Moses and God's Days

[Percivale]

It seems significant to me that in the one Psalm written by Moses, the traditional author of Genesis, he writes that a thousand years are like yesterday or like a watch in the night to God. Genesis one is the only passage where God is the only one acting, so it seems reasonable to me that Moses might have been using the word 'day' in that passage to refer to God's perspective: thousands of years passed, but that time was like a day to God. And science clearly confirms that reading of the passage.

 

[Willtor]

Interesting. I had not put 2 and 2 together on this (that Psalm 90 is the psalm of Moses). However, a literal reading of Genesis is still not reconciled with nature, even if the days are God's days. We still have the issue that things are created out of order.

 

[BobRyan]

Originally Posted by Percivale

It seems significant to me that in the one Psalm written by Moses, the traditional author of Genesis, he writes that a thousand years are like yesterday or like a watch in the night to God. Genesis one is the only passage where God is the only one acting, so it seems reasonable to me that Moses might have been using the word 'day' in that passage to refer to God's perspective: thousands of years passed, but that time was like a day to God. And science clearly confirms that reading of the passage.
​

The facts are pretty clear when it comes to the Bible.

No "confusion about days" between God and Moses

Ex 16
And Moses said to them, “This is the bread which the Lord has given you to eat. 16 This is the thing which the Lord has commanded: ‘Let every man gather it according to each one’s need, one omer for each person, according to the number of persons; let every man take for those who are in his tent.’”
17 Then the children of Israel did so and gathered, some more, some less. 18 So when they measured it by omers, he who gathered much had nothing left over, and he who gathered little had no lack. Every man had gathered according to each one’s need.



19 And Moses said, “Let no one leave any of it till morning.” 20 Notwithstanding they did not heed Moses. But some of them left part of it until morning, and it bred worms and stank. And Moses was angry with them. 21 So they gathered it every morning, every man according to his need. And when the sun became hot, it melted.
22 And so it was, on the sixth day, that they gathered twice as much bread, two omers for each one. And all the rulers of the congregation came and told Moses. 23 Then he said to them, “This is what the Lord has said: ‘Tomorrow is a Sabbath rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord. Bake what you will bake today, and boil what you will boil; and lay up for yourselves all that remains, to be kept until morning.’” 24 So they laid it up till morning, as Moses commanded; and it did not stink, nor were there any worms in it. 25 Then Moses said, “Eat that today, for today is a Sabbath to the Lord; today you will not find it in the field. 26 Six days you shall gather it, but on the seventh day, the Sabbath, there will be none.”

27 Now it happened that some of the people went out on the seventh day to gather, but they found none. 28 And the Lord said to Moses, “How long do you refuse to keep My commandments and My laws? 29 See! For the Lord has given you the Sabbath; therefore He gives you on the sixth day bread for two days


There was NO Guessing about what a day meant when GOD said it - and Moses reported it. No not even when God spoke directly to the people.


Ex 20:8-11

8 “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. 9Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 10but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates. 11For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it




=========================


The Bible cannot be "imagined away" in service to blind faith evolutionism.



Because when it comes to "details" such this - well they are very clear.

 

[Percivale]

Interesting. I had not put 2 and 2 together on this (that Psalm 90 is the psalm of Moses). However, a literal reading of Genesis is still not reconciled with nature, even if the days are God's days. We still have the issue that things are created out of order.

I'd say the chronology lines up pretty good with science. Only variations are fish and the atmosphere clearing up (stars appearing) came before trees. But a minor variation like that for an obvious stylistic reason (parallelism between first three and last three days and some topical grouping) is not enough to discount the strong parallels there are. The passage even says dinosaurs were created on day five, though our translations don't bring that out. Study the Hebrew word taniyn, mistranslated whale in the KJV, to see it.

Bobryan, your passage is about human activity, so naturally the days are normal ones. But there is no human activity in Genesis one.

 

[Papias]

Hi Percivale - nice to see you around again.

Percivale wrote:

I'd say the chronology lines up pretty good with science. Only variations are fish and the atmosphere clearing up (stars appearing) came before trees.

The order is often simply wrong, in place after place (and it's a pretty short chapter). The story has birds created before any life on land (when life on land existed ~400 million years before birds of any kind existed), land appears after the oceans existed (when in reality, there was land before any oceans existed, by again hundreds of millions of years), land plants are said to exist before aquatic life (again, the reverse is true), and the whole sun and stars doesn't exist until day 4, again off by at least 10,000 million years in addition to being out of order. There are plenty of other examples too.

But a minor variation like that for an obvious stylistic reason (parallelism between first three and last three days and some topical grouping) is not enough to discount the strong parallels there are.

As we saw above, this isn't some "minor variation" - the literal reading make little sense compared to the actual science (especially when we look at the hard dome/flat earth model Genesis 1 describes). I think you hit the nail on the head with "for obvious stylistic reasons (parallelism..). The whole thing is clearly stylistic -an artistic poem on the glory of God's creation, not meant to give scientific details like order.

Bobryan, your passage is about human activity, so naturally the days are normal ones. But there is no human activity in Genesis one.

Yep, I think you are right here as well as being right about the obvious stylistic reasons.

In Christ -

Papias

 

[Percivale]

Hi Percivale - nice to see you around again.

Percivale wrote:




The order is often simply wrong, in place after place (and it's a pretty short chapter). The story has birds created before any life on land (when life on land existed ~400 million years before birds of any kind existed), land appears after the oceans existed (when in reality, there was land before any oceans existed, by again hundreds of millions of years), land plants are said to exist before aquatic life (again, the reverse is true), and the whole sun and stars doesn't exist until day 4, again off by at least 10,000 million years in addition to being out of order. There are plenty of other examples too.



As we saw above, this isn't some "minor variation" - the literal reading make little sense compared to the actual science (especially when we look at the hard dome/flat earth model Genesis 1 describes). I think you hit the nail on the head with "for obvious stylistic reasons (parallelism..). The whole thing is clearly stylistic -an artistic poem on the glory of God's creation, not meant to give scientific details like order.



Yep, I think you are right here as well as being right about the obvious stylistic reasons.

In Christ -

Papias

There's different ways you can read the passage, but I read it as a narrative of what things looked like from the surface of the earth, focusing on the features of the natural world that the original audience knew about and wanted an explanation for. It is a poetic work of art, but that doesn't mean it has no narrative content; narrative poems are common, and don't have the precision of a scientific description yet describe actual events. Microbes, extinct creatures, deep sea creatures, etc. were not known to the original audience and thus were not mentioned.

The sort of land animals that were familiar to the israelites, like horses, lions, goats, foxes, etc. all first appear in the cenozoic. Major divisions of the bird kinds show up in the Cretaceous, large 'fearsome reptiles' (my translation of taniyn)* dominate the mesozoic, and recognizable fish appear around the same time in the paleozoic as trees do. It is likely that the sun moon and stars were not clearly visible until photosynthesis changed the atmosphere--perhaps why plants are listed before that. Before the continents we stand on were produced there was a time when water probably covered most of the earth's surface.

*It seems that dragons and such were a concept known to many ancient peoples, and since dinosaurs match the concept fairly well they were of interest to the audience, unlike other extinct or unknown animals.

 

[Papias]

Percivale wrote:

There's different ways you can read the passage.

Sure. And I'm not saying that it's forbidden, or something like that, to read the passage as you do. However, I do see problems with the "from the surface of the earth, only mentioning extant, visible creatures, giving the order of appearance" approach.

The sort of land animals that were familiar to the israelites, like horses, lions, goats, foxes, etc. all first appear in the cenozoic.

Plenty of land animals familiar to the Israelites appear long before the cenozoic. Lizards date back over 300 mya, prior to any species of fish alive today, and many arthropods date back even further. Scorpions date back farther than 400 mya, all of these are long before, say, birds at ~150 mya.

Major divisions of the bird kinds show up in the Cretaceous,

Which doesn't fit the order given in Genesis, since that's after many land animals, before many land plants that the Israelites would be familiar with (if you are using your "familiar with" rule here too), etc. And it's false anyway, since many major divisions of birds (such as ducks, penguins,etc.)

large 'fearsome reptiles' (my translation of taniyn)* dominate the mesozoic, and

But did you not say:

Microbes, extinct creatures, deep sea creatures, etc. were not known to the original audience and thus were not mentioned.

I think this is to address that:

*It seems that dragons and such were a concept known to many ancient peoples, and since dinosaurs match the concept fairly well they were of interest to the audience, unlike other extinct or unknown animals.

But then why not mention the actual dinosaurs, since they are more like dragons anyway?

recognizable fish appear around the same time in the paleozoic as trees do.

What do you mean by "recognizable"? Things from the Ordivician, over 450 mya look like (are) fish - though not the same species around today. Like the other forms of life, extant types cover a wide range of times, with the oldest perhaps being pine trees, which date back around 300 mya (though I don't know that any of the kind which are that old live in Israel, so that date is probably a lot later, and common trees like cedar and oak are much later). Either way, you've got extant trees and fish covering a wide range of time, preventing any stepwise order from making sense.

It is likely that the sun moon and stars were not clearly visible until photosynthesis changed the atmosphere--perhaps why plants are listed before that.

The first photosynthesis was by blue-green algae, not plants, around 3,500 years ago - long before there were plants. Plus, the atmosphere before that was transparent anyway - photosynthesis added oxygen.

Before the continents we stand on were produced there was a time when water probably covered most of the earth's surface.

Water covers most of the earths surface today. There has never been a time when water covered all (or even nearly all) the earth's surface.

There's different ways you can read the passage, but I read it as a narrative of what things looked like from the surface of the earth, focusing on the features of the natural world that the original audience knew about and wanted an explanation for.

I agree that focusing on the creatures and features familiar to the audience and needing an explanation was done. - I just don't think that this meant that the poetic description given had to be literal.

I don't think the "looked like" approach helps, nor the idea that this gives order of appearance. I think it makes things more difficult by still leaving Gen 1 failing to fit the order of appearance, and making things even more confusing since members of a group (say, local trees) appeared at such widely varying times.

Worse, I think it raises theological problems. For instance, you can see over and over that your description simply doesn't match what the text says. It says over and over that "God created". I think that's the main point. But if we take the view that the text could mean "it just looked like this, but something different actually happened", then couldn't some argue that Satan created, or that Zeus created, but it just "looked like" God was doing it? Or the same thing for many other places in the scripture - if the description is only what it "looked like", then doesn't that raise other problems? What about John 3:16 (the docetist heretics, for instance thought that Jesus didn't have a real body, and hence only "appeared" to have been crucified).


I mean, I can see why literalists claim something like the "vapor canopy" idea - because they are requiring the poem to both have the parallel, poetic structure as well simultaneously be exactly, literally descriptive. But you aren't tied to that.

In Christ-

Papias

 

[juvenissun]

It seems significant to me that in the one Psalm written by Moses, the traditional author of Genesis, he writes that a thousand years are like yesterday or like a watch in the night to God. Genesis one is the only passage where God is the only one acting, so it seems reasonable to me that Moses might have been using the word 'day' in that passage to refer to God's perspective: thousands of years passed, but that time was like a day to God. And science clearly confirms that reading of the passage.

I take that verse literally. I guess you know the consequence of that.

Strangely, this crazy idea seems to be universal in all cultures. Human not only has the sense of time (so human is not an animal), but has a sense of inconsistent time scales long long before the idea suggested by modern physics. That is really crazy.

 

[juvenissun]

Interesting. I had not put 2 and 2 together on this (that Psalm 90 is the psalm of Moses). However, a literal reading of Genesis is still not reconciled with nature, even if the days are God's days. We still have the issue that things are created out of order.

To me, this is a retired issue. They are NOT out of order.

For the sale of love, if you ask question, I will reply.

 

[Hismessenger]

The answer lies within God's response to Moses when he asked God whom should he say sent him. God said tell them that I Am sent you. If you ask yourself why did God give that response, it will bring understanding to this discussion.

hismessenger

 

[Percivale]

Percivale wrote:



Sure. And I'm not saying that it's forbidden, or something like that, to read the passage as you do. However, I do see problems with the "from the surface of the earth, only mentioning extant, visible creatures, giving the order of appearance" approach.



Plenty of land animals familiar to the Israelites appear long before the cenozoic. Lizards date back over 300 mya, prior to any species of fish alive today, and many arthropods date back even further. Scorpions date back farther than 400 mya, all of these are long before, say, birds at ~150 mya.




Which doesn't fit the order given in Genesis, since that's after many land animals, before many land plants that the Israelites would be familiar with (if you are using your "familiar with" rule here too), etc. And it's false anyway, since many major divisions of birds (such as ducks, penguins,etc.)

Yes, but those aren't the majority, nor the ones most important to the israelites. It would make Gen 1 a scientific treatise, not a work of art, if all those details were recorded.

But did you not say:



I think this is to address that:



But then why not mention the actual dinosaurs, since they are more like dragons anyway?

Are you asking why the text doesn't use the English word Dinosaur? I believe that taniyn is the one word available to the author that is what he would call a dinosaur. Its meaning is broader than that but includes that.

What do you mean by "recognizable"? Things from the Ordivician, over 450 mya look like (are) fish - though not the same species around today. Like the other forms of life, extant types cover a wide range of times, with the oldest perhaps being pine trees, which date back around 300 mya (though I don't know that any of the kind which are that old live in Israel, so that date is probably a lot later, and common trees like cedar and oak are much later). Either way, you've got extant trees and fish covering a wide range of time, preventing any stepwise order from making sense.

Yes, which is why if the passage is in any way a work of art, whether to put fish or plants first is rather arbitrary, so the author was free to do whatever fit best poetically. Put them either way and one can say they're not in order.

The first photosynthesis was by blue-green algae, not plants, around 3,500 years ago - long before there were plants. Plus, the atmosphere before that was transparent anyway - photosynthesis added oxygen.




Water covers most of the earths surface today. There has never been a time when water covered all (or even nearly all) the earth's surface.

On those two points I came across secular scientific websites that disagree with you. One said "about 2 billion years ago the methane haze disappeared and the sky turned blue." Maybe it was wishful thinking but to me haze meant the sky was not as transparent before. Another said the whole earth may have been covered by a shallow ocean at one time. Doubtless science is not certain on those points. Also I think algae has more right to be called a plant than things like sea anenomes have to be called animals.

I agree that focusing on the creatures and features familiar to the audience and needing an explanation was done. - I just don't think that this meant that the poetic description given had to be literal.

I don't think the "looked like" approach helps, nor the idea that this gives order of appearance. I think it makes things more difficult by still leaving Gen 1 failing to fit the order of appearance, and making things even more confusing since members of a group (say, local trees) appeared at such widely varying times.

Worse, I think it raises theological problems. For instance, you can see over and over that your description simply doesn't match what the text says. It says over and over that "God created". I think that's the main point. But if we take the view that the text could mean "it just looked like this, but something different actually happened", then couldn't some argue that Satan created, or that Zeus created, but it just "looked like" God was doing it? Or the same thing for many other places in the scripture - if the description is only what it "looked like", then doesn't that raise other problems? What about John 3:16 (the docetist heretics, for instance thought that Jesus didn't have a real body, and hence only "appeared" to have been crucified).


I mean, I can see why literalists claim something like the "vapor canopy" idea - because they are requiring the poem to both have the parallel, poetic structure as well simultaneously be exactly, literally descriptive. But you aren't tied to that.

In Christ-

Papias

.
I don't see that there is that theological problem. My interpretation affirms just as much as any other that God created, and does not say that things only seemed to happen. God literally set lights in the sky by clearing the haze from the atmosphere. Before that, balls of hydrogen-fusing gas existed in space, but points of light did not exist in the sky(assuming that the thick haze existed). We should use the Israelites' definitions, not ours, in understanding their scriptures.

I don't think you can deny that the overall thrust of the passage is chronological. It gradually goes from a formless and empty earth to a full one ending with the creation of humans. It is tough knowing how to take the passage in harmonizing it with science, and I'm sure we'll all continue seeing it differently. As humans we keep trying to simplify complex things; some reject science, some the Bible, because it's easier to only have one source of truth. But I see strong reasons for believing there is truth in both.

Juvenisson and Hismessenger, I'd love to hear your perspectives. I didn't quite understand either of your posts.

 

[Calminian]

It seems significant to me that in the one Psalm written by Moses, the traditional author of Genesis, he writes that a thousand years are like yesterday or like a watch in the night to God. Genesis one is the only passage where God is the only one acting, so it seems reasonable to me that Moses might have been using the word 'day' in that passage to refer to God's perspective: thousands of years passed, but that time was like a day to God. And science clearly confirms that reading of the passage.

The passage is very simple and straightforward. From God's perspective, events don't take as long. IOW's His patience is infinitely greater than ours. Events that are literally 1000 years to us humans, seem only a day to God. And I imagine the 6 days of creation were like an instant to Him.

Think about it. If a thousand years is as a day to God, then what would 6 days be to Him? It would have to be an instant, or if you want to take it very literally, it's 1.42 seconds (6 days divided by 1000 years). Thus to God, thousands of years are like days, weeks are like seconds, and days are like fractions of seconds.

[Let me know if anyone else got a different calculation.]

But there's nothing in the description of God's perspective of time that changes the literal meaning of measurements of time. God defined the day as cycles that contain a morning and evening. Those cycles pass very quickly from His perspective, but that doesn't mean they pass by quickly to us.

Thus we can be sure Johah was in the belly of the whale 3 days (not 3 thousand years) and we can be sure the Israelites circled Jericho 7 days (not 7 million years). God was merely telling you how He perceives the elapsing of time compared to us.

 

[juvenissun]

It seems significant to me that in the one Psalm written by Moses, the traditional author of Genesis, he writes that a thousand years are like yesterday or like a watch in the night to God. Genesis one is the only passage where God is the only one acting, so it seems reasonable to me that Moses might have been using the word 'day' in that passage to refer to God's perspective: thousands of years passed, but that time was like a day to God. And science clearly confirms that reading of the passage.

If what the Psalm says is literally true, then there exists at least two time scales. So everything related to time (basically, that include literally everything) could have at least another meaning in time. For example, our life span, 100 years, could just be a short moment to God.

This idea is also commonly recognized in many oriental religions and philosophy that have nothing to do with Christianity.

 

[BobRyan]

It seems significant to me that in the one Psalm written by Moses, the traditional author of Genesis, he writes that a thousand years are like yesterday or like a watch in the night to God. Genesis one is the only passage where God is the only one acting, so it seems reasonable to me that Moses might have been using the word 'day' in that passage to refer to God's perspective: thousands of years passed, but that time was like a day to God. And science clearly confirms that reading of the passage.

Because Moses was trying to make room for Darwinism???

Or because you think the "kind of literature" that Genesis is - lends itself to inserting a kind of symbolism there??


The resurrectionists, creationists, virgin-birth-ists, new birth-ists, Bible-believe-ists, will hall have it that these biblical historic accounts are to be trusted.

The evolutionists will have a problem at that point.

But not if those evolutionists are the sort of atheist that we find in many of the world class universities when it comes to admitting to the "kind of literature" that these historic accounts are - as we find them in the Bible.

reject even the most obvious statements in scripture.

Originally Posted by BobRyan ============================================
[FONT=&quot]One leading Hebrew scholar is James Barr, Professor of Hebrew Bible at Vanderbilt University and former Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford University in England. Although he does not believe in the historicity of Genesis 1, Dr. Barr does agree that the writer's intent was to narrate the actual history of primeval creation. Others also agree with him. [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]
[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Probably, so far as I know, there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writer(s) of Genesis 1-11 intended to convey to their readers the ideas that (a) creation took place in a series of six days which were the same as the days of 24 hours we now experience; . . . Or, to put it negatively, the apologetic arguments which suppose the "days" of creation to be long eras of time, the figures of years not to be chronological, and the flood to be a merely local Mesopotamian flood, are not taken seriously by any such professors, as far as I know. [/FONT]

James Barr, letter to David Watson, 1984.

 

[MoreCoffee]

Genesis chapter one appears to be poetry. It looks a lot like a litany. Is it good exegetical practise to treat poetry as if it were plain prose reporting events in history?

 

[Calminian]

Genesis chapter one appears to be poetry. It looks a lot like a litany. Is it good exegetical practise to treat poetry as if it were plain prose reporting events in history?

The only problem is, it doesn't look like poetry. We know what biblical poetry looks like. In fact we see poetry within the narrative of Genesis, like Adam's description of his wife when he first met her, and Lameck's boasting to his wives. But the account itself in Gen. 1 and 2 is nothing even close to hebrew poetry. It's very mundane straight forward narrative connected by a bunch of vav conjunctions.

 

[MoreCoffee]

The only problem is, it doesn't look like poetry. We know what biblical poetry looks like. In fact we see poetry within the narrative of Genesis, like Adam's description of his wife when he first met her, and Lameck's boasting to his wives. But the account itself in Gen. 1 and 2 is nothing even close to hebrew poetry. It's very mundane straight forward narrative connected by a bunch of vav conjunctions.

In my bible it does look like poetry.

 

[Calminian]

In my bible it does look like poetry.

Actually, you sound like you're being poetic to me. What I'm sensing is, you know it's not poetry, but are saying it is, yet in a poetic way and non literal way. Thus, I'm going to disregard what you're saying, and simply interpret you in a manner that's more to my liking.

 

[juvenissun]

Genesis chapter one appears to be poetry. It looks a lot like a litany. Is it good exegetical practise to treat poetry as if it were plain prose reporting events in history?

The content of any poem needs to be logically correct.
Give me an example which is not.

So, Gen 1 is logically correct.
If it is, then it could be scientifically correct.

 

[MoreCoffee]

Actually, you sound like you're being poetic to me. What I'm sensing is, you know it's not poetry, but are saying it is, yet in a poetic way and non literal way. Thus, I'm going to disregard what you're saying, and simply interpret you in a manner that's more to my liking.

Go for it