One thing that always struck me about the Genesis narrative is the peculiar way things are written. It always describes what God did during a particular time period then it says "And there was an evening and there was a morning." It's like there was a 24 hour day that was used to mark a boundary between the end of a period and the beggining of the next. So the Genesis narrative can be interpreted in a manner consistent with a creative "days" longer than 24 hours of unspecified duration.
Another thing that the "longer than 24hr" folks point to is what Paul says in the 3rd and 4th chapters of Hebrews where he says that the seventh day was still going on. That, along with what I mentioned about the wording of Genesis, gives some credence to the longer period hypothesis.
Did Genesis indicate literal creation days?
by M.J. 18 Replies latest watchtower bible
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Forscher
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IT Support
Aren't the Genesis accounts of creation metaphorical (whether or not they were intentionally written that way)?
I'd have thought that discussing the length of the creative 'days' would be about as useful as trying to decide the type of clouds Wordswoth had in mind as he wandered through his field of daffodils.
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Narkissos
One thing that always struck me about the Genesis narrative is the peculiar way things are written. It always describes what God did during a particular time period then it says "And there was an evening and there was a morning." It's like there was a 24 hour day that was used to mark a boundary between the end of a period and the beggining of the next. So the Genesis narrative can be interpreted in a manner consistent with a creative "days" longer than 24 hours of unspecified duration. It might sound like that when you have already decided that longer periods are meant. However, the complete formula is: "And there was evening and there was morning, the first/second/third etc. day". Do you suggest "evening and morning" imply a 24-h day but the word "day" which immediately follows means something else? Or that all the sentence refers to a 24-h day, but then where is the mention of another "period"? Btw, what would such a period be made of, if not "days"?
Notice the installment of the time pattern:
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.
Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.Day is day as opposed to night, which is exactly what the evening/morning pattern recalls with each passing night/day sequence.
The author of Hebrews (certainly not Paul, btw) is a platonist-like allegorist, very similar to Philo of Alexandria, who likes to draw timeless teachings out of the OT stories (cf. the treatment of Melchizedek in chapter 7). However, he never says that the day of Genesis 2:2-3, literally, is still going on. The "today" of salvation is "another day" than the later day of Joshua (Ièsous), 4:8. The author is not concerned about chronology but a timeless definition of "God's rest" -- the seventh day of Genesis, like Melchizedek or the tabernacle, being just a shadow of "eternal things". Reading this back into Genesis is hopeless -- just as believing that the Melchizedek of Genesis was really meant to be without a father and a mother.
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Dennis
No. Not the 24 hour day we are accustomed to. Our bodies are limited to rest and refreshment, so 24 hours is quite balanced for our day and because we associate our lives with a 24 hour period of time we almost always go with the flow of each day is 24 hours. Makes sense.
Our creator is not limited as we are to a 24 hour sequence of time and events to accomplish His purpose. The Creator may at will, may sit on a matter for as long as He likes.
And remember please, a day in the Hebrew text is not always a 24 hour set time frame.
It will help if we view matters from a different perspective. When studying thoughts and ideas from the Bible, think of matters as though you were in a heavenly postion looking towards the earth, rather than our dailly normal postion of looking from earth up into the heavens. It will open up a temendous amount of thought and will separate the common from the uncommon commentaires we get from others.
The answer is, keep doing the research. Answers will come.
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dorayakii
Well, Genesis 2:4 (NWT) says: "This is the history of the heavens and the earth in the time of their being created, in the day that Jehovah God made earth and heaven." So the 6-day period mentioned in Genesis 1 is itself reduced to one day. (Also, the view that Paul held in Hebrews 3 and 4, of the ongoing 7th rest day, may not have been the view that the writer of Genesis held.)
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Narkissos
Welcome Dorayakii,
Remember the verse divisions are not original. Actually Genesis 2:4b is better read as the start of the second creation story, which is completely different (man is created before the vegetation and animals) and does not refer to seven days. E.g. NRSV:
In the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up--for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground-- then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground the LORD God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil...
About Hebrews see my previous reply to Forscher. -
Leolaia
I understand the desire to stretch out the days, but there hardly is any justification for this from the text itself. There are "mornings" and "evenings", and to insert an unspecified span in between (as Forscher suggested) is simply to insert something that isn't there in the text. As Narkissos pointed out, the first creative act was not just creating light but temporally dividing light and darkness into "day" and "night" (v. 3-4), which establishes the temporal rhythm of the creative week. These are not just symbolic days covering whatever length or epoch you want to assign, but days with periods of light and darkness, mornings and evenings. That the mornings and evenings are not figurative is demonstrated by v. 14-19, regarding the creation of the sun and moon as luminaries to "govern the day" and "govern the night"; these are time periods that already existed prior to the creation of the sun and moon, but now these time periods will henceforth be governed by the sun and moon as they are today. This strongly indicates that 24-hour days are meant, as there is no indication to the contrary (and postulating epoch-long days would require that the plants created on the previous day would grow and reproduce in darkness for thousands of years, or whatever time period one wants to assign). Moreover, v. 18 refers to the sun and moon as again created "to govern the day and the night and to divide light from the darkness". This is same sort of division referred to in v. 4, which produced the first day. As to Dennis' suggestion that these are longer days because humans get tired and need rest every night, whereas God does not and thus could take as long as he wanted, this is hardly a reason for treating the days as necessarily longer; one could also take the point of view that it limits God's ability to need a much longer length of time to create the word than the indicated days. The sabbatical concept in this narrative, btw, is not of a nightly rest after each day's work, but a day of rest after six days of work. By providing the very template for human work, the concept is more of man following God's pattern, rather than God exceeding man's pattern.
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M.J.
Here's some info from a sermon I found online:
*The day-age theory--also called progressive creationism. This view says that God created the world directly and deliberately, but that He did it over long periods of time that correspond roughly to the geological ages. There are three variations of this view: (1) day-geological age, which assigns different geological eras to the creation days in Genesis 1; (2) modified intermittent day, in which each creative era is preceded by a 24-hour solar day; (3) overlapping day-age, with each creative era overlapping with each other (Evangelical Dictionary of Theology [Baker], p. 389).
Each variation says that God created the prototype and then allowed for some process of change over long periods of time under His providence. The advantages of this type of explanation are that it allows for scientific data which seem to support the antiquity of the earth. It seeks to take Genesis seriously, not in a mythological sense, as theistic evolution does. It challenges change between species while allowing for adaptation and variation within each species. The disadvantages of the view are: (1) A straight reading of Genesis seems to indicate that “day” means a 24-hour day; (2) it is difficult to harmonize the material in Genesis 1 with the findings of geological, biological, and other sciences; (3) it introduces death into the world (at least the death of animals) before the fall, whereas the Bible seems to make death the consequence of man’s fall into sin.
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zagor
"... and there came to be evening and there came to be morning a first day (second, etc)"
Jewish day started in evening and ended in evening of the next day. Hence, above rhetoric would indicate to me that day was quite literal