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.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live." View all posts by Jimmy Akin