The morning and evenings are beginning and endings, like the sun rising or setting on an empire or an age. The Genesis creation account is a simplified poetic story told to man in a earlier age. The fact that each creative day is described as having a morning and an evening does not in itself require that they be literal days.
actually, it does. it's not "beginning" and "end," it's "evening" and "morning." or rather, "night and day." it's refering back to the first cycle of dark followed by light. which means a literal 24 hour day. jews today still regard the day as starting at sundown.
all other interpretation is apologist bs. it's not what the text says.
Remember many things in the Bible are told in signs that have larger meanings like the parables Jesus told.
but it's not a parable, is it? genesis 1:1-2:4 is one whole account. where's the moral? the hidden meaning? the metaphor? genesis as a whole is a collection of cultural mythology, specificially of origins. like our stories about washington cutting down a cherry tree, or throwing a coin across the delaware.
On the length of the creative days, each one had a morning and an evening, all but the seventh day. Each of the earlier days we are told ended, but not the seventh, the Bible indicates that it is still on going. At Genesis 2:3 the seventh day starts and is on going, being referred to in Hebrew chapter 4 as still going on. In fact the seventh day is believed to last at least until the end of Christ millennium reign, which would give it a minimum length of over 7,000 years.
i held a similar belief for a long time, only rejecting it recently. (except i was using a logarithmic scale...)
the seventh day is the sabbath. the story is essentially an etiology of why we're supposed to take saturdays off. god does no work during the sabbath. so if day seven goes from adam to now, then the verse about god resting is a lie. he clearly did a lot of work for moses.
seventh day is also not mentioned as having an evening (the first part) either. by your logic, that would actually mean that everything is squeezed into the end of day six, and we haven't reached day 7 yet, which would be after the end of the world. this was actually my particular reading for a long time.
however, that would make genesis 1 a sort of preface and overriding structure for the entire bible, and that's just not the case. the second chapter tells essentially the same story, in the same amount of space, and at the same level of detail. one is clearly not the expansion of the other, they are independent stories.
You may also want to consider that a literal 24 creative day would only work for the one narrow area of the globe that would happened to be in the right place for the dawn, all the other areas would be out of position anyway.
you're reading a modern earth view into the story. the earth in genesis, for all intents and purposes, is FLAT. it probably also doesn't extended very far beyond the middle east.
So when you look at it in detail, there is no way the morning and evening of each creative day could have been literal without raising illogical conundrums.
well, there's a couple possibilities, isn't there? just because one isn't right doesn't mean your's has to be. the hebrews at the time sismply did not have a concept of a rotating earth. they didn't know it was round. and if they did, i've already shown evidence in this thread that daytime and the sun are not connected in the text. if they knew the world was round, maybe they though that when they had daytime, so did the people on the otherside of the planet. (although i suspect the first case is more correct)
or, maybe the guy over at timecube.com is right.
Most important of all is clear scriptural evidence that the creative days are long periods of time rather than literal 24 hour long days. In the Bible, the term 'day' is used to refer to a period of time, it can refer to a literal day or it can refer to a much longer period of time or age.
now, here, you are committing the bible-dictionary translation fallacy. a day is a day is a day. the hebrew usage is actually very close to our english usage (i suspect strongly that english usage was affected by the bible). day can mean either sundown to sundown, or the period of time in which the sun is up.
when it's used otherwise, as a period of time, it's used in plural. the days of adam's life, for instance, means how long adam lived. here, day technically means year. but it's usage is different.
the THIRD usage, which you've brought up here, is "in the day." it doesn't mean any specific period of time at all. in modern english, it means "when." it's just a fanciful way of saying it.
quote:
Gen 2:4 These [are] the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens
in the 7000 years that the lord god made the earth? doesn't that conflict with your view, then? or when the lord god made everything?
quote:
Gen 2:17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
in the 7000 years that you thereof? or when you eat?
quote:
Gen 35:3 And let us arise, and go up to Bethel; and I will make there an altar unto God, who answered me in the day of my distress, and was with me in the way which I went.
in the 7000 years of my distress? or when i was distressed?
genesis 1 says "day" and "night," not "days," not "in the day." so when genesis 1 says "the light is called day" and "an evening and a morning: the first day" it means the same kind of day we have now, and NOT an era.