The Day-Age Interpretation

The Day-Age Interpretation of Genesis 1 holds that each of the six days of creation represents a long, indefinite period of time rather than a 24-hour day. Each day may represent millions or billions of years, allowing the Genesis 1 chronology to be squared with the findings of modern science.

In its favor, advocates of the Day-Age Interpretation can point to the fact that, in Hebrew as in English, the word "day" can mean a number of things. It can mean "the daylight hours of the day," "a 24-hour day," or "an undefined period of time."

Sentences like the following three are thus equally possible in both English and Hebrew:

  • "He went out during the day, but he came home again at night."
  • "We’re open 24 hours a day, seven days a week."
  • "Many Christians were put to death in the Emperor Nero’s day."

Strictly focusing on the word "day" (Hebrew, yom, which rhymes with "foam") it is possible that the six days of creation could be read as six long periods of time.

Advocates of the interpretation can even point to the fact that Genesis 2:4 uses the word yom in precisely this sense, speaking of "the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens."

But there are problems.

First, the Genesis 2:4 reference seems to be part of a different literary unit. We seem to have moved on from the recounting of the week of creation to zoom in on the specific creation of Adam and Eve. This means that the use of the word yom in 2:4 may not shed all that much light on its use in chapter 1. Further, since Genesis 1 depicted the creation of the heavens and the earth as a succession of six yoms (to stick an English plural ending on a Hebrew word; the Hebrew plural would be yomim, pronounced yo-meem) and since 2:4 depicts it as being created in a single yom, that’s at least prima facie evidence that yom is being used in different senses in these passages.

These are small matters, though. Now for some big ones.

The Day-Age Interpretation has a HUGE problem with the fact that the day/night cycle is set up on Day One, while the sun isn’t created until Day Four.

The ancients knew that the fact that the sun is shining is what provides daylight and makes it day, and that the absence of the sun is why the sky is dark at night. This is not something that you need Charles Darwin or even Galileo Galilei to tell you. It’s pretty blog obvious. We know the ancients understood it because some of them–like Origen and Augustine–commented on the fact that the sun was created after the day/night cycle and speculated on what this might mean for the nature of these days.

To get around this problem, advocates of the Day-Age Interpretation have tried proposing a number of theories, none of which are plausible readings of the text in Genesis.

For example: There was a mist or cloud or barrier or atmospheric condition of some kind that blocked clear vision of the sun until the fourth age but which let daylight seep through in a diffuse way for the first three ages. Well, that’s not suggested by anything in Genesis 1. It’s pure speculation designed to prop up a theory that is otherwise in trouble.

Or: The Day-Ages in Genesis 1 aren’t concurrent. They overlap with each other, so the sun would have been visible from the earth’s surface in earlier ages. (This variant also can get around the problem of how birds and fish get created on Day Five even though land animals aren’t created till Day Six. Modern science suggests that the order was fish > land animals > birds, which doesn’t square with Genesis 1 unless the days overlap.) Again, this is not suggested by ANYTHING in Genesis 1. It’s pure speculation designed to prop up a theory that is otherwise in trouble.

But even if the sun-on-Day-Four problem could be solved, there’s another LARGER problem which is completely insoluble as far as I’m concerned.

It’s this: At the end of each day in Genesis 1 the text says a variant on, "And there was evening and there was morning, a second day" (the last bit of the phrase is what changes).

Evening and morning were the two cusps of the 24-hour day in Hebrew time reckoning. The placement of evening first also represents Hebrew time reckoning, since the Hebrew day began at sunset, so evening came before morning. "There was evening and there was morning" is a kind of hendiadys that expresses the whole of the Hebrew day. It’s like saying "day and night" in English–a way of gesturing to the whole of a 24-hour day by naming the two opposing parts of it.

That’s why the phrase is then followed by "one day, "a second day," "a third day," and so on. The evening and morning hendiadys emphasizes the two parts of each of the six days of creation.

Now here’s the problem: The evening and morning hendiadys clearly points us in the direction of a 24-hour day, and the Day-Age Interpretation has an INSURMOUNTABLE problem in that this hendiadys would NEVER have been used to describe a long, indistinct period of time. Long periods of time (especially ones millions or billions of years long) are not divisible in terms of a single evening and a single morning–not by anything other than the interpreter’s fiat, at any rate. This was NOT a part of ancient Hebrew time reckoning, and it would have occurred to NOBODY in the ancient world.

And so I think the Day-Age Interpretation is demonstrably false. It simply is not a credible reading of the text in literary terms.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

20 thoughts on “The Day-Age Interpretation”

  1. The evening and morning hendiadys clearly points us in the direction of a 24-hour day, and the Day-Age Interpretation has an INSURMOUNTABLE problem in that this hendiadys would NEVER have been used to describe a long, indistinct period of time. Long periods of time (especially ones millions or billions of years long) are not divisible in terms of a single evening and a single morning–not by anything other than the interpreter’s fiat, at any rate. This was NOT a part of ancient Hebrew time reckoning, and it would have occurred to NOBODY in the ancient world.

    Yes! Boom! Say good night, day-age theory.
    And I learned a new word: hendiadys! Hendiadys hendiadys hendiadys. What fun!

  2. I still like to say “scrupuling”.
    Great work, Jimmy. Up to now, I was sympathetic to the Day-Age view, but it’s looking rather shaky.
    Can’t wait for the upcoming posts.

  3. I’ve posted this elsewhere, but time is a construct of one’s frame of reference within creation. In an accelerated frame of reference, time moves more slowly relative to another observer not accelerated.
    Pick your frame of reference and you can have the creation of Man take any amount of time between 0 and 16 billion years, even, if you like, 6 days.
    PVO

  4. I’ve posted this elsewhere, but time is a construct of one’s frame of reference within creation. In an accelerated frame of reference, time moves more slowly relative to another observer not accelerated.

    Makes no difference at all. You still don’t get zillion-year “days” composed of evening and morning. Granted the validity of an accelerated frame of reference, a literal evening and morning would be the blink of an eye, and skillions of them would pass within the “days” of the day-age theory. The day-age theory can’t be saved by this type of consideration.

  5. To stay faithful to Jimmy’s intentions in the blog, I’d like to point out that the question of accelerated points of reference for measuring the time of creation is not really to the point when it comes to the question of “What did the author mean to say?” Folks way back when didn’t think about theories of relativity.
    Now, one could counter by saying that an INSPIRED author might have had a special insight into the nature of the universe. Granted, but he would then have had to express his special insight in words his contemporaries would understand. If we cannot see that he used language that would alert his reader to the presence of a new insight about the nature of time–and such language would have to be extreme to break through the preconceptions of his age–then we have to presume that he did not intend to communicate any such insight.
    If I understand Jimmy correctly, this is why he wants to keep modern science off-stage for a while. It is useful insofar as we know that an inerrant text cannot contradict the valid conclusions of modern science, but not directly useful for detecting the author’s intention.

  6. Explaining modern science in ancient Israelite terms isn’t going to be the biggest problem though. The biggest problem is going to be that relativity doesn’t quite work the way that you think that it works.
    It’s true that if you were going at an higher velocity time goes slower, but for you time doesn’t go slower at all because the speed of light is still the speed of light. Hence, the term relativity. Instead you would think that time for everyone else not in you reference frame appears to be going slower. It’s not going to be until you change your velocity that anything strange is going to happen when you would see time in the non-accelerating reference frame going faster and notice that you had been the one accelerating. As long as you’re going at a constant velocity you wouldn’t notice anything. In other words, your frame of reference wouldn’t just have to be accelerated, it would have to accelerate, travel, stop, and accelerate again.
    In order for this 6 days relativity thing to work it would mean that the person in the accelerated reference frame would have to accelerate and stay at a given high fraction of the speed of light for one day (by his time inside the spaceship), then stop and figure that his clock was the correct one for one day even though you could see all sorts of strange things indicating that that was not the case. For example, mountain building processes that would take years happen overnight, radioactive decay of other particles would have occurred much faster than the flux of atoms out would indicate otherwise. It would take some rather large leaps of faith on the clock issue alone. That would then define the first day.
    Then the accelerating and stopping would have to repeat another 5 times, with all the same caveats about observations. It also means that you’re going to have a have a predefined length of a “day” that can be measured by a clock on the spaceship since you can’t really look out the window and see the sun set or rise because what would it set behind? Furthermore, all the lights and everything will look strange as there would be blue and red shifts as well as tunnel vision.
    Could you force it to work using relativity? Yes, probably. However, considering all of the really, really, really, really strange things that you would have to gloss over in this “accelerated frame of reference” idea it really does seem quite silly.
    I always knew all those physics classes would come in useful.

  7. I think Jimmy tosses around “insurmountable” a wee bit too freely. “Seems unlikely” maybe but “insurmountable” in a text where four out of the five theories Jimmy mentions is going to use some sort of literary escape clause is a bit much.

  8. “The Day-Age Interpretation has a HUGE problem with the fact that the day/night cycle is set up on Day One, while the sun isn’t created until Day Four.”
    I’m with you on the rest, but how is this bit an argument against a Day-Age interpretation? It would certainly seem to rule out literal solar days, but not days representing arbitrary epochs.

  9. The point is not in interpretation, but whether the intent was literal. Though I may be dense, this is the crux between this theory, and what Jimmy will posit as theory number one. The difference being proclaimed is whether a day consisting of multiple mornings and nights could be consider the literal intent of the author writing a literal account versus the author having an intent to write a figurative account. In other words was the author attempting to write a philosophic truth for just the day portion and was literally and scientifically consistant throught the rest or was the author writing a philosophically truthful account throughout and not scientifically consistent to any meaningful extent?

  10. The point is not in interpretation, but whether the intent was literal. Though I may be dense, this is the crux between this theory, and what Jimmy will posit as theory number one. The difference being proclaimed is whether a day consisting of multiple mornings and nights could be consider the literal intent of the author writing a literal account versus the author having an intent to write a figurative account. In other words was the author attempting to write a philosophic truth for just the day portion and was literally and scientifically consistant throught the rest or was the author writing a philosophically truthful account throughout and not scientifically consistent to any meaningful extent?

  11. Extremely improbable, or even lacking all support, is not “demonstrably false.” You can’t have that kind of certainty in a literary debate.

  12. “In order for this 6 days relativity thing to work it would mean that the person in the accelerated reference frame would have to accelerate and stay at a given high fraction of the speed of light for one day (by his time inside the spaceship), then stop and figure that his clock was the correct one for one day even though you could see all sorts of strange things indicating that that was not the case. ”
    There is no “correct” timeframe, except God’s. The rate at which the mountains were built doesn’t prove anything about which frame of reference is correct unless you go in with the notion that our frame of reference today on Earth is the “correct” one. There is no reason to do this, unless we think that there was an Earthbound observer watching all of this before the Earth was formed.
    PVO

  13. The arguement offered here is interesting. I do have one difficulty with it, that being the idea that things like atmospheric conditions are not supported by the text. I don’t feel that they necessarily are supported either.
    I do know that Hugh Ross draws this conclusion from the Hebrew used to describe the creation of the sun and the stars. He states that the Hebrew does not say the celestial bodies are created, but rather that they are made visible. His entire suggestion is that these bodies had already been created by God in Genesis 1:1, but that they were not visible. If the Hebrew really indicates that these things became visible in the later days, as opposed to saying that they were created in those days, then it would seem to be a support for his interpretation.
    In the end it doesn’t really matter, though!

  14. PVO,
    The point of the argument that Jimmy is positing has nothing to do with “point of view” in an E=MC2 formula. It has EVERYTHING to do with the author’s intent in writing “days” instead of “eras” or “epochs”. In other words, “according to the texts, is it at all possible to say that the author intended for a “day” to mean anything other than a 24 hour period of time?” Quite plainly, the answer is no, because of the extent to which the author goes to ensure that what is meant by day is a 24 hour period.
    Now, the “scientific” aspect of the whole thing is another question entirely, but if one was to try and interpret Genesis 1 as meaning anything other than a 24 hour period of time, then that individual would have nothing to support his assertion.
    Upon realizing that the Biblical account could not refer to “epochs” or “eras”, one needs to understand that the creation of the world and universe would provide certain bits of evidence that would indicate “age”. Take, for instance, the creation of Adam. If Adam was to be examined by a doctor just minutes after his initial creation, the doctor would say that Adam was a full adult male of approximately 33 years of age (or so) who was in perfect health. In other words, without being TOLD, the doctor would have to assume that Adam was 33 years old, when in fact he was minutes old. The same holds true with the creation of the world. Suppose the world WAS created in 6 days, and in that time was filled with all the plants and animals that ever existed (dinosaurs, mammals, and man alike), and on the 8th day, a scientist was to examine the world … how old would he say that it was, if he was not told how long it took to make the earth? He would assume, AT THE VERY LEAST, that the earth was as old as it took the longest living animal or plant to reach full maturity, and he would be wrong.
    So, all your “points of reference” are relevant, but you have to ask yourself … who is giving you your reference point; God or man?

  15. The key point I’m trying to make is that one observer’s day IS in fact another observer’s aeon. So this whole debate is pointless, since the passage doesn’t tell us anything other than the conceptual order of creation. Time is not an absolute measurement, no matter how much we presume our frame of reference is the canonical one.
    PVO

  16. PVO, what the heck are you talking about?
    Are you trying to say that the author’s definition of a 24 hour period of time is somehow different than your interpretation of 24 hours or mine? If that is what you are asserting, then there is no purpose to language at all since all meanings are relative to the individual, and no conveyance of meaning could ever be attained.
    It sounds to me like you are trying to reach for something to hold on to so you can maintain some sort of biblical authority in regards to an old earth, but that evidence simply does not exist.
    Besides, if you disbelieve that the author meant a 24 hour period of time for each day of creation, the impetus is on YOU to support that argument.

  17. Jeremy,
    Why are we assuming that the contemporaries of the inspired author perfectly understood what he had to write? For that matter, why did he have to perfectly understand what he wrote? Did the prophets have to know exactly what their prophecies referred to? Did St. John have to understand the Apocalypse? Did the recipients of St. Paul’s epistles understand them more perfectly than we do, who still struggle? I think a holy obscurity of Sacred Scripture, perhaps a meaning that might even be hid for a thousand years, is not incompatible with inspiration.
    I suppose we could assert that the apostlic age possesed a perfect explicit knowledge of Holy writ, but that seems to me a gratuitious assumption. St. Paul may have thought the world was going to end earlier than it did, and perhaps Moses thought the world was considerably younger than we do. But we really have no way of definitively discerning the intent of the human authors, and it seems clear to me that God could intend multiple literal senses, a plurality. Is that a nightmare, or good patristics?

  18. But we really have no way of definitively discerning the intent of the human authors, and it seems clear to me that God could intend multiple literal senses, a plurality.
    It seems to me that this may be a case where the both/and is being ignored in favor of the either/or. In other words, I don’t see any reason to suggest that the framework interpretation and the day-age interpretation could both be true.
    But again, it really doesn’t matter that much in the end.

  19. “Are you trying to say that the author’s definition of a 24 hour period of time is somehow different than your interpretation of 24 hours or mine?”
    That is PRECISELY what I am saying.
    This is not just my opinion; it is a fundamental fact about the nature of time. Just because our clocks we have built for ourselves recently here on Earth run at more or less the same speed, we have embraced a Newtonian notion of absolute time which has a range of conceptually crippling consequences, not the least of which is to get pointlessly wrapped around the axle of interpreting Genesis in the context of this a priori and demonstrably false assumption.
    PVO

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