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.
Isn’t there an Eastern hesychast tradition emphasizing the uncreated light of God? (Light of the World, etc.) Couldn’t a creative person link this into an interpretation of Genesis?
In Job 38:19, God asks Job, in essence, if he knows what the source of light is. This is a strong argument for the idea that light did indeed preceed the celestial bodies and the sun.
“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.”
All very interesting stuff.
Concerning the days, and the creation of the sun on the fourth day,
The text say’s God created light on the first day, and that He separated it from the darkness. How this was, and how we can exactly imagine this was done, we don’t know. But I don’t think it’s totally far off to speculate that there was an evening and a morning when in reality there was no sun – because, all that’s really needed for a day and a night (at least from the vantage point of the inspired author) is a significant source of light and darkness in relation to the earth; (and we know that light and darkness were already created on day one).
Genesis 1:5 also appears to support this when you have God calling the light He made “day” and the darkness He separated it from “night”.
I have heard attributed to Augustine another observation about the “evening” and the “morning”: That they had to be metaphorical rather than literal.
Why not literal? Because there is not a time at which it is morning, or a time at which it is evening. It is, in fact, certain to be evening at the same time as it is morning — at different locations on the earth. An Englishman noting that it is evening can deduce from that that it is morning in Alaska.
Just thinking about it … how interesting it must be to stand at the earth’s axis and watch as morning and evening collide in a cycle where the sun never actually rises or sets.