I am sometimes annoyed by the fact that the Bible does not answer all my questions. To give just one (rather trivial) example, where did Cain and Seth get their wives (Genesis 4:17, 26)? Some people would say that they married their sisters. But incest is an abomination that defiles even the land it occurs on (Leviticus 18:9, 24-28), so that would seem to make God responsible for sin, since he commanded them to “Be fruitful and increase in number” (Genesis 1:28), but gave them no non-sinful way to do it.
Others suggest that Adam and Eve were not the only people in the world; that God had created others outside the garden. But although there are hints in Genesis that seem to point in that direction (Genesis 4:14-15), nowhere in the Bible is it actually stated that such people existed. And if they did, how should we interpret Adam’s choice to name his wife Eve “because she would become the mother of all the living?” (Genesis 3:20). Frustratingly, the actual Biblical answer is that there isn’t one. The Holy Spirit did not choose to reveal this detail.
In the New Testament, a similar situation arises with the question of who Jesus’ siblings were (Matthew 12:46-47, 13:55-56, Mark 3:31-32, Luke 8:19-20). Were they full brothers and sisters (the Protestant tradition)? Were they cousins (the Catholic tradition)? Were they half-siblings, the children of Joseph from a previous marriage (the eastern Orthodox tradition)? The original Greek text is less specific than our English translations, and all three are possible. The answer to this question, then, is not something the Holy Spirit thought was important to record, which suggests that the underlying question of whether or not Mary remained a virgin after Jesus was born, is also not important enough for believers to argue about.
Sometimes, the questions we ask are no the ones God thinks are important. Like any good author, God tells us what we need to know to follow the story, and leaves out details that don’t matter. If we focus too much of our attention on what the Bible doesn’t say, we can miss what it does say. And sometimes, even when the Scriptures do answer a question, we can miss that answer because it’s different from the kind of answer we were expecting. No one comes to the Bible without preconceptions. Every one of us reading or hearing the Scriptures lives in a culture, speaks a language and has a history. All of these factors, and many more, affect the way we understand what God’s word says. They are, ironically, what make it possible for us to understand the Bible (or anything else) at all. But sometimes those very preconceptions are what the Holy Spirit, working through the Scriptures, seeks to change. It takes a great deal of humility to set aside what we want to know and listen instead to what God wants to say.
With that in mind, I want to look closely at Genesis 1, and specifically at the word “day” (Hebrew yôm), which is used throughout this chapter. I’ve mentioned in previous articles that the full meaning of a word in one language does not necessarily fit neatly onto the words of a different language. That, for example, it takes several Greek words to cover everything that is meant by the English word “love.” In this case, however, the English word “day” and Hebrew yôm overlap pretty closely. Depending on context, both words can mean a twenty-four hour period, the period of daylight, an era, or a historical moment of unspecified length.
I’m sure that some of you reading this have heard that the word yôm, when used with a number as it is in Genesis 1, always means a twenty-four hour period. That statement is heard quite commonly, but it is not correct, as a few minutes work with any good concordance will easily show. In the account of the flood we read that, “rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights” (Genesis 7:12). It is that same word, yôm, that is used here, and it is used with a number, but what does it mean? Did it rain for forty twenty-four hour days, and also for forty nights? That’s silly. It obviously rained for forty periods of daylight and forty periods of darkness. The word yôm here, used with a number, means the period of daylight, not the full twenty-four hour day.
Now let’s go back to Genesis 1:
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that 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 (Genesis 1:3-5).
This is the very first place in Scripture that the word yôm is used, and what does it say? That God called the period of light yôm. The darkness was a different word – layil in Hebrew. The evening and morning follow God’s activities of that yôm and separate it from the next yôm. This is the pattern throughout the chapter. God works all day long, then stops and looks back on a job well done – he calls it “good,” and then there is a nighttime break (evening and morning) until he starts work again on the next day.
Is this surprising? It’s easy to overlook this understanding of yôm because it doesn’t make sense within our modern worldview. How can God only work in the daytime on a rotating planet, where it’s always day in one place and night in another? And yet, that is the picture of creation that Genesis is giving us: God works in the daytime and stops at night, just as an ancient Israelite worker would have done. In other words, God is presented here in human terms.
There are many, many other places in Scripture where God is also described in human terms. Just a few examples from the books of Moses include:
Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden (Genesis 3:8).
But you blew with your breath, and the sea covered them. They sank like lead in the mighty waters (Exodus 15:10).
Therefore, say to the Israelites: “I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. I will free you from being slaves to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment” (Exodus 6:6).
When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen (Exodus 33:22-23).
God walks. God has breath. God has an arm, and a hand, and a back, and a face. These are all examples of what Bible scholars call anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism is a type of metaphor that describes what is unknown – God – in terms of what is known – humans. Instead of delving into technical detail, it explains God’s actions in terms anyone can understand. And anthropomorphism is what Moses is giving us in the first chapter of Genesis1.
It actually makes a lot of sense that God would inspire Moses to write this way if we remember that Genesis 1 was not addressed to us in the modern world, but to the generation of Israelites that came out of Egypt. They had been living there as slaves, surrounded by Egyptian culture and Egyptian pagan religion, for generations. Then Moses appeared, claiming to represent the God their ancestors had followed. There were miracles, and suddenly the Israelites found themselves free and heading for the land that God had given to their ancestor Abraham. The most important issue that needed to be addressed in that situation was not, “how did the world come into existence?” It’s a pretty good bet that nobody was spending much time worrying about that. Rather, the burning question on nearly everyone’s mind would have been, “just who is this God that Moses is talking about?” And that question, who is God, is what Genesis 1 answers, using a metaphor that everybody could understand. God is the one who created the earth, the sun and moon, plants, animals, and all the other various things that the other nations worship as idols. Our modern question, “what is the origin and early history of the physical universe?” did not even come up in most people’s minds until about 3,000 years after Moses wrote this passage.
So what is the takeaway for us, today? Just this: if you’re arguing about how long God took to create the universe, you’re missing the point of Genesis 1 entirely. Contrary to what it might look like to 21st century readers, that’s not a subject that’s even addressed in this chapter. It only appears that way because of the preconceptions we get from our modern technological culture.
There is more going on in Genesis 1 than I’ve dealt with here; much more. I will likely address some of that in future articles. For right now, however, it’s enough to keep our focus on the first answer to the first question that the Bible addresses: who is God?
Genesis 1 tells us who God is, but not by using terms like “omnipotent” from Greek philosophy (which, obviously, did not yet exist at the time Moses wrote). Rather, God is explained using a story. The story of how he, himself, created all the other things that people worship. The story that not only tells us who God is, but also who we are in relation to him, and in relation to the other living things that surround us.
1. I first encountered this understanding of Genesis 1 in The Liturgy of Creation: Understanding Calendars in Old Testament Context by Michael LeFebvre.