Six-day creation: days & eras - a grammatical look

Another loophole used to fit the Bible into the observations of modern science is whether the word day in Genesis 1 means day or whether it means era. In all honesty, that is an excellent question, but as always, context is the key. Here’s what grammatical context reveals

The Hebrew word for day (yom) can mean either a 24-hour day as in Joshua 5:11 or it can mean an era as in 1 Samuel 1:20 or Isaiah 11:10. A plain read of Genesis 1 would seem to point to the twenty-four hour kind of day. “So the evening and morning were the (n^th) day.” The counter to that argument is that evening and morning could be signaling the beginning and ending of eras (the Hebrew day beginning at sunset). So let’s dig further.

Throughout the Old Testament when yom is used in conjunction with a sequence (first day, third day, etc.), the meaning is almost always a literal 24-hour day. Tying in the ordinal designation of the days with the evening and morning, the grammatical weight tips toward a literal day.

Finally, and the most powerful argument from a grammatical perspective would be the reference to this even that God Himself uses when He gives Moses the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20). God said:

⁸ “ Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. ⁹ Six days you shall labor and do all your work, ¹⁰ but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates. ¹¹ For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.

With purposeful structure, in clear and careful language, God corresponds His six days of creation and a day of rest with man’s literal six days of work and the blessing of a day of rest. To stretch day in that passage to mean era or eon would require linguistic gymnastics.

Next, I’ll discuss how this passage was understood throughout biblical history, the era of the Bible.