[QUOTE]Originally posted by blitz77:
many of them do not realize that if you take a look at the Hebrew used in Genesis, there is no way in which the Hebrew text of Genesis 1-11 can mean anything other than what it says, literally. Quote Professor Barr, who at the time was Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Oxford-
quote:
Probably, 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 Gen. 1-11 intended to convey to their readers the ideas that (a) creation took place in a series of six days which were the same as the days of 24 hours as we now experience (b) the figures contained in the Genesis genealogies provided by simple addition a chronology from the biginning of the world up to later stages in the biblical story (c) Noah's flood was understood to be world-wide and extinguished all human and animal life except for those in the ark. Or, to put it negatively, the apologetic arguments which suppose the "days" of creation to be long eras of time, the gigures of years not to be chronological, and the flood to be a merely local Mesopotamian flood, are not taken seriously by any such professors, as far as I know.
May we back it up for a second? With all respect to Prof. Barr, I'd like to disagree. While Hebrew scholars may rely upon the traditionally held interpretation of Gen 1-11 as described above, most scientists who have gone back to the Hebrew text feel quite differently. Is Barr actually saying that there are not three perfectly equal interpretations of "YOWM" ("day")? While it is true that this noun, attached to an ordinal (second, third, etc), refers to a 24-hour period elsewhere in the Bible, there are no other situations that would require the interpretation of YOWM as "era" or "epoch". It is a valid translation, though, and now that we have cosmological (forget the geology, we'll just continue to run in circles) evidence for the ~age of the universe, we know how to translate this passage correctly.
Further, the first six creation periods (YOWMs) were closed with the repeater "...there was evening, and there was morning..." The same can not be said of the seventh day. Further passages in Psalms validate that the age of rest (the seventh YOWM) continues through the present. We see this in the natural as the appearance of homo sapiens coincides with the end of macrospeciation as we know it. Yes, certain species will continue to adapt and subdivide on a micro-level, and may realize strains that do not cross-breed with previous strains. But extinctions rumble on unabated with no large-scale speciation balance.
The eventual point is that many Christians with even a basic respect for science understand that the evidence left behind by the Creator contradicts Prof. Barr's interpretation, and evolution is often all that is left. I used to feel the same. Fortunately, I discovered a considerable group of scientists that have taken the time to research the Hebrew as well as the cosmology of the thing.
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