THE SIX DAYS OF CREATION

The great God set the fundamentals of the land; he decorated the entire world with a cloak of beauty, and he filled the world with useful things for men; he created all the wonders of the land and the sea. Everything around us was made with an aim: by and for men.¹ Our so special origins are revealed on the Word of God step by step, since the beginning in Genesis and then in many other books of the Bible. Everything was made by God with the power of his Word. He ordered and existed.² The great work of Creation was carried out in six days. “The heavens and the earth were completed with everything that was in them. By the seventh day God finished the work that he had been doing, and he ceased on the seventh day all the work that he had been doing. God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it he ceased all the work that he had been doing in Creation. This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created”.³ The days of Creation were of 24 hours,⁴ and as the biblical text say, consisted of an “evening”, which is the dark part of the day or night, and a “morning”, the illuminated part of the day between the dawn and the nightfall.⁵ The expression “evening and morning” is clearly the description of an astronomical day, the length of a rotation of the Earth on its axis.Even though many erudite have understood that this expression “There was evening, and there was morning, one day”,⁶ means a long indefinite period of time. Hebrews, who never doubted the meaning of this expression, began the day with the sunset and finished it with the next sunset.⁷ Babylonians also began their days with the sunset; Romans, however, counted them from midnight, from where it is derived the current habit.

The statement that the days of the Creation are days of 24 hours is confirmed by:

1. The account of each day finishes with the expression: “There was evening, and there was morning…”

2. When the term yôm, [יןסע], “day”, goes with a definite number, an ordinal numeral adjective, it always means that it is a literal day of 24 hours.

3. The creation of the third day could not survive for a long time without the work of the fourth day. Photosynthesis was necessary.

4. The creation of the third day also needed the creation of the fifth day. Pollination was necessary.

5. The biblical parallel of the Exodus 20: 9 and 11 demands the interpretation of 24 hour days.

Biblical References:

1. Isaiah 45: 18
2. Psalms 33: 9
3. Genesis 2: 1-4
4. Genesis 1; Exodus 20: 8-11
5. Genesis 1: 5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 31
6. Genesis 1: 5
7. Leviticus 23: 32