Adam was created on the 3rd day

‘ (b'yom -- "in the day") is a common hebrew idiom. it simply means "when." this is the one of only two usages where "day" does not refer to either a literal day, or daytime. the other usage is as "year" in genealogies.um, maybe i'll address the rest of your post later. but this is certainly a new one. yes there is. genesis 2:3.

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because god took the whole day off. shabat is different, special.

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i hate to make this sound like an ad hominem, but it's not an issue of being an expert in literature, it's knowing this particular piece of literature, the bible, with a reasonable degree of familiarity.it's not redundancy, it's standard biblical parallelism. in more poetic sections of the bible, (ie: psalms, and similar), this is often found in full lines that are nearly synonymous with the one before it. is that redundant? it's commonly thought that this was done for effect in biblical hebrew. in the less poetic passages (ie: genesis), a similar technique is used. look at the very next verse:

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And God created man in His own image,
in the image of God created He him;
male and female created He them.

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are the first two lines of that redundant? it's the same words. you've got a long way to go if you wanna remove this "redundancy" from the bible. expect a much thinner book when you're done.anyways, the real topic. they do in fact mean the same thing, in that they are synonyms. but like any other set of synonyms, they have different connotations and flavours. — (tselem) "image" (literal image: picture, appearance)
(demut) "image" (figurative image: character, personality)

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you can get a firefox plugin for that. but i find it's faster just to type them. most people have it the other way. i think both are a little, well, out there. they are simply two different (slightly contradictory) stories, with the same basic points, and different emphasis.but i'm trying to figure out a good argument to post in repsonse to the op.

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except jacob.oh, and moses.

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i am aware of other interpretations. they are all flawed, for a number of reasons.

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The term ym is always joined to a numeral. In Genesis 1:5 it is a cardinal and elsewhere in Genesis 1:1 - 2:3 it is always an ordinal. We will pay attention to this below.

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the "yom+number" convention are actually the names of the days of the week in hebrew.

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The term ym is consistently defined by a temporal phrase in the preceding sentence, "and there was evening and there was morning." This clause serves in a defining function for the word "day."

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the text is specifically setting up the markers for the passage of time. it defines the hebrew day as starting at sundown (evening THEN morning) because darkness came before light. it then describes the week as having 7 days, starting with sunday, and ending with saturday (shabat). the chapter is about the division of time more than anything else. the days have to literal because this chapter is the etiological reasoning behind the origin of the hebrew work week.

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The complementary creation account of Genesis 2:4-25 contains a non-literal, figurative meaning of the singular of the term ym, "day."

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it's an idiomatic usage, which i described in the post you are responding to.Edited by arachnophilia, : removed unnecessary quibble.

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genesis 1 and 2 are approximately the same length. genesis 2's order is causal -- one action causes the next. the order cannot be non-linear. non-linear storytelling would be anachronistic anyways. short summaries followed by lengthy elaborations are, indeed, somewhat common in the bible. but i think you'll find the longer examples are the work of multiple authors. ie: job 1/2 (and 42?), vs job 3-41. it functions as recursive text, but it is the result of two completely separate hands. genesis 1 and 2 do not even function this way -- we would have to read genesis 1 as a larger story, and genesis 2 as an expansion of day 6. chapter 1 then would not be a summary of chapter 2. again, texts of similar length, by different authors. it does not apply here. an example of this actually much more obvious than you think. it's genesis 1:1, and then genesis 1:2-2:4. the first verse says "in the beginning, god created the skies and the ground." and then the rest of the chapter tells how god created the skies (and all the objects in it) and the ground (and everything that lives on it).it does not apply to genesis 1 and genesis 2. both are complete stories in their own right, written in two slightly different styles. they are comparable works, by different authors.there have been some attempts to justify them against one another, so that they do not contradict, but this is rather pointless. it is distorting the meaning of one text with another. if you want a good rationalization for noncontradiction here, i could give one, but i promise it makes a lot more sense this way. especially in light of the rest of the bible and its compostion.

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joseph, this was garbage when you first argued it, and it's still garbage. it requires tiwsting the text incredibly far away from its plain and simple meaning, discounting an entire chapter in favor of misreading a single verse.please, take this claptrap to the appropriate thread.

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please take it to the appropriate thread.