(BA) Genesis 1, day

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31 July 2022 *Navigate 'up' to the Genesis index: index-genesis.

And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day. (Genesis 1:5, Revised Version)

In Hebrew, as in English, the word day sometimes has meanings other than a literal, light-and-dark, twenty-four hour period. For example, "In my day, we had to walk to school uphill both ways." Some people take this as an opening to harmonize Genesis with science, by insisting that Genesis uses "day" to mean "long period of indeterminate length," thus making the 13.5 billion years of pre-human time in the scientific account of things equal to the six pre-human days of Genesis.

But this doesn't work because every mention of "days" in Genesis explicitly defines a day as containing a "evening and morning." And Genesis 1:5, this is made even more explicit. The days spoken of here refer to the alternation of night and dark that we know of as the day-night cycle. The writer of Genesis could hardly have been clearer about this is he were deliberately writing to exclude the possibility of 13.5 billion years of slow development.

Anyhow, even if you did make the days very long periods, you'd have to deal with plants being created before the sun, so you're not going to please science anyhow. And if you start insisting that the days "overlap" or "aren't sequential," then you're just stretching a pre-modern story all out of shape and forcing it into a modern mold.