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.