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Brown-Driver-Brigg's Definition
1. day, time, year
1. day (as opposed to night)
2. day (24 hour period)
1. as defined by evening and morning in Genesis 1
2. as a division of time 1b
3. a working day, a day's journey
4. days, lifetime (pl.)
5. time, period (general)
6. year
7. temporal references
1. today
2. yesterday
3. tomorrow
יֹ֔ום (yôm) can mean a time period, but that is not the case in Genesis 1. When Genesis was written the Egyptians were using sundials, but they could only indicate time during sunlight hours, and the few twilight hours. So even with those sundials, time would be measured by the sun, morning through evening. That is how the original audience of Genesis would know a single day, morning and evening. So Moses wasn't necessarily saying there was literally a morning and evening, but rather that the time for a single day had passed.
gtg, more later!
So, you are going to get a Gentile's definition of YOM instead of what a Jew will tell you what YOM means and how it is used?...
So, you are going to get a Gentile's definition of YOM instead of what a Jew will tell you what YOM means and how it is used?...
It is a lot wider in application than even 'day' in English "In my day.." "In the good old days.." Though I read that the scriptural Hebrew is more limited in application. That's beside the point. It can denote any period of time, a day, a year or an age. The point is that that this particular period of time is marked by a morning of light and an evening of dark, and that before there was anyone to see it, there was no sun and moon and the light was just 'there' switching on and off for nobody's benefit and the cloud cover that blotted out the sun but still had the effect of morning and evening on the earth (as where elese could it even be relevant?) makes it clear that the particular usage of 'Yom' is related to the 24 hour day and night, and not an age or eon.
And it just gets more confused and unlikely the more fiddling goes on to try to make it work, let alone what science tells us about how it really happened.
P.s
Look. I know that you can use the ambiguity of 'Yom' and come up with all kinds of scenarios to make Genesis look feasible, or even get it to agree with evolution, so that you can tell yourselves that it is all true. I can't prove to you that it is just a creation myth if you opt for the adaptation of Genesis to fact with a handy bit of translation shopping and the light and dark morning and evenings can be shrugged off as something inexplicable that God did.
I am just saying that you are never going to be able to make a convincing case for Genesis being factual to anyone prepared to do a bit of thinking. It is going to work wonderfully on those who want to believe it as literally true and I accept that. It is those who wonder a bit will need more than one side of the discussion and that - to answer another thread - is what we are doing here.
Last edited by TRANSPONDER; 07-18-2015 at 12:11 PM..
It is a lot wider in application than even 'day' in English "In my day.." "In the good old days.." Though I read that the scriptural Hebrew is more limited in application. That's beside the point. It can denote any period of time, a day, a year or an age. The point is that that this particular period of time is marked by a morning of light and an evening of dark, and that before there was anyone to see it, there was no sun and moon and the light was just 'there' switching on and off for nobody's benefit and the cloud cover that blotted out the sun but still had the effect of morning and evening on the earth (as where elese could it even be relevant?) makes it clear that the particular usage of 'Yom' is related to the 24 hour day and night, and not an age or eon.
And it just gets more confused and unlikely the more fiddling goes on to try to make it work, let alone what science tells us about how it really happened.
P.s
Look. I know that you can use the ambiguity of 'Yom' and come up with all kinds of scenarios to make Genesis look feasible, or even get it to agree with evolution, so that you can tell yourselves that it is all true. I can't prove to you that it is just a creation myth if you opt for the adaptation of Genesis to fact with a handy bit of translation shopping and the light and dark morning and evenings can be shrugged off as something inexplicable that God did.
I am just saying that you are never going to be able to make a convincing case for Genesis being factual to anyone prepared to do a bit of thinking. It is going to work wonderfully on those who want to believe it as literally true and I accept that. It is those who wonder a bit will need more than one side of the discussion and that - to answer another thread - is what we are doing here.
That's what I was trying to point out...It has a wide scope...
Yes, but in the context, it looks strongly like normal morning-and -evening days. if not, why the need to argue that the sun and moon were there but hidden by cloud -cover?
Little darling it seems so longs since its been so clear. Sun sun sun here it comes The Beatles saw something us fundies who thought it was already clear could never see.
Nevermind Genesis 1 . Sitting at our patio listening to Rubber Soul looking over towards the harbor in Bristol RI at one of the most amazing things we have seen in the sky..... A slivered moon with a star directly above it , so close we can almost touch it.
God hovers over the deep and says let there be light and the light is good and God calls the light day and the darkness night. There was an evening and there was a morning - the first day.
The sun however, is not created until day 4. How can you have a daytime and nighttime without the sun?
Plus, it seems the Earth is created before the rest of the universe. It says on day 4 the sun, moon and stars are created.
Heart 22 He uncovereth deep things out of darkness, and bringeth out to light the shadow of death. 23 He increaseth the nations, and destroyeth them; He enlargeth the nations, and leadeth them away. 24 He taketh away the heart of the chiefs of the people of the land, and causeth them to wander in a wilderness where there is no way. 25 They grope in the dark without light, and He maketh them to stagger like a drunken man.
ok. That talks of the clouds as a garment for the
earth as is also the darkness. That is what we find today.
Either you are purposely ignoring the context with which verse 9 exists or your knowledge of scripture is incomplete. Verse 4 OF THAT SAME CHAPTER is talking about the FOUNDING OF THE EARTH. Thus your interpretation that it's talking about clouds and darkness as it exists today is in error.
Job 38:4, " “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?"
Job 38:9, "When I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness,"
Quote:
that said, you are merely repeating the claim that does not stand up - that the
sun was already created but the clouds hid it. But that is not what genesis
says. It says that god made two great lights - the sun and the moon. It does not
say that god removed the clouds that had obscured the sun and moon -though the
light and dark supposedly were visible enough to mark morning and evening. If
that was what god did. That is what it should say. You are re-writing genesis to
make it fit science and save its' crumbling credibility.
Hebrew Scholar Gleason Archer (and yes he has the academic credentials) indicates the following with regard to Genesis 1:14-19:
"Genesis 1:14-19 reveals that in the fourth creative stage God parted the cloud cover enough for direct sunlight to fall on the earth and for accurate observation of the movements of the sun, moon, and stars to take place. Verse 16 should not be understood as indicating the creation of the heavenly bodies for the first time on the fourth creative day; rather it informs us that the sun, moon, and stars created on Day One as the source of light had been placed in their appointed places by God with a view to their eventually functioning as indicators of time ("signs, seasons, days, years") to terrestrial observers. The Hebrew verb wayya`as in v.16 should better be rendered "Now [God] had made the two great luminaries, etc.," rather than as simple past tense, "[God] made." (Hebrew has no special form for the pluperfect tense but uses the perfect tense, or the conversive imperfect as here, to express either the English past or the English pluperfect, depending on the context.)
Classical Hebrew unlike modern Hebrew and English did not have the notion of tense.
Quote:
you talk of using brains and scientific experimentation. The science tells us
that what genesis says is wrong and our brains ought to tell us that it makes no
sense that god would say what a man at the time would think he saw rather than
say what god actually did. You are craftily trying to evade the problem by
saying that the bible doesn't need to tell us what happened. It does tell us
what happened - but it tells us wrong. It could easily have told us the right
way it happened - if it was true.
Wrong.
God created the universe, including the earth, in the indefinite past as stated in Genesis 1:1“in the beginning." Science agrees that the universe had a beginning. Science suggests that the universe is about 14 billion years old. Thus a Christian could well believe the creation account in Genesis and when asked how old the universe is could refer to whatever best scientific models of our modern day suggest.
What does science indicate is the most important element for a planet to sustain life? Water. Genesis 1:2 indicates just that.
What does vegetation need to grow? Light. Genesis 1:3-5 covers that
Genesis 1:6-8 refers to God creating an expanse What's in this expanse? Gases that form our atmosphere. You need one of those to sustain life on our planet, right?
If you are going to have vegetation and animals and humans running amok you need some dry land for them to step on because a "waterworld" would just be right for Hollywood and Kevin Costner but depressing for the rest of us. Genesis 1:9.10...check...dry land.
Well we already read that we have water first...check. And microscopic algae can thus be sustained along with the light that already existed (see Genesis 1:3) to produce oxygen.
So lets see we have water, light, an atmosphere, land and oxygen. Once we have these conditions we can have vegetation covering the land to eventually feed animals and mankind. Genesis 1:11:12
There is nothing that would prevent Moses under inspiration to write the account of creation from the viewpoint of an earthly observer had one been present. Nothing that an omnipotent being could not convey to a man.
Craftily...bunk. What is crafty is assigning one's own interpretation of Scripture and taking it out of context to try to support one's viewpoint.
Yes. And you are ignoring the context of God overaweing Job by asking where he was when he created everything. And you are ignoring that he talks of closing the waters of the deep behind doors, which is snowdome -cosmos nonsense, but is what was believed by the writers of the Bible. They were there when Noah was supposed to be alive and were opened to let the Flood in. Nothing had changed from creation. So I am arguing that the clouds and the darkness were supposedly made by God but were no different from the clouds and darkness of their own day. There is no reason to suppose that it relates to some sun - obscuring cloud cover that God dispelled on the fourth day for no reason other than to make Genesis look credible - the sun was there when light appeared, but it couldn't be seen.
As I say that makes no sense for God to describe how it appeared from the human point of view when there were no humans. I might also remark that God must be talking about the clouds that Job was familiar with rather than the supposed sun - obscuring could which of course Job knew nothing about.
I don't care what certificates Gleason Archer has. His assertion that the 4th day was not the making of the sun and moon but the parting of clouds so that the people who hadn't been made yet could see them makes no sense and is merely another highly qualified scholar misusing his erudition to fool himself - and as many others as possible - into believing that Genesis is literally true.
"There is nothing that would prevent Moses under inspiration to write the account of creation from the viewpoint of an earthly observer had one been present. Nothing that an omnipotent being could not convey to a man."
That is the point of asking why God would put Moses in the position of writing an account from the earthly point of view when putting him in the spacial point of view where he could write what actually happened would astound us and I might say, would convince us of divine inspiration. Do you suppose that God didn't know how wrong Genesis would look in our day? Don't you see that the writer was making his best attempt at a guesswork Creation from his own earth - based imaginary viewpoint and limited to his own flat earth and sky -dome cosmos? But you try to argue that thus was Revealed to him by God and then have to explain why it is that what was revealed actually looks wrong. The more you wriggle, the worse it gets.
It is hardly amazing science to have dry land appear out of the water so that plants and animals could be put on it. And then you fiddle in a bit of Pre-Cambrian micro organism, ignoring that Genesis says that grass and herbs appeared. There was no grass (or so science tells us) until the Jurassic. And no birds, either. They appeared on the fifth day - before the earth brought forth living creatures. The science is that the earth was crawling with living creatures millions of years before birds and even grass appeared. You are still fiddling the text and the facts to try to make the former fit the latter.
"Craftily...bunk. What is crafty is assigning one's own interpretation of Scripture and taking it out of context to try to support one's viewpoint."
I couldn't have put it better myself. That is exactly what you and all the other Genesis -is -true -apologists are doing. But I repeat that this is better than simply denying what science has told is about what happened and insist that it was as Genesis literally says.
I just love it here.
Last edited by TRANSPONDER; 07-19-2015 at 04:36 AM..
Reason: correcting my diabolocal typing.
A little on Gleason Archer. I would say that he is rather like water under the bridge, his view, arguments and position, debunked, discredited and devoid of merit.
Gleason Archer (Survey of Old Testament Introduction [1974], p. 25), to claim: “Even though the two copies of Isaiah discovered at Qumran Cave 1 near the Dead Sea in 1947 were a thousand years earlier than the oldest dated manuscript previously known (A.D. 980) they proved to be word for word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95 percent of the text.”
But, what Archer omits is that these manuscripts of Isaiah were vastly outnumbered by manuscripts that differed dramatically from the text of the Bible we have now. For example, the book of Jeremiah represented in the DSS is about one-sixth shorter than what is found in most modern Bibles.
Why does he misuse and abuse his undoubted knowledge in order to make it seem that the Bible is inerrant - which it is not?
"His defense of the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy by proposing harmonizations and exegesis regarding inconsistencies in the Bible made Archer a well known biblical inerrantist. He stated: "One cannot allow for error in history-science without also ending up with error in doctrine."[Wiki]
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