The Seven Days of Creation

Genesis is pure history. If you do not believe Genesis, they why should anyone else believe anything else in Scripture?

 

No, the opening chapters of Genesis are not a poetic wisdom hymns. Genesis 1-3 has no figures of speech. They are part of a historical narrative and their construction in Hebrew only allows for us to understand them as historical. Every place these chapters are referenced in other parts of the Bible, they are treated as literal history, not poetry. Hebrew poetry has a particular construction called parallelism that is not present in the opening chapters of Genesis.

 

So here is a primary reason for varying interpretation issues, disagreement on the genre of Genesis 1.

“Generally, the creation account is slotted into one of four categories: myth, science, history, or theology. The determination of the genre of any passage must always be founded on the text, and careful textual analysis of Genesis 1 reveals that it is problematic to assign this passage to any one of theses categories.
B.K. Waltke, “The Literary Genre of Genesis 1,” Crux 27 (Dec 1991):2-10​

Rob

 

I agree, and any real textual analysis of the text will show that it is history, that it reads like history. It contains theology, but it is not a theological treatise. It is not a myth as the rest of the Bible treats like real history and given that the whole Bible is inspired by God and inerrant, the only real conclusion a reasonable person can make is that it is a historical account. It is as historical as Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Leah/Rachel and Joseph.

 

My point was if you look at Genesis 1 as “pure history” you are missing much of what the opening chapter is communicating. It has NOTHING to do with if one “believes Genesis”.

• The language is highly stylized using uncommon words for common objects (example, two great lights).
• The chapter is chock full of figures of speech starting off in the first verse with “heaven and earth” (merism).
• Even the simple word, day is used in more than one way in the chapter if you look closely.
• If you miss the poetry of this opening chapter you are not understanding the word as the original listeners would have heard and understood it.

Lastly, If one were to look at the Bible as a single book, the first chapters of Genesis can be compared to the ending of Revelation, with both there is some difficulty determining what is figurative, symbolic or literal.

Rob

???Not sure why the letters are crossed out???

 

I am responding to your claim that it is a poetic wisdom hymn. But the textual structure doesn't support that claim. For my part, I am not claiming it is "pure history." I am saying that it a historical account of the origins of the universe and all that it contains. Yes, it speaks to theological truth. All of the major Christian doctrines find their origin either directly or indirectly in the first three chapters of Genesis. But it is, primarily a historical account.

 

I believe the approx 4000 yr genealogy of Jesus, is true, both of his legal but not biological father Joseph who back then was considered as son of Heli , Mary's father when they become one flesh in marriage and Joseph's genealogy begotten of his fathers listed fathers in Luke back to David then on back to Adam .. I believe Jesus believed them too ..

 

I was working from my IPad, I have no idea how it happened.

I’ve no problem with it being a history (that’s obvious), but it is so much more.

Rob

 

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It cannot be history AND a poetic wisdom hymn. Those are two completely different genres.

 

Why not? How would you describe Psalm 136? A song/hymn, poetry, a history, a theology

Rob

 

I don't see that saying that the sun is the greater light and the moon the other light is poetic in any sense of the word.

If a person does not believe Genesis, then others can say that Scripture is not perfect and one should believe the science of evolution/deep time and not Scripture, which is what millions of Americans are now saying.

This debate seems to have its beginning 200 years ago, although the idea may originate with Hinduism and then the ancient pagan Greeks.

 

I can't because the poetic structure isn't present in the text of Genesis 1-3. And the sequential structure of the text is indicative of a historical narrative.

Psalm 136 is clearly not a historical narrative. The structure of the text doesn't indicate a historical account. It is not at all like Genesis 1. It references historical events with a purpose to glorify God in those things, but that does not make it a historical account.

 

AiG has a cartoon suggesting that Young Earth Creationists Preachers sometimes preach for a long time...

 

Again:

It can be taken as a time-compressed description of the evolution that took place over millions of years, according to a presentation by 9Mark Dever and his mentor Roy Clements to the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union:

CICCU • Dever and Clements on Christians and Science (audio file)

38:30-39:55
CLEMENTS: "In fact if you think about it, Genesis chapter One does portray an evolutionary model. It would have been very easy for the ancient author, knowing nothing at all about evolution, to have simply said the whole of the universe suddenly sprang into being by a single divine fiat, with no progress, no development at all, but no, he spreads it out over seven days, and he says that material things emerged first: light, and the earth, and the heavens, and then plants before animals, and marine animals come before land animals, and the human race comes only at the very end.
In an astonishing way, he anticipates the general sort of evolutionary scheme, without any of the evolutionary details. So I don't have any great difficulty in accepting that if evolution was the way it happened, that God might have used such a mechanism for the production of the variety of species that we see, and I don't find any great difficulty harmonising that with Genesis One. But there are some Christians who feel that the seven days have to be taken with a greater degree of literalness than I feel is necessary, and they must look for another solution to the problem."

1:12:00-1:13:20
DEVER "The word Yom there in the Hebrew is used very similarly to the way we use the word Day, and it means many different things. I'm not sure I want to say exactly what Roy said on that, but I think, as a Christian who certainly believes in the truth of scripture there's nothing he's said that's inconsistent with that."
CLEMENTS: "If it were a twenty four hour day, I favour the view that it was a twenty four hours of revelation, maybe the prophet saw the vision over the space of seven days, but I don't think the prophet could possibly have been given an actual time scale to set against the things he was seeing happen. They had to have taken place in a time-collapsed way. He couldn't possibly have seen them, in my view, across the spectrum of the time the took, if they took millions of years, as science would say. He would have to have seen it in a time-collapsed way."
DEVER - "And I would say of course He could have done it in that way, and of course the prophet could have seen it that way, but the point is the word doesn't necessitate, the word Yom, doesn't necessitate you or me or Roy looking at it any one of those —"
CLEMENTS - "There are a whole host of ways of harmonising Genesis One with scientific accounts of origins. Some are seven-day Creationists, Young Earth view, I respect that view, but I don't hold it myself."