I am here to prove to you that the creation of the earth really did take place in 6 literal days by using the original Hebrew text. If God wanted to relay the fact the process took any longer, he would have originally inspired the writers of the Bible using different words and context. The English word for day in Genesis 1 translates directly from the Hebrew word Yom. As one would assume, the Hebrew language is slightly different from the English language. The word Yom translates two different ways, but neither way suggests a meaning that would justify God taking any longer than 6 days for God to create the earth. According to Dr. Strong’s Greek and Hebrew dictionary the first way the word day translates is literally the warm part of the day, meaning the time that is sun is out, from sunrise to sunset approx 12 hours. The second way is where I am sure there will be some debate. However, I have the research and information to show you why there should be no argument at all.

Picture this, someone maybe a grandparent or elder starts to tell a story. He or she starts out by saying “back in the day….such and such took place.” Now I don’t know about you but when I hear that phrase, I don’t think of time in that manner. It is translated as an abstract period of time reference. This second way does not translate into a set amount of time. It is just a reference. No where does it indicate a starting and ending point.

If one were argue that it took any longer than six days, all they would have to do is reference a Hebrew dictionary to see that the word for a period longer than a day is the word Olam. God didn’t inspire the writers of the Bible to use the word Olam; he had them use the word Yom.

Essentially what the other side of the argument is going to say is that the word day is used as a symbol for a longer period of time. To fully understand the use of symbols in literature, I did a little research on the Hebrew language as well as the English language. Moses was a very well educated person in the Egyptian Culture but not until later after his schooling was he engulfed in the Hebrew life. The Hebrew he then learned was taught by common people and therefore was a sort of “street language” if you will. Even though the book of Genesis was most likely not written with the most proper grammar, the translators would have translated it using proper English grammar. Using this information about proper English, we can more easily understand that in proper English, a word cannot take on symbolic meaning without its literal meaning first being defined. If it were the other way around we would have no way to base a synopsis of the defining word.

To sum up my argument, I am going to read the from Gleason Archer’s Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties. This passage cleared up a lot of discrepancies, at least in my book:

A true and proper belief in the inerrancy of scripture involves neither a literal nor a figurative rule of interpretation. What it does require is a belief in whatever the biblical author (human and divine) actually meant by the words he used.

Thank you
Rebuttal for Light / Dark Theory

“God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. So the evening and the morning were the first day.” Genesis 1:5

The last time I checked every 24 hour period has an evening and a morning. A longer period of time would have many evenings and many mornings. A longer period of time may have a beginning and an ending but it will only have one evening and one morning.

How do we as humans define a period of time? We look for repetition. The repetition we know is what we see. What do we know? The sun rises every morning and sets every evening. That is what God gave us as a starting point.



Rebuttal for Scientific Evidence

Essentially what the other side is trying to do is tell you that billions of years happened in between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 in order to accommodate theories regarding fossils, dinosaurs, and rocks. I have a question for all you to ponder. How on earth could we know it takes a billion years for a certain rock formation to form? The only proof they have is how fast things are happening now, and that doesn’t prove anything.

In Steve J. Arthur’s “Bible Apologetics,” it explains that we have no evidence or proof how the fossils and rock formations were formed. For all we know it could have happened in God’s Flood that destroyed the earth.

We can sit here all day long and refute proven fact and scientific theory, but at the end of the day we still have the Bible and our faith, and what the Bible says is fact, and now I will show you that using the original Hebrew text.
Work Citied

Edersheim, Alfred. Bible History: Old Testament. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Grand Rapids, Michigan. 1982.

Elwell, Walter A. Evangelical Dictionary of Theology. Baker Book House. Grand Rapids, Michigan. 1984.

Archer, Gleason L. Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties. Zondervan Publishing House. Grand Rapids, Michigan. 1982.

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