the ANE did not use numbers the same way that we do.
Our culture, has for 2 millennium systematically desacralized numbers.
From Pythagoras to Plato to Kepler to Newton, the numberological meaning of numbers has changed.
when we discuss, for example, our Hawaiian 7 day/6 night vacation by what we did each day, we mean historical literal 'what do i do on my vacation'
the ancients did not see numbers as simply a way to count. But rather they saw numbers as having mystical and religious significance. so the answer to the question is that 6 days does not mean 6 days as in my hawaiian vacation, but rather it has great religious and theological significance.
7 is the number of completeness, 6 is just a little short and is indicative of 'not finished', incomplete, CONTINGENT. But God rests on the 7th-complete, it is finished, it is good, done.
YECist not only force the Scriptures into a 18thC box, Newtonian, Baconian, but they ignore the much more important ANE context. They want to see 20thC standards of truthfulness which is scientific and historical pushed back onto a 2nd millennium BC document where the hearers of the Word did not have any idea of these standards. In fact, they heard the Word with a very much different mindset, and it is the task of hermeneutics to cast light on that mindset. The continual refrain of 6 days as a literal, logos, scientific baconian context does great injustice to what God really desires for us to understand from Gen 1.
Sadly they would rather argue about the mechanism of how light before the son then the greater issues of contingency, radical separateness of creation from God, creatio ex nihilo, or the polemics against the sun moon and stars as personifications of natural powers to worship. These are the take home message of Gen 1, not the order of creation.
i guess what bothers me most about this is that it diverts the church from really critical work in the meaning of the Sabbath and how to apply the Sabbath week to us today. Diverted into this endless talk about the scientific basis of the 6 week 24 hr day creation. Sadly AiG and the rest of the YECist groups and RTB as well, are missing some important points and minoring in things that just aren't there.
