Jiří Moskala
“God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.” Genesis 1:5.
The Creation days have been understood in different ways. Some interpret them as symbolic days; others as a poetic description or an evolutionary account of God’s creative activity; again others see it as a revelation of God and take the days as literal days. In order to determine which interpretation is correct, one must closely investigate the term yom (day) in the Creation account (Gen 1:1–2:4) because only the context can shed light on the issue.1
Genesis 1 as a genealogy – The immediate context of the Creation story suggests that it is a genealogy or history (Gen 2:4); it is not mythology, a prediction, a metaphor, a parable, poetry, or a hymn. A genealogy is a historic account with real meaning, e.g., water in the Creation story is water; vegetation is vegetation; animals are animals; and days are days. This observation is significant when one discovers that the literary structure of the whole book of Genesis is divided into ten genealogies (Gen 2:4; 5:1; 6:9; 10:1; 11:10; 11:27; 25:12; 25:19; 36:1; 37:2). If the genealogies of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph are literal, and these persons are historical, it suggests that the genealogy of the heavens and the earth should be interpreted in the same way. One must be consistent; either all genealogies are literal or none are.
The Creation days – The word “day” in the Creation week consistently occurs in the singular (in verse 14b, days have a different function). Furthermore, it is significant that the word “day” in Genesis 1 always appears as a plain noun without prepositions, suffixes, or other particles. On the other hand, a Creation day is always accompanied by a numeral, “the first day,” “the second day,” etc. When the Bible, in a historical account, uses the word day in combination with a numeral, it consistently refers to a regular day, e.g., “on the first day,” “on the second day,” etc. (Num 7:12-78; 29:1-35).
The unique phrase “and there was evening, and there was morning,” always precedes the particular Creation day (Gen 1:5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 31). This expression provides a temporal boundary that implies the existence of a day consisting of a 24-hour period.
Other scriptural texts interpret the seven Creation days in a literal way, as well. For example, the fourth commandment contains the phrase, “For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day” (Exod 20:11); and in Exodus 31:17 the Israelites were told to keep the Sabbath “for in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day he abstained from work and rested.” In both texts human beings are admonished to follow God’s example and rest on the seventh day.
Scholarly opinions – Gerhard von Rad stresses: “The seven days are unquestionably to be understood as actual days and a unique, unrepeatable lapse of time in the world.”2 T. E. Fretheim agrees and says, “Other possibilities for understanding day (symbolic; sequential but not consecutive; liturgical) are less likely. Efforts to understand day in terms of, say, evolutionary periods, betray too much of an interest in harmonization.”3 Gordon Wenham concurs: “There can be little doubt that here day has its basic sense of a 24-hour period.”4 And James Barr aptly states: “So far as I know there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writer(s) of Genesis 1-11 intended to convey to their readers the idea that creation took place in a series of six days which were the same as the days of 24 hours we now experience.”5
The days of Creation were seven literal consecutive days – The biblical teaching of a seven-day Creation week is a unique account that has no parallel in any extra-biblical creation stories in ancient Near Eastern literature. The teaching that the Creator God made everything in seven days is built into the very fabric of the Creation order. To remove it means a gross distortion of the doctrine of Creation.
There are several good reasons for taking the days of Creation as identical to our week as we know it. The fivefold evidence associated with the term day in Genesis 1 (singular in form, always connected with a numeral, standing as a plain noun without a preposition or any other kind of constructions, preceded by a temporal phrase, and tied to divine rest) points unequivocally to one conclusion: the author of the book of Genesis intended to say that the day of the Creation week is a regular day consisting of a twenty-four hour period and cannot be interpreted figuratively. It is the only time-cycle that is not derived from natural astronomic phenomena and must be understood as consisting of seven literal, historical, factual, consecutive, and contiguous days. Genesis 1 provides the only evidence we have for the origin of our seven-day week. The author’s purpose was to provide an account of what actually happened during the Creation week. The theology and history of the Creation account fit together; they are complementary and do not contradict each other.
“The rhythmic boundary phrase ‘and there was evening and there was morning’ provides a definition of the creation ‘day.’ The creation ‘day’ consists of ‘evening’ and ‘morning’ and is thus a literal ‘day.’ … It cannot be made to mean anything else” (G. F. Hasel, “The ‘Days’ of Creation in Genesis 1,” in J. T. Baldwin, ed., Creation, Catastrophe & Calvary [Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald, 2000], 60).
1 For a comprehensive discussion of these issues, see Gerhard F. Hasel, “The ‘Days’ of Creation in Genesis 1: Literal ‘Days’ or Figurative ‘Periods/Epochs’ of Time,” in Creation, Catastrophe and Calvary, ed. John Templeton Baldwin (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald, 2000), 40-68.
2 Gerhard von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary, trans. John Marks (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1972), 65.
3 Terence E. Fretheim, “Were the Days of Creation Twenty-Four Hours Long? YES,” in The Genesis Debate: Persistent Questions About Creation and the Flood, ed., Ronald Youngblood (Nashville, TN: Nelson, 1990), 12-34.
4 Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15, Word Bible Commentary, 52 vols. (Waco, TX: Word, 1987), 1:19.
5 James Barr, Personal letter to D. C. K. Watson, April 23, 1984, published in the Newsletter of the Creation Science Council of Ontario, 3/4 (1990-91).