Discerning Truth: How to Interpret Genesis 1.

Hi folks, welcome to Discerning Truth. I'm Jason Lyle, the founder of the Biblical Science Institute. Now previously we looked at how Genesis is foundational to all major Christian doctrines. That is, if Genesis is not literal history, then none of those doctrines can be justified.

They don't make any sense. That's not to say that you can't be a Christian if you don't believe in Genesis, but it is to say that the Christian way of thinking, Christian doctrines like the Gospel, marriage, and so on, make no sense apart from the literal history recorded in the book of Genesis.

We also covered the difference between exegesis and eisegesis. Exegesis, reading out of the text what the author has placed in there for us to understand, getting to the author's intention as best we can, whereas eisegesis is reading into the text.

Basically you're saying, here's what I want God to mean. It's a temptation for all of us to do eisegesis, but we've found that it doesn't make sense. If you're going to do eisegesis, you might as well throw the book away and just say, here's my opinion on the issue, because the book is utterly irrelevant if you're going to do eisegesis.

We need to do exegesis. So what I wanted to do today is explore the arguments made by Christians who think they're doing exegesis. They say, I do believe in Genesis, I just don't interpret it the way you do.

I believe the author meant something other than God actually creating in six days. Generally there are three positions, well you can cut the cake different ways, but I'm going to cut it into three slices.

There are those who claim that Genesis is not literal history, that the author of Genesis never intended for us to take it as literal events that happened in time. Then there are those who claim that Genesis is history, but the words don't mean quite what they say, the details are not quite what we would expect taking Genesis at face value.

And then third, there are those who claim that Genesis is history, and the words do mean what they say, except for the time scale. There are those who would say that God didn't really create in six literal days, but all the other details are basically how you would read them.

So let's start with that first position, the idea that Genesis is not meant to be taken as literal history but something else, the idea that the author never intended for us to come away thinking that God actually made things in six days, that he spoke the universe into existence and so on.

And we can sort of divide this into four subcategories. There are those who claim that Genesis is not literal history because it's poetic. There are those who claim it's a polemic. There are those who claim it's a parable.

And there are those who claim that it's a picture. And so I hope you like that alliteration, I worked real hard on that. So let's start with the poetic, those who think that Genesis is non-literal because it's a poem.

And then we'll talk about the polemic view, the idea that Genesis is an argument against pagan myths but not meant to be taken as literal history. And then we'll deal with the parable view, the idea that Genesis is teaching us something spiritual but is not meant to be historically accurate.

And then those who take it, Genesis as a picture, as a sort of a literary framework designed to teach God's purpose in creation but without giving us actual details on how God historically did create.

Genesis Is Not Poetry

So let's start with that first one, the idea that Genesis is poetic, that it's poetry. And of course the Bible does contain poetic literature and so we need to take this claim seriously. There are those who would strawman the creationist position and say, well creationists, they take the Bible, all of it literally.

That's not true. There are sections that are poetic and we take them poetically. They're still true but they're non-literal. And sections like the Psalms, for example, or the Proverbs, when the Bible says there's no rock like our God, it doesn't mean that God is literally a rock.

He's not basalt or granite or whatever. Is Genesis poetic in nature? What do you think? Let's take a look at some passages in Genesis. Look at Genesis 5, for example. Beginning in verse, let's say verse 5, Genesis 5, 5.

So all the days that Adam lived were 930 years and he died. Seth lived 105 years and became the father of Enosh. Then Seth lived 807 years after he became the father of Enosh and he had other sons and daughters.

So all the days of Seth were 912 years and he died. Enosh lived 90 years and so and so lived and so and so lived and they died and so on. Worst poem ever, right? It's not written in a poetic style, not at all.

And it's even more obvious when you know something about the Hebrew language. Now, poetry in English, we tend to focus more on rhyme and meter. That's how we recognize poetry. Not always. A poem doesn't have to rhyme to be a poem, but often they do.

If I read a poem to you and every line or every other line rhymed, the last word rhymed, you'd say, yeah, that's poetic. We get that. Fortunately, in Hebrew, it's not that way. In Hebrew, poetry is not characterized by rhyme and meter, but rather it is characterized by parallelism.

Parallelism is when you say something and then you say that kind of the same thing using different words or the flip side using different words. And it's beautiful. And I think it's wonderful that God used the Hebrew language to record the Old Testament, most of it anyway.

There's some sections in Daniel that are Aramaic, but I think that's wonderful because you see, if he had used a language like English, where poetry is based on rhyme and meter, it wouldn't translate.

The beauty of the poetry would be lost in translation to other languages. But in Hebrew, God uses parallelism to record poetry, and that does come across. It does translate. And so let me give you an example here.

Psalm 19 .1, the heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaim the work of his hands. That's a supreme example of parallelism because it kind of says the same thing using different words. And you can see the parallel between the two passages.

Sky goes with heavens and declare and proclaim. They kind of mean the same thing. And so that's an example of synonymous parallelism. In that particular verse, there are two sayings and they go together using words that are synonyms or phrases that are synonyms.

That's synonymous parallelism. The other type is antithetical parallelism. And you find that in Proverbs 1 .7. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction.

So you get on the one hand, the positive aspect, if you're going to have knowledge, start with God, submit to him. On the other hand, fools, they don't care about knowledge. They reject it. And so you get an idea and its flip side.

That's antithetical parallelism. You'll find both throughout the scriptures, but particularly in passages like Psalms and Proverbs. And that's how you recognize these sections of the Bible as poetic in nature.

Now, the key to interpreting poetic sections is to see what the two parts or more, sometimes you'll have more than just the two, to see what those have in common. What is it trying to convey by seeing how the two parts go together?

So the heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of his hands. So heavens and skies, the celestial realm. Okay, we get that. The heavens declare, declare, the skies proclaim the work of his hands, declare, proclaim.

They're saying something about God. We're getting information about God from the celestial realm. And then his glory, the work of his hands, the work of his hands. This is one of the aspects of God's glory is what he does, how he's created in nature.

So we understand what that psalm means, that when we look into the celestial realm, we recognize it as the handiwork of God, it is glorious, we learn something about God, there's revelation there. Now, often these poetic sections form a couplet, like you have in Psalm 19 .1, but sometimes there are three parts.

For example, in Psalm 1 .1. Let's have a look at that. How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the path of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers. And so that's a, you have three things that are said there, and they're parallel to each other.

And you can look for the specific words that that are synonyms, basically, or at least go together, they don't have to be synonyms, but they go together. So for example, the posture of this man, first walk, he does not walk.

And then the second, he does not stand. And then the third, he does not sit. And then you have the counsel, the path and the seat, which would be the, which would be appropriate to each of those forms of posture.

And then you have the wicked, sinners and scoffers. Well, those are the same things, right? I'm just using three different words to explain the same thing. So we get the point of it. The man is blessed if he doesn't go along with, if he's not collaborating with the wicked, with sinners.

We get that, we understand it. And there are lots of different forms of parallelism that you'll find in scripture. We've already seen the A and B, and we've seen here A, B, C, where they all kind of go together.

Sometimes you'll have A, B, C, A, B, C. Sometimes you'll have A, B, C, C, B, A, or A, B, B, A. There's lots of different forms of it. There's one example would be graded numerical parallelism. I like this one because it appeals to me as a mathematician, but this is where the number goes up by one.

You'll have a phrase that has a number in it. And then the next phrase, the number goes up by one. And one example of this would be Proverbs 6, 16. There are six things which the Lord hates. Yes, seven, which are an abomination to him.

And it kind of sounds weird in English. You're like, well, which is it God? Is it six or seven? Well, seven includes six, right? If God hates seven things, then he necessarily hates six things and one more.

And so it seems a little awkward in English, but it's great Hebrew poetry. Number of examples of that in the scriptures. Hosea chapter six, verse two, he will revive us after two days. He will raise us up on the third day that we may live before him.

So again, you have the two days and then the third day. Yeah, that's graded numerical parallelism. And we'd expect that because Hosea is a prophetic book. Prophetic books tend to have that parallelism in there, both synonymous and antithetical.

Now, once you identify a passage of scripture by recognizing parallelism in its many forms, you would then expect to find other literary devices that tend to be more common in poetic literature, perhaps than in historical narrative.

For example, you'll find figures of speech, non-literal ways of saying things. One of those would be metaphor. When you call something, something else, when the Bible says there's no rock like our God, it doesn't mean that God is literally a rock.

We understand that as a metaphor because there are certain properties that a rock has in common with God. Perhaps it's strength, it's stability and what have you. We have examples of this in scriptures.

First Samuel chapter 2 verse 2, there is no one holy like the Lord. Indeed, there is no one besides you, nor is there any rock like our God. Now, you'd have to be rather dense to think that that's saying that God is literally a rock.

He's not. We understand that. Another example, Deuteronomy chapter 32 verse 18, you neglected the rock who begot you and forgot the God who gave you birth. Again, you can see this synonymous parallelism there.

Rock goes with God. Begot you goes with your birth. Now, it's not literal. Nobody's saying that God literally gave birth to you in a physical sense anyway, but we understand the meaning of the passage.

Brought you forth, gave birth. God is responsible for your existence. He's the one that has enabled you to exist, to be born and to live and so on. We get that. We understand it. By the way, this also serves to illustrate another point.

Deuteronomy, the book of Deuteronomy is primarily historical narrative. It's mostly literal, but you can see that even in literal books, you can have sections of poetry. This is quoting someone and that someone is speaking in a poetic fashion.

You'll find the same in the book of Job. Job is often classified as poetic wisdom literature because it's recording the speeches of Job and his friends, and in the end, God himself. But these speeches are written in a poetic way.

So, it's kind of both. It's recording the literal history that happened, but the literal history that happened was people speaking in poetic fashion. Another figure of speech that you'll find typically in poetic passages, at least often, is synecdoche.

Synecdoche is the representation, the substitution of the part for the whole, or the whole for the part. And we use that in English too. We use it in figures of speech. You might say, you know, my friend Josh, boy, he's got a huge family.

He's got eight kids, and him and his wife, he really needs a raise because he's got 10 mouths to feed. Now, when we say that expression, mouths to feed, he's really not feeding mouths, he's feeding people.

We understand that. But the mouth is the part of the person that is most associated with eating food. And so, the mouth represents the entire person. That's an example of synecdoche. We'll see this in the scriptures too, again, in the poetic sections like Proverbs.

Proverbs chapter 6, we already looked at verse 16. There are six things which the Lord hates, which are an abomination to him. Verse 17, haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood.

Now, does anyone think for a moment that God's okay with you shedding innocent blood and you lying? He's just angry at your hands or your mouth for doing those things, your tongue for lying. We understand that.

The tongue, the lying tongue represents the person who is lying. The hands that shed innocent blood represent the person. It's the person who's doing these wicked things, who is haughty, who is lying, who is shedding innocent blood.

But God uses the particular body part that's most associated with that particular sin. Great example of synecdoche. So, these are the kinds of things that you'll find in poetic literature once you've identified the literature as poetic.

That's the first step. First, you need to identify the section as poetic by recognizing that parallelism. That's the key. Do we find this in Genesis chapter 1? Let's have a look. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep. And the spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Then God said, let there be light, and there was light.

And God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. And God called the light day. No, you'd be hard-pressed to find any kind of synonymous parallelism in there whatsoever.

It's certainly not something you would draw out of the passage naturally. Not at all. Genesis is just a statement of this happened, and that happened, and that happened, and so on. You do not find any of the markers of Hebrew poetry.

They're not there. There's no way Genesis is poetic. You cannot defend that position rationally. Now, some people have argued that the phrase evening and morning, because it's repeated. There was evening and morning, day one, the first day.

There was evening and morning, second day, third day, fourth day, fifth day, sixth day, and so on. Some people have said, well, that's like a refrain that you find in the Psalms. And there are sections of the Psalms where a particular phrase is repeated.

And for example, in Psalm 46, verse 7, the phrase there is repeated in verse 11. Verse 7, the Lord of hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our stronghold. Selah. Verse 11, the Lord of hosts is with us.

The God of Jacob is our stronghold. Selah. Now, of course, we need to remember that the Psalms, most of these, these were sung at one point. These are hymns, basically. And in a hymn, a lot of times there's a chorus where you will repeat a particular phrase.

That's what you're seeing here. And the Psalms, there are a number of examples of this in the Psalms where a particular verse is repeated exactly, just verbatim, because that's the way you would sing it.

Another example would be in Psalm chapter 56. In the second part of verse 4, we read, in God, I have put my trust. I shall not be afraid. What can man do to me? And then look down in verse 11, in God, I have put my trust.

I shall not be afraid. What can man do to me? Now, some people have suggested that that's what you're seeing in Genesis, that it's a chorus that's repeated, but that won't work. First of all, there's no synonymous parallelism in Genesis.

You don't find, at least in Genesis chapter 1, it's not there. And so you really can't argue that this is a Psalm. It's not a Psalm of praise. It's recording what happened. And the reason that evening and morning are repeated is because that's what happened.

Evening and mornings tend to repeat, you see. And it's not a refrain though, because the number changes. You don't have an exact replication. You have evening and morning, day one, evening and morning a second day, evening and morning a third day, and so on.

The number changes and therefore this is not a poetic refrain. Genesis is not poetry. There's no rational basis for taking it that way. Another way you can know that Genesis is not poetic in nature concerns the way it's written in Hebrew.

You might notice in English translations of Genesis chapter 1, for example, a lot of the verses begin with and. And God did this, and God did that, and so on, and so on. And when you have that in Hebrew, by the way, the word order is not always the same, but in Hebrew when you have and followed by a verb, which is what you find throughout most of Genesis 1 with the exception of the first two verses, it's and said God, and saw God, and so on.

The verb comes first in Hebrew normally. When you have that and you have a sequence of that, that's that's called a Vav consecutive, and this happened, and that happened. Each one of those is a Vav consecutive, and when you have a chain of Vav consecutives, that is always indicative of historical events that are being recorded.

There are no exceptions of a long chain of Vav consecutives in poetic literature. It doesn't have it. Poetic literature will have, I mean, it might have an occasional Vav consecutive, but there they tend to be more Vav disjunctives.

A Vav disjunctive is where you have and followed by a non-verb, such as a noun, and it indicates that it's a clarification or an explanation of what came before it. We'll come back to that a little bit later, but you don't find a lot of those in Genesis chapter 1.

You do find one in verse 2. It begins with and the earth, that's and followed by a non-verb, and so on. So, verse 2 is a Vav disjunctive, but the rest of Genesis 1 is Vav consecutive, and you don't find that in poetic passages.

You will not find anywhere in the Psalms a list, a sequence of Vav consecutives. So, that really is proof positive. Case closed, the Genesis is intended to be historical narrative. There's no doubt about that.

Genesis as Polemic, Parable, and Framework

What about those who claim that it's a polemic, that it's an argument against secular myths? That kind of makes sense, right? Because the Israelites were surrounded by all these pagan nations, and they had their own creation myths about how their gods came into existence, and how the rest of the world came into existence, and so on.

And the idea behind those who say that Genesis is a polemic, but not literal history, is that God then came up with his own myth to counter these pagan myths, so that the Israelites would have a version of their own.

A little bit like Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Tolkien, he was a Roman Catholic. He wasn't trying to rewrite history, but he wanted a fictional story that would be kind of like the myths of these other cultures, in terms of explaining how the world came to be that it is today.

And it's a wonderful story, and indeed a lot of the myths from these other cultures are wonderful. But here's the problem with that view. I do think that Genesis has polemic value, that it can be used as a reputation for pagan myths, because it's historically true.

But if it's not historically true, then how can you possibly use it to refute a myth? How can one myth refute another myth, right? If these pagans are saying, here's how we think the universe came into existence, and God says, well, I don't like that, so I'm going to make up my own fictional story about how the universe began, and I'll give that to my people.

It doesn't work. You cannot refute fiction with fiction. You can only refute fiction with facts. And so Genesis does work as a polemic, but only if it's real, literal history. There are those who say that Genesis is a parable.

And of course, we know that Jesus often spoke in parables, and we readily recognize them. There's the parable of the seeds, and there's the parable of the wheat and the tares, and so on. And I like those two in particular, because Jesus explains what they mean, so there's no doubt.

But in parable, in a parable, you use something that is in the physical world that we're all familiar with, and you relate that to a kingdom principle. Now, people are familiar with seeds, and particularly in the culture to which Jesus was speaking at the time, people understood planting and harvesting crops.

And so Jesus used those things, those physical things with which people were familiar, to explain principles of the kingdom, to explain how the gospel is spread, and how it depends on the soil, and how sometimes the gospel produces fruit, and sometimes it doesn't, and why.

The wheat and the tares, why God allows the wicked and the righteous to live together, and so on, until the end. We get that. We understand that. But that's not what you have in Genesis. In Genesis, you don't have something that we're familiar with physically.

You have a description of God creating the universe, speaking new things into existence. That is not something that we see in an everyday basis, and therefore, it can't be related to a kingdom, a spiritual principle.

Now, that's not to say there aren't spiritual principles in Genesis 1. I think there are, but it's not a parable. It's real history, and again, the Bob consecutives demonstrate that. There are those who claim that Genesis is simply a picture designed to teach us about God's purpose and creation, and that the days, God didn't really create in six days, but these are a literary framework.

The days are kind of a way of organizing the writer's thoughts, so that we are meant to understand that, yes, God is the creator. He had a purpose in what he made, but we're not supposed to take those details as literal history, sometimes called the framework hypothesis.

Meredith Klein has been promoting that view for many years, and a lot of folks who hold to this hypothesis have recognized that there's a loose parallel between the first three days of creation and the remaining three days, days one through three, days four through six.

There's a parallel there. Now, Genesis 1 verse 2 indicates that the world was, when it was first created, it was unformed and unfilled, or empty and void, depending on your translation, tohu vavohu in the Hebrew, and so it's empty, it's formless, and it's empty, and so the rest of creation is God then forming and filling that which was initially formless and unfilled.

It makes sense, and a lot of folks who hold to this literary framework would say that, yeah, we're not supposed to take those details as literal. It's just a way of explaining that God created. So, you know, on day one, he makes the heavens, and then on day four, he fills the heavens with stars.

On day two, we have oceans separated from maybe the atmosphere being created on day two, and on day five, we have the creation of fish and birds, those things to inhabit the oceans, those things to fly in the expanse of the heavens, and then on day three, you have the creation of the land, and on day six, you have the creation of land animals to inhabit the land.

It sounds pretty good, and by the way, I think there's something to the fact that those are connected. I think God literally created that way, and then he had a reason for doing it, but the framework hypothesis advocate would say that these are not to be understood as literal descriptions of what happened on literal days, but they serve as a literary mechanism.

The days organize the writer's thoughts so that he can get across the point that God really is the creator, and if that seems very strange and unnatural, difficult to understand, I think that's because it's strange and unnatural and difficult to understand.

I don't think it can be defended rationally. There is order in creation because God literally did form and fill heaven and earth the way he says he did in six days. There is some parallel between the first three days and the second three, but it's not perfect, and I think maybe God did that intentionally so that we couldn't just say, well, it's some kind of literary device.

For example, land is made on day three, but plants which inhabit, which are made to fill the land, they're not made on day six. They're also made on day three. Water existed on day one, but fish were made on day five, not on day four, and so again, the parallel, it's not perfect, and that's because there's a rational reason why God historically created in the order that he did.

More importantly, the text of Genesis uses long sequences of Vav consecutives. We've pointed that out. Every verse except the first two is, and this happened, and that happened. They're all Vav consecutives, and that indicates that Genesis is meant to be understood as literal history.

That is what the writer Moses intended. It's written in the same style as Exodus. Exodus has Vav consecutives, and it lacks the poetic parallelism of the Psalms, except for a few verses where they sing to God and so on, and obviously that can be poetic in nature, but it's literally recorded.

So it would be irrational to take Exodus as literal history while rejecting Genesis as literal history, since they are both written in the same style. They really are. I find the framework hypothesis difficult to explain because I don't think it makes internal sense.

How can you argue that something's a literary device when the writer is saying, no, here's what happened. This is what happened. If you'd like a more detailed refutation of it, Dr. Ken Gentry has written a wonderful resource called As It Is Written, and I'd highly encourage you to get that.

As It Is Written by Ken Gentry. Okay, so what about those folks who say, yes, Genesis is history, but the details are not meant to be taken as literal. The details are there to kind of give us the main point that God is the creator.

That's what they're for, but you're not supposed to go and say, yeah, God literally made animals on day six and birds on day five. See, they don't want to believe that because the secular scientists say that land animals evolved long before birds.

Birds are supposed to come later, but the Bible has birds being created on day five and land animals on day six, and so that can't really be the proper order and the sequence and so on. Those details are really just there to reinforce the main point that God is the creator, and that is historically true.

If that were the case, then Genesis could end at verse one. In the beginning, God created the earth, period, and then you can skip on to chapter 12 with Abraham, which almost all conservative scholars believe is real history.

So, no, but God gave those details for a reason, and they're not just to reinforce the main point that he created. In fact, it doesn't really make sense to say that fictional details could support a literal historical conclusion.

Let me give you an example. Suppose I said Seth is a really bad driver. He got four speeding tickets just in the last year, and in fact, he had three accidents last year, all of which were his fault. He's a terrible driver.

Okay, and you do a little research, you do your homework, and you find out, wait a minute, there's no evidence that he got, he hasn't ever got a speeding ticket, and not only was he not involved in any accidents last year, he's never been in an auto accident.

And suppose then I responded and said, well, yeah, I made up those details to re-emphasize the point that he is a really bad driver. That's the takeaway, he's a bad driver. But you see, if those details aren't true, then you really can't conclude that he's a bad driver.

The details are not irrelevant to the main point. The details establish the main point, but only if they are themselves literally true. So yes, God created the heaven and the earth, and that probably is the main point of Genesis chapter 1, but those details are not to be swept under the rug and to be considered non-literal.

They establish that first verse, they reaffirm it, but only because they too are literally true, they're literal history. Finally, we have those who would say that Genesis is literal history, I believe it, I'm a creationist, but you, Dr. Lyle, you're misunderstanding the time scale.

God didn't really create in six days just thousands of years ago. Now, I would argue that anyone who makes that claim is not really arguing exegetically. I would claim that whatever view you take, if it's not God creating in six days, it's really driven by something other than the text.

And some people will even admit that, yeah, just taken at face value, God created in six days, but they think it can't be that way because they think science has proved millions of years. Well, again, within this view, there are sort of three subcategories, ways that people would argue that they're reading the text exegetically, but it allows for millions of years.

Well, where are you going to put the millions of years? Well, there are those that put the millions of years before the beginning. That would be the first category, those who say that millions of years and then Genesis 1, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

And that view is pretty easy to refute because if the millions of years happened before the beginning, then the beginning wouldn't be the beginning. It would be the much later. And so that's not what we find in Genesis 1.

It's in the beginning that God created the heaven and the earth. And so you can't put millions of years before that. It wouldn't make any sense. There is the view sometimes called the gap theory, that there's enormous gap of time in between Genesis 1 and 2.

And the idea is that, yes, God created six days, but that happened after millions and millions of years. And we'll come back to that a little bit later. But that is a prominent view within the church.

I think it's been thoroughly refuted, but we'll come back to that. Finally, we have the day-age theory, which postulates that God did not create in six days, but rather he created in six ages. And so they would claim that the word day in Genesis 1 really means an enormous age, perhaps hundreds of millions of years for each of them.

So effectively, day-age advocates are arguing that the days of Genesis really have been mistranslated, that they should be translated ages or times or epochs. And translation, that's a real issue. It's a real concern.

Most of us don't read the Bible, can't read the Bible in the original Hebrew and Greek. And so we rely on English translations. And those translations, sometimes they make mistakes. I don't think there are major mistakes in them, but you can find differences when you look at different English translations and how they dealt with a particular passage.

Because there are some words, some phrases in Hebrew that don't have an exact parallel in English. And so different translators have to pick a different method to try and get the meaning across. They understand what it means, but how do you convey that in English?

And let's face it, human beings are the ones that translated the scriptures and human beings make mistakes. I know some people think that God supernaturally protected the translators so that they made no mistakes at all, but the translators themselves didn't believe that.

And I don't believe that myself. I can point to different errors in different major translations. Again, nothing enormous, nothing that would affect any major Christian doctrine. But my point is, it is reasonable to ask, has this word been properly translated?

And fortunately, I have a Hebrew Bible. I can go back and look at that. And of course, these days it's pretty easy with software. You can go back and check the meanings of the words and verify or refute the idea that they've been mistranslated.

But I do find it interesting that all the major English translations of the Bible, all of them translate the days in Genesis as days, evening and morning, one day, evening and morning, a second day, and so on.

Now, the Hebrew word that's translated day in Genesis and throughout the scriptures is yom. And the literal meaning of yom is day. And in fact, it's really similar to our English word for day, where it can mean either a rotation of earth, a 24-hour day, the period from one sunrise to the next or one sunset to the next.

Or it can refer to the light portion of a day, daylight. We use it the same way in English. It's remarkable that the word parallels those two meanings. But there are non-literal meanings of yom as well, and so we'll talk about those.

One of the non-literal meanings of yom, and it is used in scripture, is to indicate a period of time that's potentially longer than 24 hours. And frankly, even our English word day can mean a period of time longer than 24 hours in certain contexts.