In our oral telling of these stories to some Sakha people here in Siberia, we actually started with the creation story of the garden, Adam and Eve. We then moved on to the next story in the garden, when they disobeyed and ate the fruit of knowledge of good and evil. Later we went back to the creation song in Genesis 1, where “everything God made was good.” It was quite a surprise to our friends that everything was good, as the world we live in is not good at all. They found the second two stories easier to understand.

By the time we got round to the creation song about everything being good, they were ready to interact with this, as the other two stories had made sense to them. This is certainly what Genesis 1 is all about, contrasting the good and perfect Creator God from all the evil gods in the world around. (Not about when the universe was created.)

I appreciate the goal of exegesis being to reveal both original audience and original intent. Having had to do just this for a few years in graduate and post-graduate work in primarily Greek and a little Hebrew, it impresses me that exegeting words such as “day” should maybe be a little more simple than Walton is making it in his studies. It is simple to say that the Hebrew word “yohm” that is translated day in Genesis 1:4ff (that is, evening and morning as well as an accompanying numerical modifier) ALWAYS means 24 hours in a literal day. There really aren’t any exceptions to this in ancient Hebrew Texts. When “yohm” is used in other contexts to describe periods of time (i.e. the Psalms and prophetic books mentioning the “day of the Lord” as a future event or period in time), there exists context and reasons to translate the word with a non-literal 24-hour day in mind. Exegesis done. You wouldn’t run to, say, 2 Peter 3:8 where a thousand years is “as a day” to the Lord and a day a thousand years, for exegetical purposes, this would be exegetically unsound. Different audiences, different languages, different words altogether, etc. And, bman, I believe, exegetically, that God had Moses relate time to the reader as they were familiar with it by the time of Genesis’ writings. On the fourth day of creation, God created the sun, moon, and all the universe(s) and said “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years,” in Genesis 1:14, so I believe that God actually applied what he said about the keeping of time retroactively to the previous days of creation. It seems in keeping with the text.

I do understand your assertion that Moses would use terminology familiar to his audience to foster understanding of events in his writings, to get his points across, as Paul or Christ Himself would have. I am not saying that Moses did not use or appropriate language to describe the creation; what I am saying is that God was revealing truth, regardless of societal mores and norms of speech, and what exists in Scripture is an account of history, not an allegory or some malleable set of concepts wrapped in ANE speech and writings. God was telling the truth of what happened. (By the way, I actually do believe that in Job chapters 38-40, when God was speaking, that this was a literal occurrence and what he said concerning behemoth and leviathan was accurate and true. Even the fire-breathing part. So I don’t take that as simple imagery.) God, according to my understanding, limited as it is, set forth to give an explanation or account of the beginning of all things. This is not an apology deriding evolution or any other theory. It is a delineation of origins (the cosmos, time, animals, humans, sin, death, etc.), there is no great gesture by God via Moses to either exhaustively compose or define this in any more complicated language than He did. It is a succinct representation of God’s creative action. Contrarily, what the evolutionary theory and all of its complimentary “sciences” attempts to do is postulate an entirely different set of death-filled, random acts that hold no creative imperatives that would reveal God as a loving, competent or purposeful being.

I’ll try to wrap this up (I am long winded, I know (and I love parentheses)hehe), is that I do want to address the idea that Scripture is not the only means of revelation God uses to convey truth to people. I know this to be true. As I typed earlier, I overemphasized the word “only” by putting it in all caps, but the next adjective that comes before revelation (true) is just as important there. Yes both nature and conscience are means through which God can reveal Himself to mankind. Romans 1, Job 12:8, and many other Scriptures point out that people can observe nature and see the hand of a Creator at work. And conscience is mentioned as a way to keep oneself honest in the sight of God and man. Here is the thing though: both conscience and nature are ridiculously limited in their ability to reveal TRUTH about God on their own. In fact, neither of these can accurately reveal who God is or his plan for mankind apart from the guidance of the Scriptures. General revelation (i.e. nature) has no salvific ability. In Romans, it shows man that there is a God, but leaves the man unredeemed, unregenerate and ultimately condemned when apart from the Scripture and the work of Christ revealed therein. Observing nature can even lead one to such philosophies as animism, naturalism, and other “isms” that take the observers farther and farther away from God. Conscience is even worse, it can be defiled (Titus 1:15), weak (1 Corinthians 8:10), or even seered so that doing wrong seems right (1 Timothy 4:2). When either of these inferior revelatory apparatuses are used in conjunction with Scripture, then they can be deemed trustworthy, but left to themselves or aided by other things (even the “scientific method”) these are dangerous ways to “know” anything about God at best. Divorced from special revelation (through the Bible and Jesus Christ/the Holy Spirit) these become a blunt instrument, and I am reminded of the old axiom about the use of a tool in the wrong hands.

My point here is that starting outside of Scripture with (so-called) science is the ONLY way one gets to millions or billions of years as a basis for the model of Creation. Looking in the Bible, it seems implausible for Christians to extrapolate this time frame. This didn’t happen until the 19th Century, wonder what that means? (psst… has something to do with a dude named Darwin) A simple reliance on and reading of the Scriptures produces millennia, not more. When we analyze artifacts or evidence such as fossils, rocks or even the light from stars, we do it with presuppositions. Usually against the Bible. I see the stars, the fossils, the rocks the same way I do Adam at the end of Genesis 1 and in Genesis 2. I see them as being created with apparent age. That is to say, God did not creating seedlings, eggs, spermatozoa, and other building blocks of life, he created a set of biosystems able to reproduce themselves from the inception of each organism, plant, species, etc. If He created the sun and it lit upon the earth on the “DAY” that He created it, He didn’t sit around and wait the light-years it would take for a single ray to hit the earth, or wait for the warmth of the heat generated to travel here. It was here, He created it that way. Using methods of dating such as radiocarbon dating, cosmogenic or environmental isotopes, or other trusted methods of deriving age from supposed ancient artifacts is unsustainable at best, seeing as how some of these methods have been shown to date batteries from the 1970s to 60,000 years B.C.E. So be it stars, rocks, or whatever, at creation, apparent age ensued. That fits most readily with Scripture. There is not a thing wrong with asking questions that attempt to answer why God would create rocks that appear “billions” of years old, but to step away from the authority of the word of God to find the answer seems both counterintuitive and counterproductive, to me, at least. The reason people postulate huge amounts of time for all things to come into balance, is because they factor in chance and improbabilities and such variables that doesn’t exist in a perfectly planned, conceived, and created process like the one that is represented in the Bible when it says, God looked over everything and saw that it was Very Good.