HowardDean said:
Its an astrological term, referring to the precession of the equinox.
there has been a number of things that got me thinking in this direction.
the first was a poll that said that 17% of adults thought that a day was determined by the length of time it took the earth to revolve around the sun.
the other is the use of the words morning and evening in Gen 1 and how their definitions are not simple, but rather embedded in a complex scientific matrix.
but mostly it is the result of thinking about the Sabbath for the last few months.
looks at our lengths of time:
sec, min, hour, day, week, fortnight, month, year, decade, score, century, millennium.
the one that doesn't fit is the week. despite people trying to look at it in terms of 1/4 of a month, or the numbers of visible wanderers in the sky etc. well we've discussed this here.
what is interesting about the week, is that it ought to be 5 or 10 days long, not seven.
but as i worked on Sabbath issues i wanted to see if there were longer periods of time that cultures named.
that is where the precession of the equinoxes comes in, it is a candidate for the longest period of time that mankind had discovered in the ancient world.
So what?
When i was discussing morning and evening at:
http://www.christianforums.com/showpost.php?p=23065893&postcount=26
one of the main ideas was how much the average person knows in our culture as contrasted to what no one knew in the time of Genesis' writing.
And it occurred to me that most people probably don't know what the precession of the equinox means. the knowledge is still working it's way through the common culture. It actually came up in a sunday school class a few years back and the teacher was astonished that i actually knew what it was etc....It was his big surprise and i spoiled it *grin*
what does this have to do with gen1 and the usage of morning and evening?
when we interpret the Scriptures with respect to our common sense what we miss is the complexity and progressive nature of our scientific matrix. what a day is defined as (at least for the 83% of people who know) to us is certainly not what the ancient Hebrews thought a day was. But that is not all, the knowledge is still working its way through the population about the precession, even though the usage is already in the popular culture. it is a line in a song, a popular song, i'm willing to bet that most people have never even asked themselves what "age of aquarius" means. and as a result it means something different to them then it did to the authors of the song.
does that make sense?
