"On the First Day": Yom, Days, Genesis, and Poetic Language
Saturday, May 29, 2010 at 9:45AM | by Otter An email this morning made me a little sad and angry.
It's from a friend who's hanging out with some friends and family who are laying down the law on the Book of Genesis.
I want to write a little about why I think this has such high importance in a minute, but to the family's issues first:
From that email:
[A family member] mentioned to me that there were all these scholars who said that day (yom?) meant 24 hour day.
This is quite true, and a very common argument used to bolster literalist readings of Genesis. "Day" means "day" in any language.
So what is understood very well are the prosaic semantics, the meanings of words at their everyday level.
What is completely dark to this argument is that words are not judged by their dictionary definitions (and keep in mind that there are no such things when Genesis is written, that words are defined much more by context than authority).
Rather words gain their meaning at the level of the utterance.
If I am standing next to my wife and mother-in-law at the naval docks in Norfolk, arguing with my mother-in-law about where we'll have lunch, and she storms off, and after a pause my wife and I stare out at the water and I say, "Wow. She's an old battleship," you'd better seriously understand what it is that I'm uttering, not what the dictionary definition of "battleship" is.
This is how language works even today. It was far more so at the time of the composition of Genesis.
So yes. Yom means "day," and no, that's of no use whatever in establishing a literal meaning to Genesis.
And no, it's not used like a scientist might use it to say that a lab-culture grew in six days.
Unfortunately for my friend, it's quite common among literalists to make a false equation between "truth" and "fact."
They cannot imagine how Genesis 1-11 could be "true" if "it never happened." I've written about that here and here, and am always happy to apply the thoughts there to new questions.
Why don't I just accept Genesis 1-11 as "fact"? Because the facts are against it. And you can't have it both ways. If it's "factual," you must mean something by "fact." A "fact" is a thing that all reasonable observers agree has been observed. There is no factual evidence for a creation in six days, for a global flood, for a Tower of Babel, and so by calling them "facts" you either devalue the word "fact" until it is useless or you throw yourself back on a sort of fideism that's an unncecessary sacrifice of your rationality.
There is all the evidence in the world that these stories about things that didn't happen as advertised did describe truths, though.
It's easier than you might think to let the stories and their truths speak for themselves.
My friend, and me, and you, shouldn't be made to choose falsely a thing that strokes our idea of truth but misunderstands both language and story, and therefore the Bible.
Reader Comments (1)
Excellent post. I love it when you opine on this topic. My favorite argument against 24-hours as the meaning of yom has to be the fact that there was no sun until day 4.