Or, Why Genesis 1 means exactly what it says: Another response to comments by Sandy Grant

In October 2006 I responded to the position held by Sandy Grant as described in his article “Reading Genesis”, published in the October 2006 edition of Matthias Media’s The Briefing. This was followed by another post in August 2007 after Sandy took the opportunity to clarify his position, believing that I had misrepresented him[1]. I am quite aware that Sandy’s views are popular among Sydney Anglicans and The Briefing is widely promoted amongst Sydney Anglican churches. In fact during discussions I have had with informed Anglicans on this topic since October 2006, Grant’s article is often cited as an argument against a straight-forward reading of Genesis 1.

However while I believe I dealt with Sandy’s position (and objections) fairly in my previous posts, there were some additional points raised by Sandy in August 2007 that I will address now. In doing so I hope to demonstrate that a straight-forward reading of the early chapters of Genesis[2] is the most sensible and that the kinds of objections that Sandy raises come from an unnecessary compromised theology that cannot be sustained.

Objection 1. “The highly stylized literary structure of Genesis 1 [is] atypical of ordinary historical genre.”

Response:

To the contrary it reads very much like ordinary historical genre for several reasons, some of which are:

  1. Jesus quotes it as straight-forward history. For example in Matthew 19:4-6, when Jesus is explaining the foundation of marriage, he quotes from Gen 1:27 and Gen 2:24 as straight-forward history – “Haven’t you read…”
  2. Use of the waw consecutive imperfect verb (i.e. the English “and”), typical in Hebrew historical narrative. e.g. “and he did…”, “and he said…”, “and he went…”, which basically means that it reads like any other typical historical account in the Pentateuch.
  3. Equally, the lack of a clear delineation between the style of Gen 1 and the subsequent sections of the book, which read as typical historical accounts (see point 5 below for an expanded argument on this point).
  4. From CMI’s booklet 15 Reasons to Take Genesis as History[3]:

    The strongest structural parallel of Gen. 1 is Num. 7:10–84. Both are structured accounts, both contain the Hebrew word for day (yôm) with a numeric—indeed both are numbered sequences of days, and both have a series of waw consecutives. In Num. 7, each of the 12 tribes brought an offering on the different days:

    The one who brought his offering on the first day was Nahshon, son of Amminadab of the tribe of Judah. … On the second day Nethanel son of Zuar, the leader of Issachar, brought his offering. … On the third day, Eliab son of Helon, the leader of the people of Zebulun, brought his offering. … On the twelfth day Ahira son of Enan, the leader of the people of Naphtali, brought his offering. …

    In this structured narrative (Num. 7) with a sequence of numbered days, no one claims that it is merely a poetic framework for teaching something theological and that it is not history. No one doubts that the days in Num. 7 are ordinary days, so there simply is no grammatical basis for denying the same for the Gen. 1 days. That is, Gen. 1 is straightforward history.

  5. The RATE Project’s statistical language analysis on the genre of Genesis 1 demonstrating that it is most certainly to be understood as historical prose[4]; much like the structure used throughout all of Genesis and most of Exodus, Joshua, Judges, etc. The study included the survey and sampling of 97 Old Testament passages from all three major divisions in the Hebrew Bible that were previously identified as falling into one of two genres, historical narrative and poetry. Two of the methods used for data arrangement and analysis were a Scatter Plot and a Logistic Regression Curve. The result from the logistic regression curve is that Gen 1:1-2:3 is statistically classified as narrative with a probability of 0.9999 (see below).

 

[Image from Thousands... Not Billions by Dr. Don DeYoung, second printing November 2005, page 166. Used with permission from the publisher - Master Books, Green Forest, AR; copyright 2005]

[Image from Thousands... Not Billions by Dr. Don DeYoung, second printing November 2005, page 168. Used with permission from the publisher - Master Books, Green Forest, AR; copyright 2005]

Therefore I deny that Genesis 1 is atypical of ordinary historical genre.

Objection 2. “The example in Gen 2:4 where ‘day’ refers to a period other than 24 hours, even if the numbered days of Genesis 1 do not.”

Response:

  1. This syllogism is not particularly weighty. If the numbered days of Genesis 1 are ordinary days – which Sandy concedes here for the sake of argument – then it doesn’t really matter what the word day means in the context of Gen 2:4. I agree of course that “day” can have various meanings, but this is always dependent on context and does not permit an arbitrary meaning. For example, try importing the meaning of day from Gen 2:4 into passages such as Joshua 6:14 or Jonah 1:17 and you begin to see the absurdity of holding consistently to this kind of exegesis. This is what New Testament scholar Dr. Don Carson has called an “Unwarranted adoption of an expanded semantic field. The fallacy in this instance lies in the supposition that the meaning of the word in a specific context is much broader than the context itself allows and may bring with it the word’s entire semantic semantic range.”[5]
  2. Again from the 15 Reasons booklet,[3] consider this argument from the Numbers 7 passage, demonstrating the inconsistency in using Gen 2:4 to overthrow the plain meaning of day in Gen 1:

The parallel is even stronger when we note that Num. 7 not only has each day (yôm) numbered, but also opens and closes (vs 10 and 84 NASB) with ‘in the day that’ to refer collectively to all the ordinary days of the sequence. In spite of the use of ‘in the day that’, no one doubts that the numbered day sequence in Num. 7 is anything but ordinary-length days, because these days lack a preposition like ‘in’. This refutes the claim by some critics that ‘in the day that’ (beyôm) in Gen. 2:4, summarizing Creation Week, shows that the Gen. 1 days are not normal-length. This is a Hebrew idiom for ‘when’ (see NASB, NIV Gen. 2:4).

Therefore I deny that a comparison between Gen 2:4 and Gen 1 is an exegetically sound means to interpret the meaning of day in Gen 1.

Objection 3. “The perceived improbability of Man naming all the livestock and the birds of the air and every beast of the field in one part of one day, and this before God made the Woman as Man’s helper, on that day.”

Response:

The deciding factor in this argument depends on exactly how many animals Adam had to name. Sandy doesn’t suggest a number – a fairly important oversight given his argument – making the claim somewhat arbitrary. But just so we are all clear, it is not improbable for Adam to give names to an unknown number of animals in a given time frame. Like many evolutionary-based assessments of this problem though, I assume Sandy perceives the number to be somewhere is the vicinity of millions?  However, estimates of the numbers of the original biblical “kinds” – which has little to do with the arbitrary system of man-made taxonomy used today – have been made based on an understanding of speciation and a Genesis creation model, rather than the evolutionary one.

For the light readers, Andrew Kulikovsky has a brief one-page article – How could Adam have named all the animals in a single day? – demonstrating that Adam could have named all the animals mentioned in Gen 2:20 in under four hours.

Therefore I deny that it is improbable that Adam could have given names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and beasts of the field within the timeframe of an ordinary day.
Objection 4. “The difficulty of accounting for the existence of literal days before the creation of the sun and the moon on day four.”

Response:

In a debate on the John Ankerberg show a few years ago between Ham/Lisle and Ross/Kaiser, well-respected Old Testament scholar Walter Kaiser also struggled with this concept (I believe the term he applied to these non-solar days was “whatchamacallits”), so Grant is certainly in good company with his objection.

And that’s true, the sun and moon weren’t created until day four. Some people who are uncomfortable with the most straight-forward reading therefore insist that since evening and morning imply a sunrise and sunset - which in turn implies a physical sun to rise and to set - that days one two and three can’t be ordinary days because the text says there was no sun until the fourth day. And if days one to three aren’t ordinary days, then neither are the rest.

But God said there was light on day one! He doesn’t say what the light source was, just that there was one. Why does the sun have to be the light bearer for it to be considered a normal day? All you need is a light source and the rotation of the earth on its axis, “…and there was evening and there was morning, one day.”

It’s quite presumptuous to say that God must have in place a physical sun (or moon) for His light source before we can consider the terms evening and morning as meaning anything other than an ordinary day.

Therefore I deny any difficulty in accounting for the passing of a normal day without the presence of the sun and the moon.

Objection 5. “The hint from Gen 2:5 that God used at least some natural processes in his work of creation.”

Response:

Gen 2:5 (NIV): “and no shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth and no plant of the field had yet sprung up, for the LORD God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no man to work the ground,”

I’m not sure how this would preclude a straight-forward reading of six ordinary days of creation and would need further clarification to respond in any more detail. It seems as though the argument is that rain was required for the appearance of certain plants and because of this we’re not meant to take the days in Genesis 1 as ordinary days?

Apart from my previous arguments demonstrating the clear meaning of day in Genesis 1, and regardless of any “hint” of peripheral problems that might exist, I don’t want to waste time responding to a straw man.

Therefore as I do not have enough information to understand the relevance of the objection, I see no reason to think that the presence of natural processes in God’s creative works has any bearing on the most natural reading of Genesis 1.

Conclusion:

I do not for one moment pretend or wish to give the impression that these objections are an exhaustive list of the most troubling questions for the literal six-day view[6]; I am familiar with many others. But those were the ones raised and they certainly are representative of some of the most common objections to the view[7]. However I do not believe that any of them can be sustained and this only serves to further demonstrate the compromise and lack of depth in Sandy’s original article.

References and Notes:

  1. Copies of my original article and my response to Sandy’s claims are available at my old blog indefinitely. Should these links become broken, please email me for a copy.
  2. The focus of this article is predominantly on Genesis 1, however the various disagreements over the nature of the content in Genesis amongst evangelicals is typically from Genesis 1-11. It’s only once we arrive at Genesis 12 – the calling of Abram – that all evangelicals begin to see eye-to-eye.
  3. D. Batten and J. Sarfati, 15 Reasons to Take Genesis as History, (Creation Ministries International 2006), p. 7-8. The Hebrew characters have been excluded in the citation.
  4. Dr. Don DeYoung, Thousands… Not Billions (Master Books 2005) p. 157-170
  5. D.A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies, as cited by J. Sarfati in http://creation.com/expose-of-the-genesis-question#r10 [accessed 3 Feb 2010]
  6. I also want to make clear that the rejoinders I have offered to the suggested problems are not exhaustive either, but a post that is already over 1900 words long is difficult enough to digest without exhausting every conceivable angle on which to respond, especially when there are countless volumes devoted to Genesis 1 and the various views that are held about it.
  7. These kinds of objections are especially common among those who are barely able to demonstrate a cursory knowledge of popular YEC literature. In fact one of my critiques of Sandy’s original article was that he showed no evidence (either by the content of his article or by his footnotes) that he was familiar with such literature. In effect, he was knocking down straw men.

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