The First Seven Days

What is the creation account trying to tell us?

Evangelicals agree that the Bible is the inspired Word of God. And they reject in unison any approach that treats Scripture with a profound skepticism regarding its historical credibility. Yet when they read Genesis 1:1–2:3, there is anything but unanimity.

While there seems to be great variety of opinion, we can generally divide evangelical scholars who study the early chapters of Genesis into two groups: concordists and nonconcordists.

The concordists try to harmonize (or find concord between) Genesis 1:1–2:3 and scientific descriptions of Earth’s origins. Some (called scientific creationists) harmonize science with their straightforward reading of the Bible. Others (called creation scientists) harmonize the Bible with science.

The creation scientists, in turn, are composed of various subgroups: progressives (who construe the “days” of Genesis as immense periods of time) and re-creationists (who reckon with more than one creation). In addition, there are transformationalists, who argue for a pre-Genesis Earth and time. They may belong to either kind of concordist. Re-creationists and transformationalists reject the traditional reading of Genesis 1:1–3, which understands those verses to describe the beginning of Earth-time, when God created the Earth from nothing.

The second group, nonconcordists, may disagree about the meaning of “days” and the syntax of Genesis 1:1–3. But they agree that Genesis teaches neither straightforward history nor science, and needs no reconciliation with the kind of history and science devoted exclusively to what can be observed and measured.

Which of these groups you find yourself in depends on how you answer three big questions about the biblical Creation account:

• What kind of literature is Genesis 1:1–2:3?

• What does the author mean by the word day?

• How are the phrases and sentences of Genesis 1:1–3 related?

Let us examine them in reverse order.

How Is Genesis 1:1–3 Put Together?

Knowing how the various parts of a statement are related can make a big difference in our understanding. For instance, I might write: “I went to my office today. The telephone system wasn’t working right. I felt discouraged. I went home early.” That is rather inelegant writing, in part because I did not explicitly connect the ideas with words that showed time relationships or cause-and-effect patterns. You would probably read some relationships into that passage—that the malfunctioning telephones caused my discouragement—and you might be right; but you might be wrong.

Likewise, the first few sentences of Genesis are not connected in a clear way. Thus, scholars suggest relationships between the sentences and come to different understandings of the text.

• One group of scholars sees Genesis 1:2 as contemporaneous with Genesis 1:1. This is a traditional view in which 1:1 recounts God’s original creation of the Earth, and 1:2 gives us three situations belonging to the same time period: (a) the Earth was “formless and empty”; (b) there was “darkness over the surface of the deep”; and (c) “the Spirit of God hovered over the waters.” Following this line of thought, Calvin commented: “For Moses simply intends to assert that the world was not perfected at its commencement …”

All schools of thought see God’s activity of 1:3 (“Let there be light”) as later than the situation in 1:2. But this school sees all of 1:1–5 (from “In the beginning” right through the end of the first day’s creation) belonging to the same chronological grouping.

In its favor, this view has the support of the classic Hebrew grammar, Gesenius-Kautzsch-Cowley. And theologians prefer it to a transformational theory that reads God’s “In the beginning” creation of 1:1 as earlier creation attempts than the one described in the six days recounted in the rest of the chapter.

But there are insurmountable problems with this traditional interpretation. This passage contains pairs of words called syntagmes, words that occur together in various contexts to denote one unique notion. One scholar explained it this way: “In language, as in chemistry, a compound may be found to possess qualities absent from its constituent elements. For example, anyone who does not know what ‘broadcast’ denotes, will not be able to guess the connotation of the word from its separate elements ‘broad’ and ‘cast’ ” (U. Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis).

Let us take the word-pair heaven and earth. Like our phrase night and day, it is a statement of opposites to indicate totality. Night and day means “all the time.” Likewise, heaven and earth signifies “the entire organized universe” or “the cosmos.” Brevard Childs of Yale Divinity School concludes that this syntagme never stands for disorderly chaos, but always for an ordered world. And John Skinner says it “is a Hebrew designation of the universe as a whole … the organized universe, not the chaotic material out of which it was formed.”

Next let us look at empty and formless. This word pair (which reads tohu wabohu in Hebrew) is a rhyming syntagme, something like the English phrase hanky-panky. It stands for “chaos,” and it is the antithesis of the “cosmos” of verse 1. Logically, the disorderly chaos and the orderly cosmos cannot be applied to the same thing and the same time—and thus verses 1 and 2 simply cannot be contemporaneous.

• Another way to understand the relationship between the sentences of Genesis 1:1–3 is to see verse 2 as following verse 1 in time.

According to re-creationists, verse 2 tells of a second Creation that happened after the original Creation recorded in verse 1. The first Creation, they say, may have occurred millions of years ago but was reduced to chaos by divine judgment on disobedient spiritual beings; and the second Creation happened around 4000 B.C. According to this so-called gap theory, most fossils are relics of the first Creation.

Although it was the Scofield Reference Bible that popularized and sanctioned this view in 1909, it has its roots in early Jewish tradition and has been held throughout the history of the church. Moreover, the verb translated “was” in verse 2 may mean “became”—“The earth became formless and empty.” Finally, the condition “formless and empty,” when it occurs in other Old Testament contexts (Jer. 4:23, Isa. 34:1), is the result of divine judgment.

But this interpretation faces an insurmountable problem: the “and” that introduces the “formless and empty” description of verse 2 does not imply a subsequent situation (unlike the “and” introducing verse 3: “And [then] God said: ‘Let there be light’ ”). Also, although the formlessness and emptiness in Isaiah and Jeremiah result from God’s fury, it is not logically necessary (or even likely) that this chaos arises from his wrath. Peter knows of only two divine judgments on the whole Earth: a past flood and a future fire (2 Peter 3:5–7).

• A third way to understand the relationship between the Bible’s first sentences is to see verse 1 as a dependent clause, with verse 2 as either a parenthesis or the principal clause—as in several recent translations:

When God began to create the heaven and the earth—the earth being unformed and void …—God said …

(Jewish Publication Society, 1962)

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland.… Then God said …

(New American Bible, 1970)

In the beginning of creation, when God made heaven and earth, the earth was without form and void.… God said …

(New English Bible, 1970)

All three endorse a transformational view of Creation, entailing a pre-Genesis time and chaotic space.

The eminent scholar of Hebrew Scriptures, Harry Orlinsky, argued that the cumulative evidence—from the study of lexicons, syntax, context, and comparable Near Eastern stories of how the universe began—favors this interpretation. Indeed, no lexical or grammatical objections can be raised against it. But the context and the comparisons with other Near Eastern creation stories favors the next view we shall examine. Moreover, with two notable exceptions, Jewish and Christian traditions have understood verse 1 as an independent clause.

• A fourth way of understanding the relationships in these verses (and perhaps the best way) is to see verse 1 as a summary statement that matches the concluding summary statement of Genesis 2:1: “Thus the heavens and the earth were completed”; and to see verse 2 as a circumstantial clause modifying verse 3.

Thus understood, Genesis 1:1–3 could be translated: “In the beginning God created the cosmos. Now [this is how it happened]. The earth was chaotic …, and then God said …” Like the third option, this reading also entails a pre-Genesis time and Earth.

Read this way, Genesis 1:1–3 would be similar in structure to the introduction of the other Creation story in Genesis 2:4–7, as well as with other ancient Near Eastern tales of how it all began.

An obvious theological objection will be raised against this transformationalist view. Where did the negative conditions originate? The question is best answered with another question: Where did Satan originate? The origins of both moral evil and natural evils (like tornadoes and malaria) remain a mystery in monotheism, and Genesis offers a relative beginning with respect to each. Nevertheless, by comparing Scripture with Scripture, transformationalists should conclude that both evil and matter are temporal in contrast to the eternal (see Jer. 10:16; John 1:3; Col. 1:16).

Since Genesis seems to presume pre-existent matter and time, scientific creationists would do better to argue for an old Earth rather than a young one.

How Long Are The “Days” Of Genesis?

Part of the problem science poses for the interpreter of Genesis is the long periods of time required to lay down the fossil record. Obviously, those who wish to harmonize Bible and science must in some way read the seven days of Creation as something other than 24-hour days.

Progressive creationists—who tend to minimize divine, special intervention and to maximize the operation of natural law—make room for the long ages in two ways:

First, some interpret the days of Genesis as successive days on which God revealed his creative process to Moses. Back in the last century, J. H. Kurtz wrote that God revealed to his prophet, Moses, through visions seven progressive scenes of pre-Adamite creation. And in 1936, P. J. Wiseman suggested that God told Moses the story over six days. In this approach, the six visions are presented in logical, but not strictly chronological, order. Wiseman embellishes the theory by noting that Babylonian Creation accounts were customarily put on six tablets with a concluding colophon. And so in Genesis, he alleges, there was a day of revelation for each tablet followed by “the colophon of Genesis 2:4.”

This interpretation of “day” faces the objection that it adds to Scripture. Genesis 1:1–2:3 contains nothing comparable to the introduction in Genesis 15:1: “And the word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision.” And in any case, the verb “made” cannot be changed into “showed” in Genesis 2:2: “And on the seventh day, God ended his work which he had made, and he rested on the seventh day.”

Second, some progressive creationists interpret the days as ages, which they correlate with the successive epochs recorded in the geological column. These advocates of the “day age” theory (which W. B. Riley called, “The Devil’s Counterfeit”) argue that the Hebrew word yom can have other meanings than “a 24-hour period.” For example, in Genesis 2:4, we find the phrase “in the day,” referring to the whole creative process recorded in Genesis 1:1–2:3. Gleason Archer of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School also argues cogently that the events recorded in 2:4–25 (the making of Adam, the planting of the garden, the naming of the animals, and the gift of a bride) cannot be squeezed into a sixth 24-hour period.

This view, however, satisfies neither the text nor science. Terence E. Fretheim of Lutheran Northwestern Theological Seminary linguistically validates the assertion that the author of Genesis intended to write of 24-hour days. And Robert C. Newman of Biblical Theological Seminary shows that they were intended to be chronologically successive. Moreover, in Genesis, against scientific understanding, plants precede marine organisms and even the sun, and birds precede insects. Problems, such as the chronological tension of so much happening on the sixth day, are better explained by an artistic-literary approach.

What Kind Of Literature Is Genesis 1:1–2:3?

The strongest evidence that Genesis 1:1–2:3 should be read as a historically and scientifically accurate narrative is that this traditional interpretation seems to be the plain, normal sense of the passage. When the fourth commandment gives God’s six days of creation and one day of rest as a pattern for human work and Sabbath, it seems to clinch the argument (Exod. 20:11).

But there are two acute contradictions between Genesis and normative science about terrestrial origins: How long the process took, and in what order events took place. These contradictions have driven some biblical scholars to suspect that the passage was not intended to be taken in so straightforward a manner. They have asked just what kind of literature it is, and have compared and contrasted their own preunderstandings with those of the biblical writers. Even if the prodigious research, debates, and diligent publications of the scientific creationists should fully harmonize science with Genesis, Bible scholars can never again read the text through uncorrected lenses.

Former Barrington College President Charles Hummel noted that Genesis 1:1–2:3 is unlike science in these ways:

• Its subject is God, not the forces of nature;

• Its language is everyday speech, not mathematics and technical jargon;

• It is prescriptive (answering the questions who, why, and what ought to be), not descriptive (answering the questions what, how, and what is);

• It is written for the covenant community and is validated by the Spirit, not for a scientific community or validated by empirical evidence.

To pit the biblical claim of Ultimate Cause (“God created the heavens and the earth”) against scientific claims of immediate causes is as mischievous as pitting David’s theological assertion “You created my inmost being” (Ps. 139:13) against genetics. The Bible shows a marked disinterest in the mechanics of Creation (compare the one chapter devoted to the origins of the Earth and life to the numerous detailed chapters in Exodus, Leviticus, Chronicles, and Ezekiel devoted to recounting the formation of Israel’s formal worship system). And certainly science cannot answer questions of the creation’s purpose or value.

In addition, nonconcordists say Genesis 1 conflicts with the aims of modern historians, who exclude ultimate cause and stress brute fact. In contrast to that kind of history writing, the Bible editorializes to the point that it rearranges the order of events in order to make theological points. For example, D. J. A. Clines of Sheffield University shows that the Table of Nations in Genesis 10 (which must chronologically follow the scrambling of languages at the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11) was dischronologized for theological reasons: The author wants to present mankind under God’s blessing to be fruitful and to fill the Earth. And while Exodus (7:14–11:10) reports that God inflicted ten plagues on Egypt, beginning with blood, the poet-theologian of Psalm 105 (vv. 28–41) feels free to reduce the number to seven and begin with darkness (to contrast with God’s three miracles in the desert that begin with light). Similar rearrangements of events in the synoptic Gospels are well known.

Ronald Youngblood of Bethel Seminary West has demonstrated that Genesis 1:1–2:3 has also been dischronologized. In brute history, he argues, it seems unlikely that God created light and “separated light from darkness” on the first day, and then created luminaries as the means “to separate light from darkness” on the fourth day, or that evening and morning existed on the first three days before he created the heavenly lights to mark off days.

These obvious incongruities in the text suggest to more and more evangelicals that a literary reading of Genesis 1:1–2:3 is called for. Systematic theologian Henri Blocher of the Faculté Libre de Théologie Evangélique labels the genre as “historico-artistic.” According to him, the interpreter should understand “the form of the week attributed to the work of creation to be an artistic arrangement … not to be taken literally.” “It is possible,” he adds, “that the logical order [the author] has chosen coincides broadly with the actual sequence of events of the facts of cosmogony; but that does not interest him. He wishes to bring out certain themes and provide a theology of the sabbath.” This approach not only relieves tensions within the narrative itself and with science, but also with the second Creation story (Genesis 2:4–25).

Australian scholar N. Weeks offers a plausible objection: “There is no logical reason why the presence of a structure should prove that a passage is not to be taken literally.” But Weeks fails to address the tensions within the text as well as the figurative elements we shall note later. And Blocher argues against this objection by applying the philosophical principle that prefers simple solutions to multiplied hypotheses.

R. Clyde McCone, professor of anthropology and linguistics at California State University, also objects to a literary approach. He complains, with some justification, that literary theories shift the focus of study away from God to the text and “present little substantive revelation of God.” This may be true of many literary approaches, but it certainly is not necessary.

Even as exegetes call for a literary rereading of the text as an artistic achievement, theologians, professional and self-taught, are calling for a figurative approach. Howard Van Till of Calvin College notes that God’s actions in Creation “are presented in highly figurative and anthropomorphic language.” Even the eminently conservative commentator E. J. Young points to the repeated formulae, “God said,” and “God called,” and reminds us that “God did not speak with physical organs of speech nor did he utter words in the Hebrew language.” These expressions and others portray the transcendent God and his activity in human forms so that earthlings may understand him. So nonconcordists ask: In the light of these obvious and numerous anthropomorphisms, is it not plausible to suppose that the first week is also an anthropomorphic representation of the Creator’s work and rest, so that the covenant people could bear witness to him and imitate his pattern?

If Moses did not intend to write a straightforward history, but an artistic literary account in anthropomorphic language (so that God’s people might imitate him), this would also give us a clue to the meaning of the fourth commandment.

While calling Genesis 1:1–2:3 a literary work, nonconcordists shy away from using the word myth. For most people, that slippery term implies a fanciful, untrue story. Besides, there is actually very little similarity between this story and pagan accounts of the beginning and ordering of the universe. Indeed, some have pointed out that Genesis 1:1–2:3 reads like a polemic against pagan cosmogonies.

Having surveyed the answers to the three big questions, we can draw some conclusions. Perhaps it is best to regard Genesis 1:1–2:3 as a creation story in torah (“instruction”), which is a majestic, artistic achievement, employing anthropomorphic language. As H. J. Sørenson said in the New Catholic Encyclopedia: “The basic purpose is to instruct men on the ultimate realities that have an immediate bearing on daily life and on how to engage vitally in these realities to live successfully. It contains ‘truths to live by’ rather than ‘theology to speculate on.’ ”

Moses intended no distinction between historical data and its theological shaping, and Bible students should resist the temptation to separate the two. Historical critics evaporate history, but nonconcordist evangelicals must take history seriously and compare Scripture with Scripture, a task that some accomplish better than others: In Literary Approaches to Biblical Interpretation, for example, Westminster Theological Seminary’s Tremper Longman helps readers walk gingerly between the promise and pitfalls of the literary approach to the Old Testament. In The Fourth Day, however, Howard Van Till seems to lose his balance when he writes that the primeval history in Genesis 1–11 is not concerned with whether the events actually happened.

This literary approach may unsettle some who cling to the Reformers’ claim that Scripture is perspicuous. But note: The literary approach to Genesis 1:1–2:3 changes no doctrine of the church while it helps us to see some of them more clearly.

Bruce Waltke is professor of Old Testament at Westminster Seminary, Philadelphia. He is coauthor of the newly published Obadiah, Jonah, Micah volume in the Tyndale Old Testament Commentary series (InterVarsity Press).

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