Just another Genesis idea...

[kmr]

Out of pure speculation, it occurred to me that a popular OEC interpretation of the Bible is the use of "Day" as a period of time. Suddenly I thought that if "Day" may not be a literal day, then it may not even stand for a set amount of time, it may only represent important moments in history. Therefore, in Genesis if you disregard the "time" and "order" of the days and instead focus on each time it brings up a specific place, i.e. each time the bible talks about the heavens, you get:

HEAVENS: God creates time > God creates space (heavens) > God creates light (presumably electromagnetism and physical laws) > God creates stars (lights in expanse of sky) > God creates Sun > God creates Moon

EARTH: God creates earth (if the "formation of the earth" refers to the formation of its internal structures like the core and the mantle, then of course in the start the earth would be formless and void) > formation of continents and dry land (tectonic activity follows formation of earth)

*WATER: God creates living creatures teeming in the water > God creates the "great creatures" and all other water animals

*AIR: God creates birds (could also refer to insects maybe, or perhaps leaves this out and skips to birds)

*LAND: Plants (plants and fungi were first to come to land) > Animals > Humans
-----* After each of these, God creates the concept of the creatures first and then talks about different kinds.

If looked at this way, the first chapter of Genesis reads like a history textbook. Each "chapter" (day) isn't in order by time it occurred, but talks about important events in history. However, each time a specific place is brought up, it is in order by time. For example, Chapter 12 of a textbook may be France in the 1700s, and chapter 13 may be England in the 1400s, and chapter 15 may be China in the 1600s. But the next time we bring of France, say, in chapter 16, it will be later on in history like the 1800s. Same here, each day is an important but not necessarily time-organized historical event, but each time you bring up a certain place, it is the next in a series of events.

-Adding on to this ever-growing list of interpretations that are "possible"!

[RickD]

Out of pure speculation, it occurred to me that a popular OEC interpretation of the Bible is the use of "Day" as a period of time. Suddenly I thought that if "Day" may not be a literal day, then it may not even stand for a set amount of time, it may only represent important moments in history. Therefore, in Genesis if you disregard the "time" and "order" of the days and instead focus on each time it brings up a specific place, i.e. each time the bible talks about the heavens, you get:

I think you'd need to prove that yom has a meaning that fits your definition. I'm no Hebrew expert, but I did sleep at a Holiday Inn Express last night, and I don't recall yom having that as a possible meaning. If you want to take Genesis as non-literal, then maybe you could try to make a case. It just seems to me that a literal interpretation fits best.

[kmr]

I agree, but I'm just saying that this is a funny coincidence that the order of events per location "fit" with modern secular science. I don't actually even have much belief in this idea but I think it is a possibility.

[secretfire6]

Out of pure speculation, it occurred to me that a popular OEC interpretation of the Bible is the use of "Day" as a period of time. Suddenly I thought that if "Day" may not be a literal day, then it may not even stand for a set amount of time, it may only represent important moments in history. Therefore, in Genesis if you disregard the "time" and "order" of the days and instead focus on each time it brings up a specific place, i.e. each time the bible talks about the heavens, you get:

I think you'd need to prove that yom has a meaning that fits your definition. I'm no Hebrew expert, but I did sleep at a Holiday Inn Express last night, and I don't recall yom having that as a possible meaning. If you want to take Genesis as non-literal, then maybe you could try to make a case. It just seems to me that a literal interpretation fits best.

Hey guys, I have studied some ancient Hebrew and ancient Greek and kmr is correct that the hebrew word YOM that is loosley translated as 'day' in english, has an alternate meaning. Ancient western languages didnt have as many characters or words to describe things as modern ones do, so many times words have multiple meanings depending on context. This is what makes translating and study of the Bible so difficult.
YOM is better understood literally in english as daylight or daytime. A true Hebrew dictionary like Strong's has it as..literal: the light or warm hours. The hebrew 24 hour cycle starts at sunset, so begins with night and Yom starts at sunrise "...God called the light day(yom) but the darkness he called night" so Yom has NEVER been used for a 24 hour day as we know it. for example Yom Kippur is only a reference to the daytime of that 24 hour span. But this is only the literal translation of YOM

Strong's contains a list of the figurative translations for Yom. since I don't have it right in front of me i will paraphrase the list from memory. It contained: lifetime, reign of a king/kingdom, length of a career and others im sure I'm missing. Basically its any length of time with a beginning and an end in which something important took place. likewise the words for morning and evening are used for beginning and end. It's not too different from the way we use our words of day, dawn and eve. When an elderly man says "back in my day" he means the time of his youth or how the day of the dinosaurs is a reference to a very great span in time when the dinosaurs walked the earth or the day of king so-and-so means his whole reign. likewise the dawn of the space age and the eve of his career are references to a beginning and an end.

so remembering that in ancient Hebrew an evening (sunset) was the beginning of the new 24 hour cycle and a morning was the arrival of the light and warmth, when we read "there came to be evening and there came a morning, a first day" they were really understanding "there came to be beginning and there came the light, a first time span(age)" it's possible that Genesis was to be understood this way.

[PaulSacramento]

Yowm can mean:
1) day, time, year

a) day (as opposed to night)

b) day (24 hour period)


2) as a division of time

a) a working day, a day's journey

c) days, lifetime (pl.)

d) time, period (general)

e) year

f) temporal references

1) today

2) yesterday

3) tomorrow

[neo-x]

well, a day doesn't have to be 24 hour..look at the poles. 6 months day, 6 months night. but my own POV suggests a literal day and night doesn't make sense, as a matter of fact, if it were to be true, how come all these dinosaurs and pre-civilization humanoids keep turning up.

Not to mention that the original (earliest) codices also contained Hebrew that was hard to read and understand, I don't know but I hear some words could not even be identified. esp. Job and Genesis. BUT I COULD BE WRONG HERE.

[secretfire6]

My personal understanding of the usage of YOM in Genesis chapter one is that its meant to be figuratively as an expanse of time in which important events took place. In particular, when it seems to say that all of a certain type of animal were created on one day. I do not believe that, when the sun came up one morning, all those animals just popped into being. instead it is more likely saying that the blueprints or the ground work for all animals of that kind were created in this certain time span and the specific creatures would physically come to be in their appointed time throughout history. case in point: day 6 was creation of beasts of the land and everything that crawled on the ground, wild and DOMESTIC. The definition of a domesticated animal is one that has been trained to serve a specific purpose for man. man was made after the beasts of the land in the scripture, so aparently scripture isnt following a sequencial chronological order that we need to read 100% literally and exact. This is further proven by the fact that chapter 2 backtracks a little into chapter 1 describing things in the specific area of Eden prior to the creation of man.

[B. W.]

Yom also means an indefinite period of time that is defined from context as to its duration.

We also use the word to express how the Hebrew Yom is used as well, for example:

“In my Great-Great Grandfather’s day, people rode horses, used candles, and later brother fought against brother during the American Civil war.”

Here the word day refers to the time in which my Great-Great Grandfather generation lived, about 70 – 80 years during the 1800's.

Another illustration would be: In the day of the Cavemen stone tools were widely used.

How long was the stone age? Yet, in the sentence what is being implied: a 24 hour period or a rough estimate of a lot longer time period?
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[kmr]

B. W., this is kinda what I was getting at... if you say "in my great-great grandfather's day" then you could also say "in the day the animals were formed" or "the day water covered the earth"... each day isn't necessarily in order, but each event is, again like the history textbook metaphor; it skips around to different times and places, but each time it mentions a specific country, we are further along in that country's history or the progressive world history. At least, that's the idea.

[B. W.]

B. W., this is kinda what I was getting at... if you say "in my great-great grandfather's day" then you could also say "in the day the animals were formed" or "the day water covered the earth"... each day isn't necessarily in order, but each event is, again like the history textbook metaphor; it skips around to different times and places, but each time it mentions a specific country, we are further along in that country's history or the progressive world history. At least, that's the idea.

That would make sense as the word "Day" can be used that way. Such usage also supports OEC as well and one of the reasons I support Old Earth Creationism (OEC).

One day to the Lord is unlike a day for us in its duration.
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[secretfire6]

oh i see so we are saying that the appearance of life in the "days" of creation dont necessarily go in chronological order? like the fossil record so far shows that animals that walked on the ground showed up quite a while before any feathered bird, when Genesis has the birds arriving before the animals on land. So why bundle animals that can fly with all the animals that swim? the mechanics of flight are very similar to swimming........ or maybe it is just a general statement that all the blueprints and ideas for every animal that will fly were created in that time span even tho the first flying creatures were insects and birds like eagles and owls didnt come along until much later...after the land animals, because they are relatives to land animals. hmmmmmm I love this deep thinking stuff!

[B. W.]

oh i see so we are saying that the appearance of life in the "days" of creation dont necessarily go in chronological order? like the fossil record so far shows that animals that walked on the ground showed up quite a while before any feathered bird, when Genesis has the birds arriving before the animals on land. So why bundle animals that can fly with all the animals that swim? the mechanics of flight are very similar to swimming........ or maybe it is just a general statement that all the blueprints and ideas for every animal that will fly were created in that time span even tho the first flying creatures were insects and birds like eagles and owls didnt come along until much later...after the land animals, because they are relatives to land animals. hmmmmmm I love this deep thinking stuff!

My opinion is that these just list the beginnings and have no major detials and the days in chronological order but the events during each day is summed up with little detials. Also note that Hebrew words for sea creatures, birds, etc and etc have meanings that adds more insight into this as well too. try looking these up and see what you shall see!
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[Legatus]

You might want to look here http://www.godandscience.org/youngearth/genesis1.html and here http://http://www.godandscience.org/you ... gdays.html and here http://www.godandscience.org/youngearth ... fense.html and here http://www.godandscience.org/youngearth/longdays.html .

You found this indedpendantly because, well, thats what it says. You are correct that it accuratly describes what happened. You also need to understand that it is written to humans, and thus is specifically written from a point of view humans can understnad, specifically a bit above sea level during the times we have been on this earth. Thus a description of say the appearence of the moon, or of light, does not nessisarily mean that that was when the moon or light were actually created first, but only that that was when they ment something at sea level, since before that they were not visdible due to the thick cloud cover specifically mentioned in Job, and also Gnenesis, where it describes a time when there was no sea, since all the water was up in those clouds (a hot earths serface would just vaporize any rain that fell on it).

[neo-x]

You found this indedpendantly because, well, thats what it says. You are correct that it accuratly describes what happened. You also need to understand that it is written to humans, and thus is specifically written from a point of view humans can understnad, specifically a bit above sea level during the times we have been on this earth. Thus a description of say the appearence of the moon, or of light, does not nessisarily mean that that was when the moon or light were actually created first, but only that that was when they ment something at sea level, since before that they were not visdible due to the thick cloud cover specifically mentioned in Job, and also Gnenesis, where it describes a time when there was no sea, since all the water was up in those clouds (a hot earths serface would just vaporize any rain that fell on it).

You are applying the vapor canopy model but have you ever sat down to calculate it? While I agree that the early hot temperature of our planet must have vaporized a lot of liquid, it would nonetheless be in a balance and not in a global scale. If all water like you said "in all the seas" went up, that would literally make the world either scorching hot or icy cool, un-habitable for any living thing (by thermodynamics, exothermic and endothermic reactions). You really mean that all the sea water was in clouds, do you know what that means if you were to accurately evaluate such a state. The air pressure needed to sustain such a large body of water must not to mention the gravity and the fact that such a body of atmosphere would be almost 100% water. Is there any logical explanation as to why such an atmosphere which would weigh as almost as the amount of water it holds could not condense?

[Legatus]

You are applying the vapor canopy model but have you ever sat down to calculate it? While I agree that the early hot temperature of our planet must have vaporized a lot of liquid, it would nonetheless be in a balance and not in a global scale. If all water like you said "in all the seas" went up, that would literally make the world either scorching hot or icy cool, un-habitable for any living thing (by thermodynamics, exothermic and endothermic reactions). You really mean that all the sea water was in clouds, do you know what that means if you were to accurately evaluate such a state. The air pressure needed to sustain such a large body of water must not to mention the gravity and the fact that such a body of atmosphere would be almost 100% water. Is there any logical explanation as to why such an atmosphere which would weigh as almost as the amount of water it holds could not condense?

This is not a "vapor canopy model", this is a description given by science, Genesis, and Job of the earth before the seas existed as such, shortly after the planet formed and while it was still a hot mess. Yes, the planet was unlivable, the atmospheric pressure was very high, and it was pitch black at what is now sea level, but it didn't matter because there was no life yet anyway. This was some 4.5 billion years ago after all. Thus when God said "let there be light", he was talking from the point of view of sea level on earth, which is specifically mentioned just before that so that we would know. He was not talking about creating light in a completly dark universe, the entire Genesis passage was written to humans, and thus is entirely from the point of view of humans who live on the surface of this earth and generally live only a small ways above sea level.

The reason this atmosphere did not condense during this fairly breif time shortly after the formation of this planet is because, if it rained, the planet was still so hot that the rain immediatly evaporated. Result "Job 38:8 "Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb, Job 38:9 when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness,
Job 38:10 when I fixed limits for it and set its doors and bars in place, Job 38:11 when I said, 'This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt'?" This is clearly talking about a time just before there were any seas, " when it burst forth from the womb" states that therefore it must have just before that been unborn, ie no seas, they were all up in the air as those clouds, stated as a garment which wrapped around like one. Then the planet cooled, the rain could then fall and not evaporate, and so it did, result, seas. later, the planet cooled more and the crust buckled some, result, wrinkles, ie continents, dry land. It's all in genesis.