Misinterpreting Genesis: What Does “Day” Really Mean?

I’m going to discuss the answers to these questions in today’s blog post, but I also answered these and more in a recent video if you prefer that format:

You know, I want you to think about these questions. I’ve met a lot of pastors and a lot of people in churches who say, “We don’t know what the word ‘day’ means in Genesis 1.”

Why is there a problem with Genesis 1?

But the Hebrew word for day, yom, is used hundreds of times in the Old Testament. And you know what’s interesting? We seem to know what it means everywhere else in the Old Testament, but not in Genesis 1. Why is there a problem with Genesis 1?

Well, I’ll tell you why. Because the idea of millions of years has permeated people’s thinking, and it’s permeated the church. And people recognize that if you’re going to try to fit millions of years into the Bible, you can’t fit them into the Genesis 5 genealogy.

That genealogy in Genesis 5 is very tight. In fact, the wording literally states about those listed, “He himself begat.” You can’t put gaps in there. There’s no way you can fit millions of years in there. So people say, “Well, if we’re going to fit millions of years into the Bible, somehow we have to do it before Adam,” which means somewhere within the six days of creation. And that is the reason I find that people don’t want to believe in six literal days—because ultimately they’re trying to fit the millions of years somewhere into the Bible.

Now, I’ve also had people tell me, “Okay, well, the word for ‘day’ in Genesis 1, the word used for each of the six days, is the word yom, but it can mean something other than an ordinary day.” And here’s my answer to that: That’s true. It can, but it can also mean an ordinary day. The question is not whether it can mean something other than an ordinary day. It’s what does it mean in the context of Genesis 1?

The Hebrew word for “day,” yom, has a range of meanings. For instance, in Genesis 2:4 where it says, “in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens,” it’s not referring to a specific day. It means “time.” But for each of the six days in Genesis 1, the Hebrew word yom means an ordinary day because of the context. Whenever the Hebrew word yom is used with “evening,” “morning,” a number, or “night,” it always means an ordinary day.

And in the description of the first day, you have all of these—“evening,” “morning,” a number, and “night” (Genesis 1:5)—and it actually literally says, “and there was evening and morning, one day.” The “one” is a cardinal number; whereas for the other days, Scripture says second, third, fourth, fifth, or sixth. Why the difference? Because God was actually defining what a day is.

We need to believe God’s Word in context the way it’s written in the Hebrew language and according to the rules of Hebrew grammar.

You know what? We need to believe God’s Word in context the way it’s written in the Hebrew language and according to the rules of Hebrew grammar. Yom means an ordinary day for each of the six days of creation.

And another aspect of this to remember is if you believe in millions of years, you have death and diseases (like cancer as found in fossil bones) millions of years before sin. In Genesis 1–2 (after God made man on day six but before sin entered the world), he said everything he made was very good. If the fossil record was laid down over millions of years before this, that would mean you have God calling cancer very good, because there’s cancer (and other diseases like abscesses, arthritis, and so on) in fossil bones.

Secularists, and those who dispute the meaning of “day” in Genesis 1 to make long ages “fit” into the Bible, believe the fossil record was laid down over millions of years before man. This doesn’t make sense in light of God’s declaration about his creation being “very good” on day six. However, if you take the Genesis accounts as the literal history they are, it’s easy to see how the fossil record is actually a record of the flood of Noah’s day. It’s a graveyard of the flood, not proof of millions of years.

No, you can’t have death and disease before sin. You can’t fit millions of years into the days of creation. God created everything in six literal days. Knowing those days are six literal days and that Adam was created on day six, we can take the genealogies and other historical information to calculate that it’s about 2,000 years from Adam to Abraham, 2,000 years from Abraham to Christ (who came as the God-man), and then approximately 2,000 years from Christ’s incarnation until now. That means the whole universe (and the earth) is only about 6,000 years old.

That’s why we at AiG believe in a young universe and earth—because that’s what Scripture teaches. You can’t add millions of years into the Bible.

So does the language in Genesis 1 eliminate the possibility of long ages in Genesis? Yes, it certainly does!

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,
Ken

This item was written with the assistance of AiG’s research team.