(1.) Beyond all question the word “day” is used abundantly, (and therefore admits of being used) to denote a period of special character, with no particular reference to its duration. We have a case in this immediate connection (Gen. 2: 4), where it is used of the whole creative period: “In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.” Under the same usage we have “the day of the Lord” (1 Thess. 5: 2) for the day of judgment; “the day of God,” in the same sense (2 Pet. 3: 12); “the day of salvation” (2 Cor. 6: 2); “day of redemption” (Eph. 4: 30); a “day of darkness and of gloominess; a day of clouds and of thick darkness” (Joel 2: 2). “In the day of prosperity, be joyful; but in the day of adversity, consider” (Eccl. 7: 14). “If thou hadst known in this thy day the things,” etc. (Luke 19: 42). So also Job 19: 25, and John 8: 56, etc.
To set aside this testimony from usage as being inapplicable to the present case, it has been said—(a.) That here is a succession of days, “first day,” “second day,” “third day,” etc., and that this requires the usual sense of days of the week.——To which the answer is that here are six special periods succeeding each other—a sufficient reason for using the word in the peculiar sense of a period of special character. Each of these periods is distinct from any and all the rest in the character of the work wrought in it.——The reason for dividing the creative work into six periods—“days”—rather than into more or fewer lies in the divine wisdom as to the best proportion of days of man’s labor to the one day of his rest, the Sabbath. God’s plan for his creative work contemplated his own example as suggestive of man’s Sabbath and was shaped accordingly. This accounts for dividing the work of creation into sixspecial periods, correlated to God’s day of rest from creative work.——(b.) It will also be urged that each of these days is said to be made up of evening and of morning—“The evening and the morning were the first day,” etc. But the strength of this objection comes mainly from mistranslation and consequent misconception of the original. The precise thought is not that evening and morning composed or made up one full day; but rather this: There was evening and there was morning—day one, i. e., day number one.There was darkness and then there was light, indicating one of the great creative periods.[3]
It is one thing to say—There were alternations of evening and morning—i. e. dark scenes and bright scenes—marking the successive periods of creation, first, second, third, etc.; and another thing to affirm that each of these evenings and mornings made up a day. The point specially affirmed in the two cases, though somewhat analogous, is not by any means identical.——Let it be considered moreover, that while in Hebrew as in English, night and day are often used for the average twelve-hour duration of darkness and of light respectively in each twenty-four hours, yet in neither language are the words evening and morning used in this sense, as synonymous with night and day. Indeed “evening” and “morning” are rather points than periods of time; certainly do not indicate any definite amount of time—any precise number of hours; but are used to denote the two great changes—i. e. from light to darkness and from darkness to light; in other words, from day to night and from night to day.Therefore to make evening and morning added together constitute one day is entirely without warrant in either Hebrew or English usage and can not be the meaning of these passages in Genesis.[4]
(2.) The showing of the narrative itself, considered apart from the bearing of geological facts.
(a.) Here vs. 3–5 demand special attention, this firstday being the model one.——I understand “evening” to be the chaotic state of v. 2, when “darkness was on the face of the deep,” and “morning” to be that first “light” which God spake into being. The reason for using these words—“evening and morning”—in this sense I find in the universal sentiment of mankind that light is pleasant and darkness is not. This sentiment is indicated here; “God saw the light that it was good.” The state of chaos was in contrast with this—dismal, dreary, awakening no sense of beauty or order; no emotions of joy. The light of day brings joy, and the freshest and best sensation of it comes with the morning. Hence these words were fitly and beautifully appropriate to the two great creative states—first chaos; secondly, light—which together marked off the first of the six creative days.——But we can not for a moment think of this chaotic state as being only twelve hours. We can not rationally think of the word “evening” applied to it as having any reference to time, duration. It was an evening only in the sense of being dark, desolate, any thing but joyous like the morning. The word “evening” may be chosen rather than night for the sake of a more perfect antithesis with “morning.”
(b.) Throughout at least the first three of these creative epochs there was no sun-rising and setting to mark off the ordinary day. These therefore were not the common human day; but, as Augustine long ago said, these are the days of God—divine days—measuring off his great creative periods. God moved through these six great periods by successive stages of labor and of rest. Beginning with the long evening of chaos; then advancing to a glorious day of light; then, after a cessation analogous to man’s rest by night, he proceeded to the work of the second day—the joyous and beautiful development of the firmament in the heavens. So onward by stages of repose and of activity, these figurative evenings and mornings continued through the six successive epochs of creation.
(c.) In some at least of these creative epochs, the work done demands more time than twenty-four hours. For example, the gathering of the waters from under the heavens into one place to constitute the seas or oceans and leave portions of the earth’s surface dry land. Nothing short of absolute miracle could effect this inone human day. But miracle should not be assumed here, the rule of reason and the normal law of God’s operations being never to work a miracle in a case where the ordinary course of nature will accomplish the same results equally well. We must the more surely exclude miracle and assume the action of natural law only throughout these processes of the creative work because the very purpose of a protracted rather than an instantaneous creation looked manifestly to the enlightenment, instruction, interest, and joy of those “morning stars,” the “sons of God” who beheld the scene, then “sang together and shouted for joy” (Job 38: 7).——
The greatness of the work assigned to the fourth day stringently forbids our compressing it within the limits of one ordinary human day. Especially is this the case if we understand the verse to speak of the original creation of these light-bearers—the sun and the moon and the stars also, and of their adjustment in their spheres for their assigned work. Think of the vastness of the sun and of the numbers, magnitude, and immense distances of the stars; and ask how it is possible that the creation of these bodies could be either instructive or joyful to the beholding angels if it had been all rushed through within twenty-four hours of human time.——This difficulty is in a measure relieved if we suppose the fourth day’s work to have been, not the original creation of these heavenly bodies, but only the bringing of them into the view of a supposed spectator upon the earth—i. e. by clearing the atmosphere so as to make these heavenly bodies visible. The question at issue between these two constructions of the fourth day’s work must be examined in its place.——The amount of creative and other work brought within the sixth day should be noticed. First, God created all the land animals; then Adam; then he brought “every beast of the field and every fowl of the air” to Adam to see what he would call them—which at least must assume that Adam had attained a somewhat full knowledge of language, and that he had time enough to study the special character of each animal so as to give each one its appropriate name, and time enough also to ascertain that there was not one among them all adapted to be a “helpmeet” for himself. Then the “deep sleep” of Adam—how long protracted, the record saith not; and finally thecreation of Eve from one of his ribs—all to come within the sixth day; for the creation of Eve certainly falls within this day, being a part of the creative work, and accomplished, therefore, before God’s seventh day of rest from all his work began. These labors of the sixth day, moreover, were precisely such as should not be rushed through in haste. The importance, not to say solemnity, of these transactions and the special interest they must be supposed to awaken in the first-born “sons of God” most stringently preclude precipitate haste. It is not easy to see how Moses or his intelligent readers of the early time could have supposed all this to have transpired within the twelve hours of light in a human day.——We may say, moreover, in regard to each and all of these six creative periods that if the holy angels were indeed spectators of these scenes and if God adjusted his methods of creation to the capacities of these pupils—these admiring students of his glorious works—then surely we must not think of his compressing them within the period of six human days. Divine days they certainly must have been, sufficiently protracted to afford finite minds scope for intelligent study, adoring contemplation, and as the Bible indicates, most rapturous shouts of joy.
Against the theory of indefinitely long periods, it is objected that the law of the Sabbath demands the usual sense of the word “day.” The record in Gen. 2: 2, 3, is—“On the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because that in it he had rested from all his work which he had created and made.” The words of the fourth command are—“Six days shalt thou labor and do all thy work; but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God, etc.—for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth: wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.”——The real argument here rests on the analogy between God’s working and resting, and man’s labor and rest. In each case the period of labor is six out of seven; of rest, one in seven. This argument does not require that God’s six working days and one resting day should be of twenty-four hours each. If it did, we should be hard pressed to show that God’s seventh day of rest from creation’s work was a merely human dayfrom sun to sun. No; it suffices if we make God’s days of creative energy and of creative rest each and all divine days—all alike periods of indefinite length—all of the same sort; and on the other hand man’s days of labor and his day of rest, all human days, of the same sort with each other, from sun to sun. As God’s resting day is plainly of indefinite length—a period known by its character and not by its duration, so should his days of creative labor be: not only so may they be, but so they ought to be according to the analogy and argument in the case.——We come therefore to the conclusion that entirely apart from the demands of geological science, the creative days must be periods of indefinite length, called “days” with reference to the peculiar work done in them and to their peculiar character, and not as being the ordinary human day of twenty-four hours. It may be admitted, moreover, that the phraseology and the whole shaping of the narrative in respect to days may have contemplated the institution of the Sabbath—to be founded as shown above upon the analogy of God’s labor and rest with man’s permitted labor and enjoined rest in commemoration of God’s work of creation.
(3.) We are to consider the geological facts bearing on this point and the weight legitimately due to them.