from Strong's Concordance of the original language. If I click on that number, I get an entry for that word. The first thing I note is that that same word, "yowm," was used for a number of things, including 24-hour days, years, and periods of time, just as day may be used in English. If I scroll down a bit, I see that the same word was used for each of  the six days, as listed above.

As an aside, Genesis doesn't tell us when the earth was created, nor the heavens, other than that they were "In the beginning." Were these created on the first day, or before the six days of Genesis 1?

Then, of course, there's 2 Peter 3:8, which says that a day is as a thousand years. Some people have taken that to mean that the six days of Genesis 1 were each exactly a thousand years in length, but I don't think that that is warranted.

My point is that it may be true that Genesis 1 is speaking of 24-hour days, but for it to be doing so, some assumptions must be made, or some other Biblical facts ignored. In other words, I believe that it is legitimate to believe that the days of Genesis 1 were not meant to be taken as literal days, and I am by no means alone in this.

I have posted on this question before. See here (which post considers the association of the days of Genesis with the fourth Commandment) and here (which post considers problems in interpretation of Genesis 2:5-7 literally) for more.

I thank the commenter for raising the question. I have by no means answered it fully. Thanks for reading.

A Biblical Case for an Old Earth, by David Snoke, part 8

I continue my posts on David Snoke's A Biblical Case for an Old Earth (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2006). The most recent post is here. In that post, I considered some of Snoke's biblical evidence that the days of Genesis 1, and of Genesis 2:1-3, were not necessarily consecutive 24-hour days.

Snoke has more evidence. On page 141, he points out that Genesis 2:4, which, of course, comes right after Genesis 2:3, uses "day" to refer to a period of time that clearly is not a 24-hour day:

Genesis 2:4 These are the generations
of the heavens and the earth when they were created,
in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. (ESV, emphasis added. All scripture quotations from this version.)

(Not all versions of the Bible use "day" here -- the NIV and the NLT do not, but at least the KJV, the NKJV, the NASB and the RSV, as well as the ESV, use "day." I checked the Hebrew -- I do not know Hebrew, but can look it up, using an option in the Blueletter Bible -- and the Hebrew word used in Genesis 1 and in Genesis 2:4 is the same word, as far as I can tell.)

Mr. Snoke says, correctly, that young-earth proponents often recognize that "day" is used in the Bible for periods longer than a 24-hour period, but say that when "evening" and "morning" are used with "day," it always means a literal day. Not so, he says, citing Psalm 90, which is usually attributed to Moses, who apparently wrote Genesis:

3 You return man to dust

and say, “Return, O children of man!”
4 For a thousand years in your sight
are but as yesterday when it is past,
or as a watch in the night.

5 You sweep them away as with a flood; they are like a dream,
like grass that is renewed in the morning:
6 in the morning it flourishes and is renewed;
in the evening it fades and withers.

A day, yesterday, is said to be like a thousand years, and evening and morning are used in the same passage. The Hebrew word for yesterday is not the same as the Hebrew word for day, used in the passages above, and doesn't even seem to have been derived from it, which weakens Snoke's argument. Snoke mentions other passages which use evening and morning in a non-literal sense, namely Psalm 30:4-5, Psalm 49:14, and Psalm 90:10, 13-14, but they don't use a word for "day," or even "yesterday."

On page 144-5, Snoke says, again correctly, that some young-earth advocates agree that "day," and "morning and evening" can refer to non-literal periods of time, but say that if days are numbered, they must be literal 24-hour days. Snoke's response is that Genesis 1 is the only occasion where the Bible uses numbers with days, in this way, so there is no way to check this claim. He mentions Numbers 29, but says that the construction is quite different.

Snoke discusses Genesis 2:5-7:
5 When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, 6 and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground— 7 then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.

I have posted on this passage previously, and, in that post, link to two other, more important authors, both of whom argue, as Snoke does, that this passage is difficult, or impossible, to reconcile with Genesis 1, if Genesis 1 is taken to mean consecutive 24-hour periods when it uses "day."

To quote A Biblical Case for an Old Earth: Note that if the land had emerged from the waters just three days earlier (assuming that these events [of Genesis 2:5-7] happen on Day 6, and the land appeared from under the waters on Day 3, in the young-earth view), then it hardly makes sense that the land would be dry and unfertile. For that matter, giving any discussion of causation for the lack of vegetation seems out of place, if the land had only just appeared. The sense of the text is that the land had been around a long time, so long that it had dried out. (p. 153) The young-earth view is that the events happened on day 6.

Snoke also writes about the rivers mentioned in Genesis 2. He says that the Pishon river (no river now existing is named that) was most likely a river that flowed across the Arabian peninsula in the past. (The other rivers, the Gihon, Tigris, and Euphrates, still exist.) He cites Carol Hill (See here for her paper -- Snoke mistakenly calls her "Caroline.") as evidence for this claim.

As Snoke says, these rivers present a serious problem for young-earth creationism:
. . . this river lies on top of sedimentary geological layers that young-earth creationists would say were deposited in the flood of Noah. So do the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. To accept this convincing case for the historicity of Genesis, Bible scholars must either accept an old-earth view or believe that God created sedimentary rock at the beginning, before the fall and the flood. (p. 155. "this river" is the Pishon.)

It seems to me that Snoke has assembled evidence, as presented here and in the previous posts, that makes it difficult to sustain an argument for young-earth creationism.

Thanks for reading.

A Biblical Case for an Old Earth, by David Snoke, part 7

I return to my posts on David Snoke's A Biblical Case for an Old Earth. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2006) The previous posts have considered what Snoke has to say about death before the Fall. (Here's the last one.) Snoke argues strongly, using Biblical evidence, that there was, indeed, animal death before the Fall, hence demolishing, in my opinion, one of the major arguments of young-earth creationism.

Snoke also deals with the question of the Sabbath, and the matter of whether or not the days of Genesis 1 were literal. Besides Genesis, itself, Exodus 20:8-11 also seems to say that God's creative actions were confined to seven literal days.

Snoke disagrees. First, he (as others have done) says that there was so much that was supposed to have happened after the creation of Adam that it couldn't have fitted into a single day. But his main argument is more direct:

To me, however, the best argument for equating the days of creation with ages comes from the precedent of God taught by the Sabbath law. I ask, "What did God do on the eighth day?" Does God work a six-day work week, taking every Saturday or Sunday off? After his Sabbath rest, did God pick up his tools and go back to work, taking another Sabbath seven days later? If God's activity is to be taken as an exact model for us, then this conclusion seems inescapable. Yet the rest of scripture does not support this. God's activity appears as a single continuity. (p. 102)

Snoke cites John 5:17, which says: But Jesus answered them, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.” (all Bible quotations from the ESV) He also uses Hebrews 4:3-4, which, says Snoke, "clearly states that God's Sabbath rest did not end -- it continues up to this day." (p. 103)

Snoke argues, therefore, that scripture does not clearly teach that the days of Genesis 1 were literal 24-hour days.

I hope to post more on this book later.

More about the days of creation in Genesis 1

I did a Google search, on the words (not phrase) theories on Genesis 1 days. I don't have time, or inclination, to go through the roughly 3,000,000 web pages that Google says it can find for me. However, I was interested in the first few that came up. (I'm not giving the URLs. One reason is that I'm not sure these pages are authoritative exponents of a particular position. If you want to see these pages, you can do a Google search yourself!)

I found that there was a diversity of views on the meaning of the word "day" in Genesis 1, just among the first ten hits.

Here are some such views:
1) The six, or seven, days of creation were literal days, approximately 24 hours in length.
2) The days refer to long periods of time (ages).
3) There was a gap in God's creative activity, between day 1 and day 2.
4) The days were days of revelation. God revealed different truths on different days.

All of these views have problems, as do any other views of the time frame of Genesis 1.

I indicated some of the problems with the first view in a previous post. Some of my readers were kind enough to comment. I may be missing something, but I remain convinced that Genesis 2:5 seems to be scriptural evidence against taking Genesis 1 as speaking of literal days. There are other scriptural reasons for questioning this view. (See this post, and the comments)

Although belief in literal days does not require belief in a young earth, at most thousands of years old, I'm not aware of anyone who believes that these days took place, say, several million years ago. The scientific evidence, what we can learn about nature from observation, is part of God's revelation, according to Psalm 19, Romans 1, and Colossians 2. Although there have been questions about the evidence, the vast majority of scientists believe that the earth is much older than thousands of years.

The second view may be correct, but it is not possible to merely say that the days were long consecutive periods of time, and that making them so yields a scheme consistent with paleontological evidence. Birds appear before reptiles, in the Genesis account, and most paleontologists are convinced that birds descended from reptiles. Water animals, apparently including seals and whales and their relatives, appear before land animals, in Genesis 1. They are believed to have descended from land animals.

As to the third and fourth options, there is little scriptural evidence for them. One of them may be correct, and they both have some appeal.

I received a comment on the previous post, indicating that the commenter, a serious theologian, intends to post more about Genesis 2:5. He hasn't yet, but I await his contribution with interest.

Thanks for reading.

Question on the meaning of Genesis 2, especially on the meaning of "day"

This is the first part of Genesis 2 (ESV) (I'm reading the ESV through this year, I hope, using one of their plans to do so):
2:1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2 And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. 3 So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.

The Creation of Man and Woman

4 These are the generations
of the heavens and the earth when they were created,
in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.

5 When no bush of the field [1] was yet in the land [2] and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, 6 and a mist [3] was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground— 7 then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.

Footnotes

[1] 2:5 Or open country
[2] 2:5 Or earth; also verse 6
[3] 2:6 Or spring


It struck me, as it never had before, that there is a puzzle here. Genesis 2 apparently says that humans were created before plants were. Genesis 1, taken literally, says that plants were created on the third day, and humans on the sixth. I am not a Hebrew scholar, but the translation above, also the NIV and the NASB, seem to say that there were no plants growing until Adam was created. Here's the ASV, which is public domain:

Gen 2:5

And no plant of the field was yet in the earth, and no herb of the field had yet sprung up; for Jehovah God had not caused it to rain upon the earth: and there was not a man to till the ground;

So what's going on? Well, it seems to me that Genesis 2:5 is scriptural evidence that the days of creation of Genesis 1 are not meant to be taken literally. (Exodus 20:11 seems to be evidence that they were.)

I knew that Meredith G. Kline, who was a Bible scholar, had written about Genesis 2:5 as evidence for non-literal days, and that knowledgeable Christian blogger Jeremy Pierce had written about this subject also, and that neither had argued that correctly interpreting Genesis demands that the days of Genesis 1 were literal, but reading this passage in the ESV reminded me forcefully of this matter.

Any comments?

* * * * *

Note added Jan 24: There have been enough comments that I plan to post again on this subject. Also, I entered it in this week's Christian Carnival, so it may get a few more readers, who may also deserve some sort of response.