Genesis One

It occurred to me that folks who are latecomers to the Genesis 1 discussion might want to read the posts in chronological order rather than reverse-chronological order, since together they form basically a single article.

This’ll also be a more convenient format for folks who want to link to them.

So here they are. . . .

Interpreting Genesis One

Yesterday’s post about the Death Star Theory
(my name for it) raised a number of questions about the interpretation
of Genesis 1 and its famous six days. In a series of posts today, I’ll
give some thoughts on that. First, let me tell you what my conclusions
will be.

There are a truckload of different interpretations of Genesis 1 that
have been offered, and I can’t consider them all today. I can consider
more (like Gerald Schroeder’s relativistic interpretation) later on.
Here’s a list of the five interpretations I will consider today, ranked
in order from what I consider the most plausible to the least
plausible, along with notes on how plausible I think them to be:

1. The Framework Interpretation (most plausible from a careful reading of the text)
2. The Ordinary Day Interpretation (most plausible from a casual reading of the text)
3. The Gap Interpretation (almost completely without foundation)
4. The Revelatory Day Interpretation (virtually demonstrably false)
5. The Day-Age Interpretation (demonstrably false)

Please note in how I treat these interpretations that I am coming at
them here from a purely literary perspective. The question I’m asking
is: "Given what the text says, how likely is it that this is the correct interpretation of the text?"

I’m trying to arrive at the correct interpretation by considering the question of textual interpretation first,
not rushing to square the text with the findings of modern science. My
interest is in figuring out what the text most likely means taken on
its own terms, not trying to harmonize it with modern science.

In this discussion, I’ll only present one significant point of a
scientific nature, and it isn’t a point of modern science. It is
something that the ancients knew and commented on, making it fair to
include in a discussion of what the author of Genesis 1 meant by what
he wrote.

(I will also include an additional few notes based on modern
science, but these will be in parentheses as they are not part of my
main argument. My main concern is just what the text would be read to
mean on its own, without considering modern science.)

Having said that, let’s look at these interpretations, starting with the least plausible.

The Day-Age Interpretation

The Day-Age Interpretation of Genesis 1 holds that each of the six
days of creation represents a long, indefinite period of time rather
than a 24-hour day. Each day may represent millions or billions of
years, allowing the Genesis 1 chronology to be squared with the
findings of modern science.

In its favor, advocates of the Day-Age Interpretation can point to
the fact that, in Hebrew as in English, the word "day" can mean a
number of things. It can mean "the daylight hours of the day," "a
24-hour day," or "an undefined period of time."

Sentences like the following three are thus equally possible in both English and Hebrew:

• "He went out during the day, but he came home again at night."
• "We’re open 24 hours a day, seven days a week."
• "Many Christians were put to death in the Emperor Nero’s day."

Strictly focusing on the word "day" (Hebrew, yom, which rhymes with "foam") it is possible that the six days of creation could be read as six long periods of time.

Advocates of the interpretation can even point to the fact that Genesis 2:4 uses the word yom in precisely this sense, speaking of "the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens."

But there are problems.

First, the Genesis 2:4 reference seems to be part of a different
literary unit. We seem to have moved on from the recounting of the week
of creation to zoom in on the specific creation of Adam and Eve. This
means that the use of the word yom in 2:4 may not shed all that
much light on its use in chapter 1. Further, since Genesis 1 depicted
the creation of the heavens and the earth as a succession of six yoms (to stick an English plural ending on a Hebrew word; the Hebrew plural would be yomim, pronounced yo-meem) and since 2:4 depicts it as being created in a single yom, that’s at least prima facie evidence that yom is being used in different senses in these passages.

These are small matters, though. Now for some big ones.

The Day-Age Interpretation has a HUGE problem with the fact that the
day/night cycle is set up on Day One, while the sun isn’t created until
Day Four.

The ancients knew that the fact that the sun is shining is what
provides daylight and makes it day, and that the absence of the sun is
why the sky is dark at night. This is not something that you need
Charles Darwin or even Galileo Galilei to tell you. It’s pretty blog
obvious. We know the ancients understood it because some of them–like
Origen and Augustine–commented on the fact that the sun was created
after the day/night cycle and speculated on what this might mean for
the nature of these days.

To get around this problem, advocates of the Day-Age Interpretation
have tried proposing a number of theories, none of which are plausible
readings of the text in Genesis.

For example: There was a mist or cloud or barrier or atmospheric
condition of some kind that blocked clear vision of the sun until the
fourth age but which let daylight seep through in a diffuse way for the
first three ages. Well, that’s not suggested by anything in Genesis 1.
It’s pure speculation designed to prop up a theory that is otherwise in
trouble.

Or: The Day-Ages in Genesis 1 aren’t concurrent. They overlap with
each other, so the sun would have been visible from the earth’s surface
in earlier ages. (This variant also can get around the problem of how
birds and fish get created on Day Five even though land animals aren’t
created till Day Six. Modern science suggests that the order was fish
> land animals > birds, which doesn’t square with Genesis 1
unless the days overlap.) Again, this is not suggested by ANYTHING in
Genesis 1. It’s pure speculation designed to prop up a theory that is
otherwise in trouble.

But even if the sun-on-Day-Four problem could be solved, there’s
another LARGER problem which is completely insoluble as far as I’m
concerned.

It’s this: At the end of each day in Genesis 1 the text says a
variant on, "And there was evening and there was morning, a second day"
(the last bit of the phrase is what changes).

Evening and morning were the two cusps of the 24-hour day in Hebrew
time reckoning. The placement of evening first also represents Hebrew
time reckoning, since the Hebrew day began at sunset, so evening came
before morning. "There was evening and there was morning" is a kind of hendiadys
that expresses the whole of the Hebrew day. It’s like saying "day and
night" in English–a way of gesturing to the whole of a 24-hour day by
naming the two opposing parts of it.

That’s why the phrase is then followed by "one day, "a second day,"
"a third day," and so on. The evening and morning hendiadys emphasizes
the two parts of each of the six days of creation.

Now here’s the problem: The evening and morning hendiadys clearly
points us in the direction of a 24-hour day, and the Day-Age
Interpretation has an INSURMOUNTABLE problem in that this hendiadys
would NEVER have been used to describe a long, indistinct period of
time. Long periods of time (especially ones millions or billions of
years long) are not divisible in terms of a single evening and a single
morning–not by anything other than the interpreter’s fiat, at any
rate. This was NOT a part of ancient Hebrew time reckoning, and it
would have occurred to NOBODY in the ancient world.

And so I think the Day-Age Interpretation is demonstrably false. It
simply is not a credible reading of the text in literary terms.

The Revelatory Day Interpretation

The next interpretation of Genesis 1 that I’d like to consider is
the Revelatory Day Interpretation. According to this interpretation,
the six days of creation are not days through which the world was
created. Instead, they are six days through which the creation of the
world was revealed to man.

The idea is that God showed Moses (or somebody) a series of visions
at a rate of one per day in which he disclosed the mystery of creation.
Genesis 1 thus serves as a kind of diary of the visions.

This gets around–or potentially gets around–a number of problems.

The first and most obvious one is that it gets around the evening
and morning problem I mentioned in the previous post. The evening and
morning hendiadys has its usual meaning: It refers to a 24-hour day.

But it doesn’t get around the Fourth Day sun problem–at least
unless you want to say that the visions of the six days zoom around in
history rather than telling what God did in chronological order.

(Nor, for those wanting to square all this with modern science, does
it get around the land-animals-after-birds problem unless you adopt the
"zoom around" theory.)

But these are small matters.

The real problem with the Revelatory Day Interpretation is that
there is nothing in the text to suggest it. The text does not have the
usual language of biblical prophecy. We don’t have Moses writing "And
on the second day God showed me this and on the third day he showed me
that." The latter is the kind of language we find elsewhere in the
prophets, but it isn’t what we find in Genesis 1.

Worse, the very first day is taken up with the creation of the
day/night cycle. That seems to be a peg that roots the interpretation
of the six days as being days in which the world is created rather than
days in which the creation is revealed.

I mean, if you spend your first day setting up the day/night cycle
and then you say "and there was evening and there was morning, one day"
then you’ve strongly suggested that the "one day" was the one
you were just talking about–in which the day/night cycle was created.
If you then slap a parallel formula onto the end of each of the other
days then it suggests that they, too, were days in which these things
were created, not days in which they were revealed.

At a minimum, it would be EXTRAORDINARILY MISLEADING to the reader to do this.

So the most charitable thing I can say about the Revelatory Day
Interpretation is that it is an interesting stab at what the days mean,
but it is completely without support and on its face contrary to the
text, making it almost as demonstrably false as the Day-Age
Interpretation.

The Gap Interpretation

The Gap Interpretation of Genesis 1 holds that the timeline offered
to us in Genesis 1 is meant to be taken literally and sequentially but
that there are gaps in it.

One version of the theory holds that there is a gap between Genesis
1:1 and the creation of light in 1:3. As this is usually articulated,
God first created the world and then it fell into a state of disrepair
somehow (possibly by the fall of the angels) so that it became
"formless and void" and God then set about a cosmic renovation project,
which is what the six days record.

Advocates of this view appeal to certain words in the Hebrew of Genesis 1 that maybe could be translated in a way that would allow for this theory (but not require it) and to certain other passages in the Old Testament whose support for this theory is highly contestible.

These are just scraps though, not solid evidence for the theory.

The Gap Interpretation simply does not leap off the page as a
plausible interpretation when you read this text. I am not aware of
anyone in the ancient world who proposed it, and it has every
appearance of being a desperate expedient to square Genesis 1 with the
findings of modern science rather than a plausible interpretation of
the text in its own right.

(It’s also not clear how well it accomplishes its intended task,
since modern science does not view the current world order as having
been re-established/created in a period of six days following a
cataclysm of some kind. To try to deal with this problem, some have
suggested additional gaps between the six days, so that they represent
six individual days–scattered throughout billions of years–on which
God did things, but this also is in no way suggested by the text.)

We’ve also still got the Fourth Day sun problem. (And we may have
the land-animals-before-birds problem if you go for a gap of millions
of years between Day Five and Day Six.)

While one could postulate that there was a space of time before God
initiated the day/night cycle on Day One without doing unjust violence
to the text, positing that there was a prior creation that deteriorated
and that Genesis 1 is simply the story of how THIS PHASE of cosmic
history got started is NOT a plausible reading.

The reason is that it mistakes the primary function of the Genesis 1
narrative. It’s a creation story, not a re-creation story. If it were
meant to be the latter then the author would have needed to signal this
fact in some clearer way than he did. On its face, the commonsense
interpretation of the chapter is that Genesis 1 tells us the story of
how God established THE WORLD, not just this phase of the world’s
history.

So, again, the kindest thing I can say about this is that it is an
interesting stab at interpretation but that it is so speculative that
it is completely without support–or substantial support, at any rate.

The Ordinary Day Interpretation

The Ordinary Day Interpretation of Genesis 1 holds that the six days
of creation are six 24-hour days that followed each other consecutively
(not overlapping, with no gaps), so that God created the world and had
a day left over to rest in the space of an ordinary week.

This is the most plausible interpretation of the text if you give it a casual reading, which is why it has been the overwhelmingly
most popular interpretation throughout Church history (and before).
Most folks in history have read the text in a casual manner (or, at
least, a manner that didn’t give full weight to the points that I’ll
get into), and if you do that then this seems to be the obvious interpretation of the text.

I have a lot of respect for this interpretation–much more respect than I do for the others we’ve considered–because it does so much justice to the different aspects of Genesis 1.

I think that there is an interpretation that is even more plausible
if you give the text a careful reading, but I want to give the Ordinary
Day Interpretation its dues. It’s an interpretation that a reasonable
person can come to upon reading the text–as evidence by the fact that
so many reasonable people have done so throughout history. It’s more
plausible by leaps and bounds than the others we have considered. And I
would most definitely hold this view of the text if I didn’t think
there was a more plausible one.

But I think there is. The first big clue to that is the fact that
the day/night cycle is established on Day One but the sun isn’t created
until Day Four. As I mentioned, the ancients knew just as well as we do
that it’s the light of the sun that causes it to be day and the absence
of the sun that causes it to be night. Origen and Augustine even
commented on the fact that the creation of the sun is dislocated from
the creation of the day/night cycle.

Now: We know from other passages in Scripture that the biblical
authors didn’t always record things in chronological order, but
sometimes recorded them according to other criteria, and the
dislocation of the creation of the sun and the day/night cycle is a big clue that that’s what we’re looking at here.

It’s the author’s way of telegraphing to the audience the fact that
this is a non-chronological sequence and that we need to look more
deeply at the text to figure out what’s going on.

That leads to the final and–I think–most plausible interpretation of the text on strictly literary grounds.

The Framework Interpretation

The Framework Interpretation holds that the six days of creation are
not intended to be taken literally as a chronology of how God made the
world. That’s what they seem to be on the surface, but there are clues
in the text–such as the creation of the sun three days after the
day/night cycle has been established–that tell us that this is not
meant to be taken literally.

The Framework Interpretation holds that Genesis 1 tells us what God did without attempting to tell us in a literal fashion when God did it. Instead, the facts of creation have been fitted into the framework
of a single Hebrew week. (The week being a characteristic measure of
time among the Hebrews; prior ancient cultures didn’t have weeks.)

The Fourth Day sun problem that other interpretations have (and have
typically solved by introducing things the text does not mention, like
atmospheric conditions that clear up, allowing the sun to be seen, or
days that overlap each other chronologically) is of itself significant
evidence for the Framework Interpretation.

But the interpretation could be strengthened if we could sketch out
the specific way in which the events of creation have been fitted into
a framework–in other words, if we could point to the framework itself. It’s a fair question, after all: "If this isn’t organized chronologically, how is it organized?"

A careful reading of the text reveals this, and we can see not just that the author has arranged things out of chronological order in a way detectable to the ancients, we can see specifically how he has organized them. We know what his organizational criteria were.

For centuries it has been recognized that the six days of creation
are divided into two sets of three. In the first set, God divides one
thing from another: He divides the light and the darkness on Day One
(giving rise to day and night), he divides the waters above from the
waters below on Day Two (giving rise to the sky and the sea), and he
divides the waters below from each other (giving rise to the dry land)
on Day Three. Classically, this is known as the work of division or
distinction.

In the second three days, God goes back over the realms he produced
in the first three days by division and then populates or "adorns"
them. On Day Four he populates the day and the night with the sun,
moon, and stars. On Day Five he populates the sky and sea with the
birds and the fish. And on Day Six he populates the land (between the
divided waters) with the animals and man. Classically, this is known as
the work of adornment.

That this two-fold movement represents the ordering principle of
Genesis 1 also is reflected at the beginning and end of the narrative.
At the beginning we are told that "the earth was without form and void"
(Gen. 1:2). The work of distinction cures the "without form" problem,
and the work of adornment cures the "void" (empty) problem. Likewise,
at the end of the narrative we are told "the heavens and the earth were
finished [i.e., by distinction], and all the host of them [i.e., by
adornment]" (2:1).

People have recognized for centuries that these are the ordering
principles at work in Genesis 1. This is not something modern Bible
scholars came up with (e.g., see Aquinas, ST I:74:1).

I don’t fault anyone who has a different view of the text
(particularly the Ordinary Day Interpretation), but this one seems to
me to be the most plausible view if you give the text a careful reading.

The dislocation of the creation of the sun thus tells us that the
text is using a non-chronological ordering, and the recognition of the
two phases of creation (distinction and adornment) proceeding through
the same three spheres (day & night > sky & sea > dry
land) tells us what ordering system is being used.

And none of this is predicated on modern science. It was all there "in the beginning."