Page 17 - ADAM IN GENESIS

The words erev and voqer occur together in 44 verses. Six of those are for Creation Days
1-6. We will address why they do not occur for Creation Day 7 later. Of the remaining 38
verses, three are referring to non-literal evenings and mornings (Gen. 49:27; Ps. 30:5;
90:6). Here they simply refer to beginnings and ends. The majority of the verses discuss
various laws in the Books of Exodus through Deuteronomy. One thing to remember is
that Moses wrote Psalm 90 which uses the words in a non-literal sense in verse 6. While
the bulk of other Scriptural usage suggests starting with a literal interpretation, it is within
the semantic range of the words to imply simply a beginning and an end. It is my opinion
this non-literal interpretation makes more sense for the Creation Days than does the
literal sun-up and sun-down times of the day for a few reasons.
First it is extremely difficult to reconcile a belief in a literal evening and morning if one
believes the sun was not created until the fourth Creation Day. We know that morning
and evening is dictated by the earths rotation bringing a place into and out of sunlight
respectively. Without the sun, we cannot have a morning or an evening. While our
Hebrew audience would not have known how this process truly works, they most
certainly knew morning as when the sun comes up and evening as when the sun goes
down. The remainder of the reasons for taking this non-literally fall into the discussion of
the word yom (day) below.

At the end of verse 5 it appears that yom echad (day one) comes to a close. As mentioned
before, the word yom is much debated. Young Earth Creationists (YECs) insist the word
means a literal 24-hour day while Old Earth Creationists (OECs) believe the word refers
here to a longer indefinite period of time. Any Hebrew lexicon will tell us that the word
could mean either so we must look at the context. Most knowledgeable YECs will say
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that the word when used with ordinal numbers (1 , 2 nd , 3 , etc) always refers to a
24-hour day. Thats not entirely true and in verse 5, yom is used with the cardinal echad
anyway. Most biblical scholars treat the word yom as a long period of time with ordinal
numbers in Hosea 6:2. I agree, however that this usage is rare and at first glance a casual
reading in the English Bible lends to a 24-hour interpretation for yom. I also agree with
the YECs at organizations like Answers In Genesis who say that throughout the first 18
centuries of church history, most Christians believed in a 24-hour interpretation because
that is all they had experienced. The idea of longer periods of time was a foreign concept
to most people and it did not come about until the mid to late 1700s. I propose we need to
be extremely careful when using the arguments of simplest, casual reading and thats what
most of our Christian Fathers believed for 18 centuries for two very simple reasons.
First and foremost, God's Word is a deep inexhaustible treasure and simply reading it
casually is not sufficient to understand and grow thereby. I do tend to favor the simpler
literal interpretation, but only if it stands up under intensive study and does not contradict
other Scripture. If it does not hold up under scrutiny, there MUST be a better alternate
interpretation.
Second, it is well documented that most church fathers also believed the sun and other
heavenly bodies revolved around the earth for over 16 centuries based on passages like
Ps. 104:5 where it says the earth cannot be moved out of place. When scientific discovery
led to the opposite some Christians held their ground, but others yielded and came to the
conclusion that it was possibly their interpretation of the Bible that was flawed and not