Creation (part four)

Now we get to the question of what a difference a day makes. Genesis 1:3-5 describes the first day.

“And God said, let there by light: and there was light. God saw the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day” and the darkness he called “night”. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

Traditionally, the literal interpretation of a “day” is a 24-hour period. Bible scholars will tell you that when the Hebrew word for day (“yom”) is used with an ordinal number (first, second, etc.) it always means a 24-hour period. That aside for a moment, there are several reasons it could mean something else. The Hebrew definition of “day” has the same three possibilities that the English word has: a 24-hour period; the period of time the sun is visible; and an indeterminate amount of time (as in, “back in my day”).

Genesis 1:5, “and there was evening and there was morning, the first day” starts the day at the traditional Jewish time, at sunset, but does it end it at “morning”? The same pattern is followed for each day in the Biblical account. Neither does it make sense in any context for a “day” to be the period of time when it is dark out, i.e. from sunset to sunrise.

I propose one or both of two things is being described here. First, it is possible, perhaps even likely given the “evening and morning” issue, that a 24-hour period or “daylight” simply do not make sense. And second, it is also possible that everything here is Relative. One of my next posts will explore whether Einstein’s Theory of Relativity may come into play here. That is, with the speed at which matter shot out after Big Bang, depending on your point of view, the universe might simultaneously be days old and billions of years old.