Echo: First, in order for general and special to be pitted against one another in this case, general revelation must teach Abraham that God cannot raise the dead, and special revelation must teach Abraham that he can. This is not the case. General revelation teaches no such contrary-to-special-revelation thing.

I’d put it more simply: dead things stay dead. Every natural observation, every single witness account up to Abraham’s time confirmed this uniformity; on the basis of special revelation, Abraham reasoned against it. “Dead things stay dead — except for my son, whom God will raise back to life.”

Your suggestion of less discongruity between natural expectation and Abraham’s expectation undervalues the intellectual act for which Hebrews chapter 11 extols him. Suppose God made you a promise about one of your children, then commanded you to sacrifice that child before the promise’s fulfillment. Your obedience would be remarkable; expecting your child to be raised back to life even more remarkable. Unlike Abraham, however, you enjoy a cloud of witnesses who have testified to you of God’s prior suspensions of the uniformity of nature by raising others back to life. Abraham, privy to none of this testimony, reasoned beyond the uniformity of nature on his own.

Echo: Next, a necessary premise for your argument would be that general revelation teaches us that the resurrection of the dead is impossible, that all men die, and that’s it.

The statement “resurrection of the dead is impossible” isn’t the same as the statement “all men die, and that’s it.” The first makes a claim about God’s sovereignty over nature; the second makes a claim about nature’s consistency with itself.

To be more specific: “resurrection” is an exception to the uniformity of nature; “impossible” is the same as “not consistent with the uniformity of nature.” So the first statement (“resurrection of the dead is impossible”) boils down to “an exception to the uniformity of nature is not consistent with the uniformity of nature.” It doesn’t say anything — unless by it you mean “resurrection of the dead is impossible for God,” which no one here believes. Indeed, Bible believers subscribe to many exceptions to the uniformity of nature (miracles), and this allows for the possibility of a literal reading of Genesis 1.

I need to take exception to the wording of the second statement as well, as both you and I have pointed out that not all men die — Enoch was taken to be with God without dying. Let’s word the natural observation as “dead things stay dead.” This is the (so-called) uniformity of nature (that God has in a few cases suspended).

Echo: But Paul tells us in Rom 1 that general revelation teaches of a coming judgment.

The fact is, any hope that anyone had for redemption is meaningless if there is no resurrection of the dead, and Paul makes this very explicit in 1 Cor 15.

The coming judgment in Romans chapter 1 occurs during life, not after. Causes: godlessness, wickedness, suppression of truth, failure to glorify or thank God. Effect: multiple forms of sexual, moral, relational and personal degradation … all of which are already evident, as the wrath of God is “being revealed.”

Echo: There are many who teach that the Hebrews didn’t have any notion of a soul that lived on after death of the body, but that’s just not true. Right there in Genesis 50:25, Joseph demands an oath that his bones be carried to the promised land. Why, if they did not know of a resurrection of the dead? Where is the prior revelation of such a thing?

I wrote a story about the Holocaust during my senior year in high school. My English teacher, who was Jewish, pulled me aside and said, “Jews don’t believe in the afterlife,” then pointed out two cases of dialogue I’d written in which Jewish characters used the hope of eternity to comfort themselves over their present travails. His statement stunned me. What good was a religion without an afterlife? Why honor such a God? Why even be moral? I didn’t know, and I didn’t ask (for fear of sounding critical). I bring up this little anecdote to point out that the concept of an afterlife may be a component of faith for many Jews, but not all.

As for Joseph, you’re interpreting his motive. You could be right. But his motive might also have been yearning to be honored, desire for resolution, homesickness, developing character in his sons. Either way, there’s a difference between believing in an eventual (and almost unverifiable) bodily resurrection of those among all generations at the end of time, and the all-too-fast-approaching bodily resurrection of your son after you slay him (the verification or falsification of which would be exquisitely concrete).

Echo: Furthermore, Jesus himself interprets special revelation in the OT:
Mark 12:26 And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? 27 He is not God of the dead, but of the living. You are quite wrong.”
Jesus is not ADDING to special revelation here, but exegeting it. The people were confused at the time of Jesus about these things because of the Sadducees who said there was no resurrection, but Jesus corrected that error. But shall we assume that no one throughout all of redemptive history up until the time of Abraham got the point?

Excellent passage! I’m with you — I make no such assumption; some must have understood God as God of the living Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But where were these gents? The soul’s survival isn’t the same as bodily resurrection. Abraham’s belief that Isaac’s soul would survive death didn’t resolve the issue of Isaac needing to father children to fulfill God’s promise. For that Abraham reasoned his way to a bodily resurrection that would occur for one person immediately, not multiple generations at the end of time.

Echo: In fact, let’s go all the way back to the Garden. There, when Adam and Eve sinned, God did not put them to death as he had promised, but instead put an animal to death and covered them with it, making them wear a reminder that their life comes at a price. What life though? The dead animal wasn’t just a reminder of the just penalty of the law, but also the hope of escaping it. It was the gospel being preached to them visibly.

Agreed — and what a great gospel. With Abraham, however, we’re discussing the uniformity of nature. That uniformity was maintained in Adam and Eve, who both died; in Abel, who died before them; in Cain and Seth and all other generations who died, sans resurrection, leading up to Abraham’s test. Abraham shared in the hope of redemption God graciously provided Adam and Eve, but he knew full well that part of the redemptive deal was (except in the case of Enoch) experiencing bodily death — a bodily death that persisted until some indefinite point in the future. And again, his trust in God’s special revelation (promises) enabled him to reason his way to a distrust in the uniformity of nature he saw in general revelation (dead things stay dead).

Echo: And we do believe that the promise made to Adam, the covenant, had as its ultimate blessing eternal, eschatological life for obedience, and eternal condemnation for disobedience. It wasn’t just about temporal life and death.
Otherwise, what was the hope of Melchizadek? Why was he a priest to God most high? What was his hope? Was it for this life only? You’re right, all men die, but if that’s the end of the story, why would Melchizadek be religious at all? The hope of the people of God has always been the same thing from the very beginning: the resurrection of the dead.
So when we come to the example of Abraham, and we see that he is of the covenant people of God, having paid tithes to Melchizadek, priest to God most high in Jerusalem, we know that he already has some understanding, some hope in the resurrection of the dead, some hope beyond the grave.

As I’m reading through and responding to these points I’m realizing my argument wasn’t clear. I agree with you that Abraham must have known the hope of bodily resurrection through the special revelation that had proceeded his time, and that he himself received. Here’s how I should have clarified:

Reformulation: Abraham used special revelation to reason against the uniformity of nature evident, without exception, throughout history until his lifetime: the persistence of death until an unspecified later date.

(As for your points regarding Melchizedek, again, I agree with you — I don’t understand why anyone who doubts life after death would be religious. I can only point to my senior year English teacher. And of course you’ve already pointed to the Sadducees.)

Echo: No, Paul makes very clear in 1 Cor 15 that there is no such thing as the hoping people of God apart from the hope in the resurrection of the dead, and there have always been people of God, immediately on the heels of the fall, beginning with Adam and Eve, to whom the promises of the hope of the bruising of the serpent’s head were given, as well as the instructions about sacrifices.
Special revelation does not begin with Abraham. Otherwise, what is the meaning of Melchizadek, or the others mentioned before Abraham?
And at any rate, they must have known about Enoch, otherwise how did Moses know about him? And if the grave is the end of the story, where did Enoch go? What did it mean? It had to mean something, and it had to mean something on the other side of death.
And in fact, general revelation itself teaches us that death of the body isn’t the end of the story.
And if you will hear it, they say that Job takes place prior to the formation of Israel. No one knows when it was written for sure, but it’s about a guy who lived, they say, before Israel. And surely he had a robust doctrine of the resurrection, saying, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him,” (13:15) and “in my flesh I will see God” (19:26).
Anyway, the point is, if there was a people of God prior to Abraham, there was also a hope in life beyond the grave, a hope in the resurrection.

Quite right; see my reformulation above.

(To be fair, I pointed out Enoch before you did.)

Echo: But that brings us to Hebrews 11:19. What does it mean when it says that Abraham “reasoned out” (as you say) that God could raise the dead? Well, your claim is that it has to mean that he sort of did the math, and that was the only idea he could come up with that would reconcile everything. So according to how you’re interpreting this verse, Abraham was the first one to figure out that God could raise the dead, and he wasn’t told this all important glorious truth, but rather, he had to figure it out for himself after working out a very difficult puzzle of special revelation that contradicted general revelation.
Well, I think you ask me to concede too much in such a claim. I think you’re insisting on too narrow an understanding of the Greek word that you say must mean “reason out”. It might surprise you to know that the definition of the word can be as simple as “think”. So it might simply mean that he “thought” God was able to raise the dead. It can mean what you are saying that it must mean, but it doesn’t have to. It can refer to logically deriving something. And after all, this is where we get our word “logic” from (this Greek word).

See my reformulation. As for the meaning of the Greek verb, we need to guard against downgrading it too far, because it is the precise intellectual act for which Abraham was honored in Hebrews chapter 11.

This sentence makes Abraham’s thought seem hypothetical: “So it might simply mean that he ‘thought’ God was able to raise the dead.” Hebrews chapter 11 gives the clear context of sacrificing Isaac. No way would Abraham simply speculate on a hypothetical theological point without seeing its direct application to the case at hand. By “Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead” we are to understand more than the end-of-time bodily resurrection of numerous believers from among all generations — we are to understand that Abraham trusted that God could, and would, resurrect Isaac after Abraham slew him.

Echo: But here, I think the simplest explanation, given all that I have said above, is simply that his reasoning for being able to obey was his conviction that God was able to raise the dead. This was his reasoning: God can raise the dead. Thus he was not afraid to trust him to be faithful to his promise, even beyond the veil of death. So the whole thing becomes an illustration about stretching our hope in God beyond the veil of death. But this isn’t entirely new with Abraham. Rather, this characterizes all the people of God. Abraham is simply exceptional in the Scriptures because he is the founder of the Jews, and the book is a Jewish book about the history of their people. So of course Abraham has some serious prominence, and rightly so! But he wasn’t the first to hope in the resurrection of the dead. He cannot be.

This argument would make sense if God had not promised that Abraham would be a father to many nations through Isaac. Suppose Abraham were any old parent asked to sacrifice his son — if that parent obeyed s/he would, as you have described, cling to the hope of eventual resurrection. Abraham’s case is different. God’s promise would not be fulfilled by Isaac’s resurrection at the end of time. The resurrection had to happen contemporaneously, in the wash of time. And again, the problem was that thus far, the wash of time had proven that God didn’t suspend the uniformity of nature concerning death’s persistence, nor would He do so until later. That uniformity was, until then, uniform.

Echo: So for Abraham, was general revelation pitted against special revelation? Not at all. There is nothing in general revelation that had to be trumped. Nothing in general revelation that had to be denied. Notice that what Abraham “reasoned” was not about Isaac, but about God. He wasn’t convicted about a fact about Isaac, whether he could or could not survive after death, but about God, whether he could raise the dead or not. And since Abraham’s belief is that God can raise the dead, and since general revelation by no means contradicts that, but in fact supports that, I just don’t see how Abraham was forced to make a choice here.

See my reformulation. The key is that special revelation drove Abraham to reason out an exception to the uniformity of nature, and Scripture praised him for it.

Echo: But let me reaffirm that if we must choose between our fallible interpretation of one over the other, we should side with special.

I applaud this principle (even as I suspect your commitment to it reinforces your resistance to Abraham’s example).

On to RubeRad’s contribution:

RubeRad: Heb 11:19 is not simply an inspired fact — new revelation of Abraham’s mindset over and above the Old Testament, but it is inspired exegesis of Abraham’s previously revealed response, which includes Gen 22:8: ‘”Abraham said, “God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.”‘ I think that needs to be factored in somehow.

Sure, let’s factor it in. Genesis chapter 22 is history. As such, not everything said or done by characters in history is held forth as right. While Abraham was correct — God did provide the lamb — he could not have known that God would do so, as that would have meant God issuing a recall on His command to sacrifice Isaac. Theologians, philosophers, scholars and poets have examined Abraham’s mindset leading up to the moment of sacrifice. My own theory is that Abraham, caught off guard by Isaac’s question, used doublespeak to avoid lying while also avoiding frightening him: God certainly would provide the lamb (Isaac)!

But I could be wrong. However we are to take that line, it’s not the motivation for which Abraham was credited in Hebrews chapter 11. That the Holy Spirit inspired the writer to the Hebrews to hold Abraham forth as a model of faith for one utterance, while disregarding the other utterance already recorded in Scripture, should indicate which is the more trustworthy.

To summarize:

1. Hebrews chapter 11 honors Abraham for reasoning against the uniformity of nature on the basis of special revelation.
2. This does not necessitate that a 6×24 reading of Genesis should trump scientific observation of the origin of the universe, but it does allow for the possibility.
3. What remains to be seen is whether a compelling enough theological case can be made.

Thanks for the review of the discussion. All of this ANE stuff you cite, while helpful, is not addressing my position. My position is not that Moses read some Babylonian text, now extant, and simply corrected it. That’s not my position, so the position these citations argue against is not mine, thus the citations, while generally helpful, are not helpful in this discussion.

E

Okay, I presented my case, Echo has presented his, at this point there should be enough on the table for one to judge what case he thinks is *exegetically* stronger. I don’t think I’m going to convince Echo, and I don’t think he will convince me. Though we are both open to correction. So, the below is to respond to him, but alos for those reading and trying to determine which case is exegetically stronger. I think I have presented far more positive arguments, and they havemainly been met by “maybes” and “what ifs.”

To respond to his brief comments in response to just a few of my arguments and claims (he left the majority unanswered, but this is understandable given the time we have):

I did tell you why morning and evening were not included on day seven. If you re-read my post you will see the answer I gave. So your question as to why morning and evening is not included has been answered. I also *did not* say that morning and evening *had to* be there for me to read it as a 24 hr day. I rather claims that *if it was there* that was evidence for me to read it that way. You’re fallaciously importing the *converse* of my claim. I might say: persons are propositions. This does not mean I think that propositions are persons. Furthermore, I made the argument from *ordinal.* The 7th day is prefixed by an *ordinal.* In the 119 cases in Moses’ writings where the Hebrew word yom stands in conjunction with a numerical adjective (first, second, third, etc.), it never means anything other than a literal day. The same is true of the 357 instances outside the Pentateuch, where numerical adjectives occur. You may not think this makes for a good argument, I do. Especially as it functions in my *cumulative case* argument.

I don’t need to interact with your long treatise on analogy since that doesn’t affect my argument and your comments rather misses my point. You’re making me say things I never implied.

As far as you saying God is not blessing today. I don’t get it. He blessed the 7th day. Today is the 7th day. He blessed today. Which premise is false. Seems to follow by strict logic. I don’t think you’ve over come my objection. I also have told you why I take it as a 24 hr. day. At this point we’re just intuition bashing. That’s fine. You’re not convinced by my argument. I have provided a rational reason for how I can answer your question. You’re not convinced, but my argument is rational and does not contradict Scripture. Also, it adds to the cumulative force of my overall case.

As to my linguistic fallacy, I did not argue as you say I did. Indeed, I even claimed I was putting forward an *abductive* argument. That is, my theory best explains all the data. I never once said that my view is *entailed* or *necessitated* by my linguistic point. I just think it adds to the pile of evidence I have offered.
I’ll look into the “b’yammin” the *same* as “yammin”? I never argued for yammin with a preposition in front of it. Does the Ex. 20 passage say “byammin”?

As far as the flat earth thing, I gave you a deductive argument where the premises are true, thus I don’t have any burden here. You tell *me* why I should take the text as teaching a flat earth. I don’t see why i should prove that it isn’t. One reason, for me, is that the arguments aren’t there for it! I can produce *nothing* like I produced in support of literal days. That’s why.

Now, you’ve also made much of how Genesis borrows from ANE literature and thought.

I would like to present some claims from scholars and what they think about the whole borrowing from ANE culture and creation account:

“As we have seen above, there is no piece of literature extant from Mesopotamia that presents itself as an account of creation. Therefore, there is nothing comparable to the creation account of Genesis in terms of literary genre. The similarities between the Enuma Elish are too few to think that the author of Genesis was in any way addressing the piece of literature we know as Enuma Elish.”

—John Walton, Ancient Israelite Literature in Its Cultural Context: A Survey of Parallels Between Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Texts (Zondervan 1990), 34.

“We are terribly ill-informed regarding the history of either Mesopotamian or biblical creation accounts. This makes the argument based on chronological sequence null and void. We cannot say for certain that the traditions preserved by the Israelites are any less ancient than the traditions preserved by the Babylonians,” ibid. 36.

“The only evidence that can be produced to support the case for Israelite borrowing is the similarities we have already identified. These are hardly convincing, in that most of the similarities occur in situations where cosmological choices are limited. For example, the belief in a primeval watery mass is perfectly logical and one of only a few possibilities. The fact that the Babylonians and Israelites use similar names, Tiamat and tehom, is no surprise, since their respective languages are cognates of one another,” ibid. 37.

“We must question, however, whether the position that the Bible demythologizes Mesopotamian legends takes into account all the critical data bearing on the issue. First of all, the common assumption that the Hebrew stories are simplified and purified accounts of Mesopotamian legends is fallacious, for in ancient Near Eastern literature simple accounts give rise to elaborate accounts, and not vice versa,” J. Currid, Ancient Egypt and the Old Testament” (Baker 2001), 29.

Second, there are no examples from the ancient Near East in which myth later develops into history. Epic simply never transfigures into historical narrative. And, clearly, the creation and flood accounts in Genesis are presented as direct history with no evidence of myth,” ibid. 29.

“Third, the contrasts between the Mesopotamian and biblical accounts are so striking that they cannot be explained by a simple Hebrew cleansing,” ibid. 29.

“But despite the reiterated claims of an older generation of biblical scholars, Enuma Elish and Gen 1-2 in fact share no direct relationship. Thus the word tehom/thm is common to both Hebrew and Ugaritic (north Syria) and means nothing more than ‘deep, abyss.’ It is not a deity, like Ti’amat, a goddess in Enuma Elish. In terms of theme, creation is the massively central concern of Gen 1-2, but is a mere tailpiece in Enuma Elish, which is dedicated to portraying the supremacy of the god Marduk of Babylon. The only clear comparisons between the two are the inevitable banalities: creation of earth and sky before the plants are put on the earth, and of plants before animals (that need to eat them) and humans; it could hardly have ben otherwise!” K. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Eerdmans 2003), 424.

“The story of creation in the Bible forms the first part of Genesis, and the best known Mesopotamian account is that found in the composition known to the Assyrians as enuma elis (‘when above’) from its first two words…This account is typical of others and shows that, apart from individual details, the Mesopotamian creation stories have little in common with the early chapters of Genesis,” T. Mitchell, The Bible in the British Museum (Paulist Press 2004), 79.

“This sort of maximalist position would see the biblical authors as working directly from Mesopotamian exemplars as they carried out theological transformations. Though this sort of conclusion is common, the summary of comparative literary studies of Genesis 1-11 offered by R. S. Hess in the introduction to ‘I Studied Inscriptions from Before the Flood’ demonstrates that [the maximalist's] conclusions are far from universally held. D. Tsumura’s introduction in the same volume details the rejection of dependence on the Babylonian materials by such well-known Assyriologists as W. G. Lambert and A. Sjoberg….Nevertheless, given the complexity of the transmission of tradition and culture in the ancient world literary dependence is extremely difficult to prove. Walton, Dictionary of the Old Testament Pentateuch, T. Desmond Alexander and David W. Baker (eds). IVP:2003.”

“The similarities between Genesis and Enuma Elish are too few to think that the author of Genesis was in any way addressing the piece of literature we know as Enuma Elish.” Walton, Ancient Israelite Literature in its Cultural Context, John H. Walton, Zondervan: 1989, p.34

“Reconstruction of a process whereby Babylonian myths were borrowed by the Hebrews, having been transmitted by the Canaanites, and ‘purged’ of pagan elements remains imaginary. It has yet to be shown that any Canaanite material was absorbed into Hebrew sacred literature on such a scale or in such a way…However, it has yet to be shown that there was borrowing, even indirectly. Differences between the Babylonian and the Hebrew traditions can be found in factual details of the Flood narrative (form of the Ark; duration of the Flood, the identity of the birds and their dispatch) and are most obvious in the ethical and religious concepts of the whole of each composition. All who suspect or suggest borrowing by the Hebrews are compelled to admit large-scale revision, alteration, and reinterpretation in a fashion that cannot be substantiated for any other composition from the ancient Near East or in any other Hebrew writing. If there was borrowing then it can have extended only as far as the “historical” framework, and not included intention or interpretation. The fact that the closest similarities lie in the Flood stories is instructive. For both Babylonians and Hebrews the Flood marked the end of an age. Mankind could trace itself back to that time; what happened before it was largely unknown. The Hebrews explicitly traced their origins back to Noah, and, we may suppose, assumed that the account of the Flood and all that went before derived from him. Late Babylonian sages supposed that tablets containing information about the ante-diluvian world were buried at Sippar before the Flood and disinterred afterwards. The two accounts undoubtedly describe the same Flood, the two schemes relate the same sequence of events. If judgment is to be passed as to the priority of one tradition over the other, Genesis inevitably wins for its probability in terms of meteorology, geophysics, and timing alone. In creation its account is admired for its simplicity and grandeur, its concept of man accords well with observable facts. In that the patriarch Abraham lived in Babylonia, it could be said that the stories were borrowed from there, but not that they were borrowed from any text now known to us. Granted that the Flood took place, knowledge of it must have survived to form the available accounts; while the Babylonians could only conceive of the event in their own polytheistic language, the Hebrews, or their ancestors, understood the action of God in it. Who can say it was not so?” Millard, “A New Babylonian ‘Genesis’ Story”, in “I Studied Inscriptions from Before the Flood”: Ancient Near Eastern, Literary, and Linguistic Approaches to Genesis 1-11, Richard Hess and David Tsumura (eds.), Eisenbrauns: 1994. p.126.

“In the study of material on Genesis 1-3, consideration should be given to G. F. Hasel’s essays on the methodology and problems of applying the comparative approach to the first chapter of Genesis. In few other passages of the Bible have so many facile comparisons been made with ancient Near Eastern myths and so many far-reaching conclusions posited. Hasel provides observations on fundamental distinctions in the creation accounts, with a strong focus on an antimythological apologetic for Genesis.” Hess, “One Hundred Fifty Years of Comparative Studies on Genesis 1-11″, in “I Studied Inscriptions from Before the Flood”: Ancient Near Eastern, Literary, and Linguistic Approaches to Genesis 1-11, Richard Hess and David Tsumura (eds.), Eisenbrauns: 1994. p.19

“So, Genesis 1 and ‘Enuma Elish,’ which was composed primarily to exalt Marduk in the pantheon of Babylon, have no direct relation to each other…It is not correct to say that ‘Enuma Elish’ was adopted and adapted by the Israelites to produce the Genesis stories. As Lambert holds, there is ‘no evidence of Hebrew borrowing from Babylon’. Sjoberg accepts Lambert’s opinion that ‘there was hardly any influence from the Babylonian text on the Old Testament creation accounts.’ …Along the same line, Sjoberg as an Assyriologist warns Old Testament scholars that ‘it is no longer scientifically sound to assume that all ideas originated in Mesopotamia and moved westward.’ …It is difficult to assume that an earlier Canaanite dragon myth existed in the background of Gen. 1:2…Shea suggests that ‘it is possible to view these two separate sources [Adapa and Genesis 2-3] as independent witnesses to a common event’…Niels-Erik Andreasen also thinks that ‘parallels do indeed exist between Adam and Adapa, but they are seriously blunted by the entirely different contexts in which they occur.’…” Tsumura, “Genesis and Ancient Near Eastern Stories of Creation and Flood, “I Studied Inscriptions from Before the Flood”: Ancient Near Eastern, Literary, and Linguistic Approaches to Genesis 1-11, Richard Hess and David Tsumura (eds.), Eisenbrauns: 1994. p.31.

“Nevertheless, the differences between the biblical and the Mesopotamian accounts are much more striking that their similarities; each of them embodies the world outlook of their respective civilizations. In Genesis there is a total rejection of all mythology…[Differences include:]…Cosmogony is not linked to theogony. The pre-existence of god is assumed–it is not linked to the genesis of the universe. there is no suggestion of any primordial battle or internecine ware which eventually led to the creation of the universe…The primeval water, earth, sky, and luminaries are not pictured as deities or as parts of disembodied deities, but are all parts of the manifold work of the Creator…The story in Genesis, moreover, is nonpolitical: unlike Enuma Elish, which is a monument to Marduk and to Babylon and its temple, Genesis makes no allusion to Israel, Jerusalem, or the temple.” S.M. Paul Ency. Judacia, s.v. “Creation”, 5:1062

Well done! Well done indeed!

Well, that certainly is a good argument, and I appreciate you putting it forth. I’m speaking of Num 7.

Linguistically, you have a very powerful argument to make there.

However, I think I can still recognize the linguistic parallels, without saying that the days of creation must be taken literally.

The ground for such a claim comes from recognizing that Gen 1 is about God and what he does. God is always revealed in analogy, anthropomorphically, if you will.

I gotta tell you though, you make a very strong argument. It’s such a good argument, that I don’t even want to argue against it. I just want to let it stand.

As for your claim about the majority of ministers in the OPC having a literal view, my sense is that you are incorrect. It’s maybe 50-50 in my estimation (half literal, half non-literal). That’s the sense I get. And of those that take the narrative literally, only a very small percentage of them want to make it hard for guys to get licensed/ordained if they hold a non-literal view. In most presbyteries, it’s not a problem. But we should speak about these matters in person rather than here.

Let me just say again, big, big kudos for pointing out Num 7. Well done, as I said, well done.

Specifically, it defeats my point about Gen 2:4, and I appreciate being corrected.

E

You said:

iii) As stated in Exodus 20:9-11 and 31:17, the purpose is not for analogy but for *imitation.* And, to what are the creation days analogous? God is timeless and not under temporal constraint. Lee Irons has stated that “God has not chosen to reveal that information” (Irons, “The Framework Interpretation Explained and Defended,” [1998], 66). But how is analogy useful here?

Echo: You seem to assume that “analogy” is an end in itself. It’s not. But that it is an analogy doesn’t preclude imitation.

For example, Christ loves the church. A whole lot. We are called to imitate him by loving our brother. Is there some difference between Christ’s love for the church and our love for our brother? Yes. In fact, it would be impossible for us to duplicate Christ’s love for the church, even apart from sin, because God is infinite and we are finite. Our love for our brother isn’t just to be distinguished from God’s love with respect to quantity, but also to quality. Thus the relationship between Christian love and God’s love is best understood as analogy, viz, our love is analogously related to God’s love.

And so we should understand the Scriptures when it says that man is made in the image of God. Do we look like God? How can that be, since God doesn’t have a body? We are walking, talking analogies of God. That means we’re like God in some ways, but not like him in others. It’s not a one to one correspondence, because we are not God. But we are somehow like him, so the statement isn’t meaningless either.

Thus, when we see that our Sabbath rest should look like God’s Sabbath rest, we know it doesn’t mean the same thing. God doesn’t kick back on his porch and sip a margarita and smoke a cigar, but that’s what my Sabbath rest looks like. Nonetheless, somehow, there is a similarity between the two. God’s rest and our rest is not the same thing, there are differences, driven by the Creator-creature distinction. But they aren’t entirely different either. They’re similar. One is like the other. One is patterned after the other.

Another example is the tabernacle in the wilderness and the tabernacle in heaven. Again, there are similarities, but they aren’t precisely the same thing.

Whenever we compare us and God, analogy is involved, because we can’t ever be just like God, only similar to God. Even when we’re glorified we still won’t be the eternal Creator. We will not have infinite Being, but will remain finite. We’ll be like him, but not exactly like him.

You said:

“I don’t see how you remotely think this shows the day is not literal. If you think the 7th day is continuing even now, then God is blessing this sin-cursed creation.”

If his Sabbath rest on day 7 entails his taking the throne over creation, and he still sits on that proverbial throne, then the 7th day has not ended. Many 6-24 believe that the 7th day is unending, that it points to his eternal Sabbath rest, which we will partake in only upon glorification at the end of the ages. Now if that’s not you, that’s fine, but just because you take a literal view doesn’t mean that you have to see the 7th day as a 24 hour day.

For his Sabbath day rest to be continuing now doesn’t entail that the blessing is continually being given. The blessing can be once and for all, even if the day is unending, because the inauguration of the day is when he blessed the creation.

However, the rain falls on the just and the unjust, so if you think he doesn’t give blessings to all mankind, then you really are, in my opinion, denying common grace. Common grace is common blessing.

I don’t understand your beef with taking the 7th day to be eternal or unending. That’s why many take the position that the 6 days are presented as literal days, but the week as a whole is presented as figurative.

You said: “i) Um, I thought “yowm” was used in Judges 21:25. See Strong’s Number: 03117″

Echo: I don’t really care what Strong says, the Masoretic text, which I actually looked at to double check before I threw it up in my post, says “yammim”. Maybe Strong’s Hebrew text was jacked up.

Here, look at this resource for yourself.

http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0721.htm

The first word of that verse in Hebrew (the word on the right) is yammin, with the preposition “b” on the front. “Bayammim”: in the days. The second word is “hahem”, which means those. So “in those days”.

בַּיָּמִים

These letters are probably hard to see, but there it is. From right to left, the first letter is a “b”, and the little line underneath it is a vowel, an “a” class vowel. That vowel means that it is “in THE days” not “in days”. The next letter, the little apostrophe looking thing to the left of the “b” is a yod. It’s the letter “y”. The little tiny “t” underneath it is another vowel. The next letter which looks like a little hill with a tail is a mem, the letter “m”. The little dot underneath it, plus the “y” to the left of it, and the final letter that looks like a square, all simply signify the plural. The little dot plus the “y” makes an “ee” sound, but is really an “i” and the last letter that looks like a box is another mem (they look different when at the end of a word). So there ya have it. That spells “yamim”.

You said: “ii) Even if you find one or two other uses, the majority of evidence is on my side.”

Echo: this claim is linguistically fallacious. You don’t say, “what does this word most often mean?” and then insist that it always has that meaning. It’s always a matter of, “what does it mean here?” And here, “yamim” clearly refers to an age, an epoch, a period of time. Not literal. And it doesn’t mean “when”.

And speaking of that, just because “in the day” is an idiomatic phrase meaning “when” doesn’t mean that’s how the Hebrews took it. They took it as “in the day” just as they said it. Just like when an old man says, “In MY day, we didn’t have computers.” He uses the same word, but we know he means it differently. So when you say that Moses’ use of “yom” in Gen 2:4 doesn’t mean day, you’re oversimplifying things. Idiomatic meaning doesn’t mean that it’s a different word.

You said: “iv) How about a literal Adam? A literal fall? Why are those literal? How is this not arbitrary?”

Echo: I’ve given reasons for why it’s not arbitrary. You may not agree with those reasons, but that doesn’t make them stop being reasons. These reasons make it not arbitrary.

Do you take apocalyptic literature literally? What exactly about those texts makes you take it non-literally? How is that not arbitrary?

The passage strikes me as non-literal, similar to apocalyptic literature, because of its subject matter, because of the metaphoric ways in which it speaks of the creation, such as unsourced light which is then formed into the sun, moon and stars, as if those bodies consist of light – which they don’t, because of the language of separated waters, which no one knows exactly what they refer to, which were never said to have been created out of nothing – have you ever thought of that? The waters aren’t said to be created out of nothing, but are spoken of already as existing in Gen 1:2.

Furthermore, God doesn’t have a mouth with which to speak. God is a Spirit. He doesn’t have a body. So when he “speaks”, the word he utters is what, exactly? Surely not mere sound waves. Otherwise, how could this Word become flesh? How could this Word be said to be one and the same with God? The narrative is chalk full of obvious analogies of various kinds.

Doesn’t God create darkness? Isn’t that what Isaiah says (45:7)? And yet, there is no day mentioned on which darkness was created. it was already present to be separated from the light. But wasn’t darkness also created ex nihilo? And the waters? The deep? There must have been some creative activity prior to day one, if God created all things ex nihilo. Have you ever thought of that? Your view cannot account for that. You at least need to revise the creation to 7 days, plus one of rest, to account for the first day on which God created darkness and the deep, the waters.

If God’s Sabbath is a simple, one day rest from his creative activity, then how does the author to the Hebrews say that there remains a Sabbath for the people of God? What is this Sabbath that we will enter into? Has God entered it yet? Have we?

No, there are analogies all over the place in the Gen narrative.

And how can it be that man is created in the image of God, both male and female? Is God our Father or our Mother? How can a man be the image of God, and also a woman, and yet men and women are so very different? How can both be in the image of God if there is no analogous relationship going on here?

In what way does the sun rule over the day and the moon rule over the night? Do they sit on thrones and govern? Do they make decisions, and if so, who are their servants to carry them out? Aren’t there a few things about the narrative that shouldn’t be taken literally?

What does it mean to separate light from darkness? How were they first mingled? Can there be such a thing as darkness and light mingling, and what does it mean to separate them? Isn’t this an analogy, and if so, to what does it refer?

Why does John, in the first 5 verses of his Gospel, refer to light as the life which is in Christ, and why does he say that the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it, and why is he deliberately drawing parallels to creation when he says it? Is John taking Gen 1 literally or figuratively?

When the author to the Hebrews speaks of a “day” that is called “Today”, to what is he referring? Where exactly in Scripture does he get the idea that days refer to something greater than 24 hours if not Gen 1? Does he get the idea from the “Day” of the Lord? Will the judgment to come take a long period of time to take place, and is that the only way the author to the Hebrews could have come to take “day” figuratively? Won’t the “Day” of the Lord be literally one day on which the Lord returns? How is he saying that this age is called Today without any previous revelation which helps that make sense, if the days of Gen 1 are to be taken literally? Was he exegeting Scripture, of was the Holy Spirit simply inspiring him to speak in a very obscure way, unprecedented in Scripture? Weren’t the Jews his audience? Didn’t they have the Old Testament? Wouldn’t they have already been comfortable with the concept of Day referring to something greater than 24 hours, since the idea is one already familiar to them, so that they might understand just what the heck he’s talking about?

Are there a few things about this passage that shouldn’t be taken literally?

You said: iv) I’m not even invoking rules. I am invoking how the AUTHOR used those words IN EVERY OTHER PLACE. That is a valid exegetical procedure (cf. Stewart. OT Exegesis).

Echo: Yes, it’s a valid procedure, but it just isn’t the end of the story. What governs what the words mean in THIS passage is not what the same words mean in other passages, but how they are being used HERE.

You said: “The chronological succession leaves too deep an impression upon the narrative to be mere window dressing.”

Echo: Agreed.

You said: “ii) I gave reasons for the 7th day being literal. You’re not responding to that. I don’t think God is continually blessing this creation. That is the logical outcome of your view. I just differ here. I guess I just don’t have those intuitions. I don’t think God blesses the cursed days. He only blessed his good creation.”

Echo: I think I have responded to it. Your reasons for taking the other days as literal entails the “morning and evening” refrain. But there is no such refrain here. At least tell me why it is absent. Isn’t its absence conspicuous to you? And I have already showed that God continually blessing the creation with the same blessing with which he blessed it is not a logical conclusion of my claim. The grammar simply doesn’t bear that out.

You said: “That’s not very interesting. I mean, I knew my friend who fixed the computer did it “by his hands.” I still don’t know *how.*”

Echo: Ok, that’s satisfying.

You said: “Now, I gave a whole *list* of arguments for why I take the days literally. You would need *at least* as much argumentative force for your *claim* that we should take Moses as trying to teach a literal, historical flat earth. If you don’t believe that, then you’re simply begging the question.”

Echo:

1. I don’t think the narrative is trying to teach a flat earth.

2. I also don’t think the point of the narrative is to teach a timeframe of the creation.

3. If the narrative is trying to teach a timeframe, as you say, and the days are to be taken literal, then the creation actually does consist of what the narrative says it does, and the activities conducted on those days are actually what God did on those days.

4. So that means that on day 1, there was light that God created. On day 2 God created an expanse, on day 3, he created the dry land, etc.

5. The narrative describes things that took place on the various days AS IF the earth were flat. (That’s the best explanation I can come up with to explain the strange separated waters for instance.)

6. IF, and ONLY IF, the days are to be taken literally, then the point of the narrative would be to describe God’s creative activity on the 6 days of creation, just as they actually took place.

7. IF and ONLY IF, the days are to be taken literally, then the text also teaches a flat earth.

8. I am free to believe that the earth is not flat, and that that is not the point of the narrative BECAUSE and ONLY BECAUSE I don’t take the days literally, but take the entire account as an analogy, having some similarity to what happened, but not exactly what happened.

9. Pretend the narrative describes a flat earth, just for fun. Then how could it be that the days are to be taken literally, and the activities of those days are not to be taken literally?

E

You said: “But, let’s face it, WSCAL is not “world-class” in the scholars sense.”

Echo: and precisely how do you reckon that you’re qualified to make such a judgment?