Days of Creation - Myth or Mystery?

For someone who sees time as an archenemy, who shares a similar fascination with time and who hopefully finds humour in this by the time it gets read. 

Einstein once called time as an illusion. Indeed, "for more than two thousand years, the world's great minds have argued about the essence of time. Is it finite or infinite? Does it flow like a river or is it granular, proceeding in small bits, like sand trickling through an hourglass? And what is the present? Is now an indivisible instant, a line of vapor between the past and the future? Or is it an instant that can be measured--and, if so, how long is it? And what lies between the instants?" - The Secret Life of Time, Alan Burdick.

A no less puzzling part about the Bible is perhaps the days of God's creation and its length of time which may appear, on its face, hard to reconcile with science or common sense. Many scholars reiterate that the point of our creation narrative is not to provide a scientific description of natural origins. Yet how should we make of it? Interestingly, Bavinck has emphasised that whether a given section of the scripture contains a poetic description, a parable or a fable, is not for us to determine arbitrarily but must be clear from the text itself. According to him, whilst the creation narrative is a series of miracles that the biblical story portrays to us each time with a single brushstroke without giving too much details, the first chapter of Genesis, however, hardly contains any ground for the opinion that we are dealing here with a vision or myth. It clearly bears a 'historical' character and forms the introduction to a book that presents itself from beginning to end as 'history'. Nor is it possible to separate the facts (being the religious content) from the manner in which they are expressed. For example, as we can see elsewhere in addition to Genesis on the days of creation, there is no objection to the exegesis that God created heaven and earth in 'six days' in Exodus 20:11 and 31:17. So what can we make of this 'miraculous' length of time that God created the universe?

Let's first turn to the words of the scripture. To understand the 'week' and the 'days' of creation, it is important to distinguish the first act of creation - as immediate calling forth of the light to separate from darkness and bringing forth of heaven and earth out of nothing - from the secondary separation and formation of the six days, which begin God's preservation and government of the world according to Bavinck. The work of the first day consists in the creation of light, in the separation of light and darkness, in the alternation of day and night, and hence also in movement, change, becoming. It is not until the fourth day that God said "let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years" (NRSV, Genesis 1:14-15). So 'days' leading up to the fourth day denotes the time in which God was at work creating between alternation of mornings and evenings. With every morning, he brought into being a new world and every evening began when he finished it. The creation days are the work days of God. 

Let's then turn to the Hebrew word yom (יום) for "day". Although yom is commonly rendered as day in English translations, the word has several literal definitions including (1) period of light (as contrasted with the period of darkness), (2) general term for time or point of time or a time period of unspecified length, (3) sunrise to sunset or sunset to next sunset, (4) a year (in the plural; I Sam 27:7; Ex 13:10, etc) or a long but finite span of time (such as age, epoch, season etc).  As Biblical Hebrew has a limited vocabulary with fewer words compared to other languages, words often have multiple meanings determined by context. Thus yom, in its context, is sometimes translated as: time (Gen 4:3, Is. 30:8), year (I Kings 1:1, 2 Chronicles 21:19, Amos 4:4), age (Gen 18:11, 24:1, 47:28, Joshua 23:1, 23:2), always (Deuteronomy 5:29, 6:24, 14:23, 2 Chronicles 18:7), season (Genesis 40:4, Joshua 24:7, 2 Chronicles 15:3), epoch or 24-hour day (Genesis 1:5,8,13,19,23,31).  In other words, the Hebrew word yom relates to the concept of time but is not just for days but for time in general. How yom is translated depends on the context of its use with other words in the sentence around it, using hermeneutics.

So by God's timing of creation and by God's labor, resumed and renewed six times, He prepared the whole earth and transformed the chaos into a cosmos, and for the whole world, it remains a symbol of the eons of this dispensation that it will some day culminate in eternal rest, the cosmic Sabbath on the day of our rest (Hebrew 4). Yet, the days of Genesis 1 are to be considered days and not to be identified with the precise periods of geology or science as Bavinck has reasoned. They nevertheless - like the work of creation as a whole - have an extraordinary character. The essence of a day and night does not consist in their duration (shorter or longer) but in the alternation of light and darkness, as Genesis 1:4 and 5 clearly teach us. This alternation was not affected by the sun, which only made its appearance on the fourth day, but came about in a different way: by the emission and contraction of the light created in verse 3. According to Bavinck, the first three days, however much they may resemble our days, also differ significantly from them and hence were extraordinary cosmic days. 

Most importantly, the creation narrative in Genesis is utterly unique. It is devoid of theogony and is rigorously monotheistic. The Bible's narrative shines through against a backdrop of other creation myths arising from folklore, Pegan beliefs, Roman/Greek, Babylonian and other forms of mythology. In light of the recent lunar new year celebrated in some Asian countries and especially as the Chinese New Year in China, the creation story of Pangu passed on in folklore is a fascinating contrast in its overly detailed approach to how elements of the universe are created over the thousands of years. I sometimes think that the creation narrative in Genesis is poetic. Whilst not meant to be scientific, geological, biological or paleontological, it is also not bogged down by unnecessary details but arguably with enough to withstand the test of time as truth. Personally, I find it extremely powerful that rather than descriptive details on how elements of existence in this world are brought to be, the Bible simply and conceptually highlights God's word. In the Bible, we have seen that God characteristically brings about his purpose through speech. Not only in creation but in providence, it is God's lively speech that is at work: "He upholds the universe by the word of this power" (Hebrew 1:3). So instead of the analogy of the invisible hand, we should think in terms of the audible word. God does not simply operate on the world, causing its history and human actions, but in the world and within its manifold creatures. 

The interpretation of Genesis has a rich and diverse history.  As Bavinck goes as far as to insist on the 'historical' rather than merely mythical or visionary character of the creation story in Genesis, it is perhaps important to recognise that a theological perspective on the material world differs from (but should not be isolated from) a philosophic and scientific one. Whilst the biblical chronology and order of creation seem, on the face of it, at odds with the accounts given by geology, paleontology and other scientific disciplines, various attempts by scholars to harmonise them achieve only modest and not satisfying results. The Bible does not provide us with a scientific cosmology but data of natural science should be taken seriously by Christians as general revelation, yet recognising that only biblical revelation can describe the true state of the world. It is true that the science is still young and faces many unanswered questions. As such, there is much merit in the point made by many scholars that theology should neither fear the sure results of science nor, in immoderate anxiety, make premature concessions to opinions of the day. As the science of divine and eternal things, it should uphold its confessional convictions with dignity and honour and in patience even if certain parts of the scripture remain in mystery, yet. 

Just as someone put to me through an insightful and intelligent question of where did the 'week' concept come from when a year is one orbit of the earth around the sun, a month is one orbit of the moon with respect to the earth-sun line and a day is one rotation of the earth, I will leave this thought with you on matters of your faith.

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