.
● Gen 1:4b-5a . . and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night.
Defining the properties of day and night may seem like a superfluous detail, but comes in very handy for organizing the three days and nights related to Christ's crucifixion and resurrection per Matt 12:40.
● Gen 1:5b . . And there was evening and there was morning, a first Day.
When you think about it; a strict chronology of evening and morning doesn't define day, it defines overnight; viz: darkness. In order to obtain a full 24-hour day, you'd have to define creation's first Day as a day and a night rather than an evening and a morning.
Well; Genesis thus far defines Day as a time of light rather than a 24-hour amalgam of light and dark; plus, there was no Sun to cause evenings and mornings till creation's fourth Day so we have to come at this issue from another angle apart from physical properties.
According to Gen 1:24-31, God created humans and all land animals on the sixth Day; which has to include dinosaurs because on no other Day did God create beasts but the sixth.
However; the sciences of geology and paleontology, in combination with radiometric dating, strongly suggest that dinosaurs preceded humans by several million years. So then, in my estimation, the Days of creation should be taken to represent epochs rather than 24-hour events. That's not an unreasonable estimation; for example:
"These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that Jehovah God made earth and heaven." (Gen 2:4)
The Hebrew word for "day" in that verse is yowm (yome) which is the very same word for each of the six Days of God's creation labors. Since yowm in Gen 2:4 refers to a period of time obviously much longer than a 24-hour calendar day; it justifies suggesting that each of the six Days of creation were longer than 24 hours apiece too. In other words: yowm is ambiguous and not all that easy to interpret sometimes.
Anyway; this "day" thing has been a stone in the shoe for just about everybody who takes Genesis seriously. It's typically assumed that the Days of creation consisted of twenty-four hours apiece; so Bible students end up stumped when trying to figure out how to cope with the 4.5 billion-year age of the earth, and factor in the various eras, e.g. Triassic, Jurassic, Mesozoic, Cenozoic, Cretaceous, etc, plus the ice ages and the mass extinction events.
NOTE: Galileo believed that science and religion are allies rather than enemies-- two different languages telling the same story. He believed that science and religion compliment each other-- science answers questions that religion doesn't bother to answer, and religion answers questions that science cannot answer.
For example: theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking understood pretty well how the universe works; but could never scientifically explain why it exists. Well the only possible answer to the "why" is found in intelligent design; which is a religious explanation rather than scientific.
_
● Gen 1:4b-5a . . and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night.
Defining the properties of day and night may seem like a superfluous detail, but comes in very handy for organizing the three days and nights related to Christ's crucifixion and resurrection per Matt 12:40.
● Gen 1:5b . . And there was evening and there was morning, a first Day.
When you think about it; a strict chronology of evening and morning doesn't define day, it defines overnight; viz: darkness. In order to obtain a full 24-hour day, you'd have to define creation's first Day as a day and a night rather than an evening and a morning.
Well; Genesis thus far defines Day as a time of light rather than a 24-hour amalgam of light and dark; plus, there was no Sun to cause evenings and mornings till creation's fourth Day so we have to come at this issue from another angle apart from physical properties.
According to Gen 1:24-31, God created humans and all land animals on the sixth Day; which has to include dinosaurs because on no other Day did God create beasts but the sixth.
However; the sciences of geology and paleontology, in combination with radiometric dating, strongly suggest that dinosaurs preceded humans by several million years. So then, in my estimation, the Days of creation should be taken to represent epochs rather than 24-hour events. That's not an unreasonable estimation; for example:
"These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that Jehovah God made earth and heaven." (Gen 2:4)
The Hebrew word for "day" in that verse is yowm (yome) which is the very same word for each of the six Days of God's creation labors. Since yowm in Gen 2:4 refers to a period of time obviously much longer than a 24-hour calendar day; it justifies suggesting that each of the six Days of creation were longer than 24 hours apiece too. In other words: yowm is ambiguous and not all that easy to interpret sometimes.
Anyway; this "day" thing has been a stone in the shoe for just about everybody who takes Genesis seriously. It's typically assumed that the Days of creation consisted of twenty-four hours apiece; so Bible students end up stumped when trying to figure out how to cope with the 4.5 billion-year age of the earth, and factor in the various eras, e.g. Triassic, Jurassic, Mesozoic, Cenozoic, Cretaceous, etc, plus the ice ages and the mass extinction events.
NOTE: Galileo believed that science and religion are allies rather than enemies-- two different languages telling the same story. He believed that science and religion compliment each other-- science answers questions that religion doesn't bother to answer, and religion answers questions that science cannot answer.
For example: theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking understood pretty well how the universe works; but could never scientifically explain why it exists. Well the only possible answer to the "why" is found in intelligent design; which is a religious explanation rather than scientific.
_
