Thoughts on Biblical Interpretation

[smac97]

I've been watching a fair number of DanMcClellan's "Okay, let's see it"-style YouTube videos, in which he critiques/debunks TikTok/YouTube and other content creators who seek to use (misappropriate, really) various "Christian" or biblical claims to bolster this or that religious and/or sociopolitical claim / position / philosophy.  Dan's videos often come across as "shooting fish in a barrel," but I think such public and direct claims are "fair game" for critique, and Dan generally has the training and competency to do it.  To his credit, Dan includes requests in his posts that his viewers not "harass" or spam content creators Dan is critiquing. 

While I generally give his asserted pronouncements on scriptural/linguistic issues a decent benefit of the doubt based on his CV, I keep that presumption firmly contingent and rebuttable.  Just today Dan posted this video in which he addresses a few points (interestingly, he is critiquing a "devotional" critique (by an apparently Christian young man) of a skeptic's critique of purported scientific "errors" in the Bible.  

1. Genesis 1 usage of "day" as a literal 24-hour day

The skeptic disputes the notion of a 6-day creative period. 

The Christian fellow then argues that ancient Hebrew word for "day," yom, is often used non-literally (as in not a literal 24-hour day).  The fellow then claims that he is "not reading into the text."

Dan then responds: "You're absolutely, indisputably reading into the text, and the text unilaterally indicates yom is to be understood as a literal 24-hour period.  To being, there is nowhere in the text where a metaphorical day is indicated.  The only thing that points in the direction of metaphor is the need for the text to point in the direction of metaphor.  The first occurrence of the word day in verse 5 is talking about the separation of the light and the dark, where the light is called day, {and} the darkness is called night.  Then it says there was evening and there was morning.  Day one.  So we have a clear transition from light to dark, and then dark to light, where we're moving between day and night and back to day.  And we're going to see in verses 14-16, when the sun and the moon are finally created, that they are there to mark that transition.  The days, the seasons, the years.  Those are being used literally as well.  We finally have the use of day with numerical adjectives attached to them, whether you translate it ordinally or cardinally.  Everywhere that occurs in the Hebrew Bible, that is a reference to a literal 24-hour period, and not to the more figurative use of day in reference to some kind of passage of time.  And Genesis 2:4B ['These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens'} is no help because that is an entirely different and entirely separate creation account, where all of creation happens in one day.  Genesis 1:1 through Genesis 2:4A is the later priestly account that is updating it and revising it, and is also using it as an opportunity to introduce the Sabbath.  So there is clearly continuity between the seventh day of creation and the seventh day of the week.  Again, there is absolutely nothing in the text that points in the direction of a metaphorical reading of yom.  There is only one thing that indicates we should read this metaphorically, and that is just the need to read it metaphorically in order to make it align with contemporary science."

A few thoughts:

A. Dan states that the Christian fellow is "absolutely, indisputably reading into the text."  I think Dan is doing the same thing.  There is always an interpretive component to reading a text.  By way of example, consider Luke 2:1, which states: "And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Cæsar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed."  The Greek word for "world" used here, oikoumenē, has the following usages in the Bible:

Quote

1. the inhabited earth

-A. the portion of the earth inhabited by the Greeks, in distinction from the lands of the barbarians

-B. the Roman empire, all the subjects of the empire

-C. the whole inhabited earth, the world

-D. the inhabitants of the earth, men

2. the universe, the world

Here, the context would seemingly call for definition 1(B).  Caesar, the political leader of the Roman empire, sent out a "decree" to all those subject to his power, that is, " the Roman empire, all the subjects of the empire."  This usage, then, seems pretty clear.  But that usage still requires interpretation and extrapolation by the reader.

Consider other uses of oikoumenē:

• Matthew 24:14 - "And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come."
• Acts 11:28 - "And there stood up one of them named Agabus, and signified by the Spirit that there should be great dearth throughout all the world: which came to pass in the days of Claudius Caesar."
• Acts 19:27 - "So that not only this our craft is in danger to be set at nought; but also that the temple of the great goddess Diana should be despised, and her magnificence should be destroyed, whom all Asia and the world worshippeth."
• Acts 24:5 - "For we have found this man a pestilent fellow, and a mover of sedition among all the Jews throughout the world, and a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes."

The literal v. figurative interpretation of these can, I think, vary a bit.

B. Dan states that "there is nowhere in the text where a metaphorical day is indicated."  I disagree with that in a few ways.  Genesis, as an ancient text, was written in a time where cosmology was more finite, flawed and rustic.  The Bible is not a scientific text, so descriptions of events were, I think, intended to both convey information but also do so in a lyrical/poetic way, to add elements of beauty and grandeur.

Moreover, the text of Genesis 1:16 states that on Day 4 "God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night."  If Dan's insistence of hyperliteralism holds, then Genesis posits that God did not create that luminous spheroid of plasma held together by self-gravity we call "the sun" until Day 4.  Since a day is "the time period of a full rotation of the Earth with respect to the Sun," it seems difficult to insist on Day 1 being a literal 24-hour period. 

Moreover, verses 3-5 reference the "light," which God created and "divided ... from the darkness" during Day 1.  So is this a reference to the sun?  If yes, how do we reconcile that with the sun being created in Day 4?  If no, then Dan's hyperliteral interpretation of the text does not seem to hold.

FWIW, the Church's Old Testament manual does a pretty good job of laying out the various ways we can interpret Genesis 1:

Quote

How Old Is the Earth?

Even when it is realized that chapter 1 of Genesis does not describe the beginning of all things, or even the starting point of mankind, but only the beginning of this earth, it cannot be said definitively when that beginning was. In other words, the scriptures do not provide sufficient information to accurately determine the age of the earth. Generally speaking, those who accept the scriptural account subscribe to one of three basic theories about the age of the world. All three theories depend on how the word day, as used in the creation account, is interpreted.

The first theory says that the word day is understood as it is used currently and therefore means a period of 24 hours. According to this theory, the earth was created in one week, or 168 hours. Thus, the earth would be approximately six thousand years old. (Many scholars agree that there were approximately four thousand years from Adam to Christ and that there have been nearly two thousand years since Christ was born.) Very few people, either members of the Church or members of other religions, hold to this theory, since the evidence for longer processes involved in the Creation is substantial.

A second theory argues that Abraham was told through the Urim and Thummim that one revolution of Kolob, the star nearest to the throne of God, took one thousand earth years (see Abraham 3:2–4). In other words, one could say that one day of the Lord’s time equals one thousand earth years. Other scriptures support this theory, too (see Psalm 90:4; 2 Peter 3:8; Facsimile No. 2 from the book of Abraham, figures 1, 4). If the word day in Genesis was used in this sense, then the earth would be approximately thirteen thousand years old (seven days of a thousand years each for the Creation plus the nearly six thousand years since Adam’s fall). Some see Doctrine and Covenants 77:12 as additional scriptural support for this theory.

Although the majority of geologists, astronomers, and other scientists believe that even this long period is not adequate to explain the physical evidence found in the earth, there are a small number of reputable scholars who disagree. These claim that the geologic clocks are misinterpreted and that tremendous catastrophes in the earth’s history speeded up the processes that normally may take thousands of years. They cite evidence supporting the idea that thirteen thousand years is not an unrealistic time period. Immanuel Velikovsky, for example, wrote three books amassing evidence that worldwide catastrophic upheavals have occurred in recent history, and he argued against uniformitarianism, the idea that the natural processes in evidence now have always prevailed at the same approximate rate of uniformity. These books are Worlds in Collision, Ages in Chaos, and Earth in Upheaval. Two Latter-day Saint scientists, Melvin A. Cook and M. Garfield Cook, have also advocated this theory in their book Science and Mormonism. A short summary of the Cooks’ approach can be found in Paul Cracroft’s article “How Old Is the Earth?” (Improvement Era, Oct. 1964, pp. 827–30, 852).

A third theory says that the word day refers to a period of an undetermined length of time, thus suggesting an era. The word is still used in that sense in such phrases as “in the day of the dinosaurs.” The Hebrew word for day used in the creation account can be translated as “day” in the literal sense, but it can also be used in the sense of an indeterminate length of time (see Genesis 40:4, where day is translated as “a season”; Judges 11:4, where a form of day is translated as “in the process of time”; see also Holladay, Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, pp. 130–31). Abraham says that the Gods called the creation periods days (see Abraham 4:5, 8).

If this last meaning was the sense in which Moses used the word day, then the apparent conflict between the scriptures and much of the evidence seen by science as supporting a very old age for the earth is easily resolved. Each era or day of creation could have lasted for millions or even hundreds of millions of our years, and uniformitarianism could be accepted without any problem. (For an excellent discussion of this approach see Henry Eyring, “The Gospel and the Age of the Earth,” [Improvement Era, July 1965, pp. 608–9, 626, 628]. Also, most college textbooks in the natural sciences discuss the traditional dating of the earth.)

While it is interesting to note these various theories, officially the Church has not taken a stand on the age of the earth. For reasons best known to Himself, the Lord has not yet seen fit to formally reveal the details of the Creation. Therefore, while Latter-day Saints are commanded to learn truth from many different fields of study (see D&C 88:77–79), an attempt to establish any theory as the official position of the Church is not justifiable.

Church manuals are, of course, not definitive - or even necessarily authoritative.  But the third theory above ("that the word day refers to a period of an undetermined length of time, thus suggesting an era") seems to work well.

C. Per Strong's Lexicon, yom appears 2,287 times in the Old Testament, and is translated in various ways:

Quote

KJV Translation Count — Total: 2,287x

The KJV translates Strong's H3117 in the following manner: day (2,008x), time (64x), chronicles (with H1697) (37x), daily (44x), ever (18x), year (14x), continually (10x), when (10x), as (10x), while (8x), full (8x), always (4x), whole (4x), alway (4x), miscellaneous (44x).

This all seems rather basic and obvious, and I suspect Dan does not really insist on strictly literal interpretation of Genesis 1's use of "day" as being a literal 24-hour day. 

D. I did find this bit of Dan's commentary interesting: "We finally have the use of day {yom} with numerical adjectives attached to them, whether you translate it ordinally or cardinally.  Everywhere that occurs in the Hebrew Bible, that is a reference to a literal 24-hour period, and not to the more figurative use of day in reference to some kind of passage of time." 

2. The Flood was "Global"

The Christian guy makes a few claims regarding the Flood, one of which is that "many scholars argue that the flood stories don't actually {describe a} global {flood}, but {rather describes a} local {flood."

Dan responds: "Many scholars argue that is probably the traditional root of the flood story in the Bible, but the Bible describes it explicitly and repeatedly as global."

Is Dan correct on this point (that "the Bible describes it {the Flood} explicitly and repeatedly as global")?

Thanks,

-Smac

 

 

Edited June 7, 2023 by smac97

[CV75]

17 minutes ago, smac97 said:

I've been watching a fair number of DanMcClellan's "Okay, let's see it"-style YouTube videos, in which he critiques/debunks TikTok/YouTube and other content creators who seek to use (misappropriate, really) various "Christian" or biblical claims to bolster this or that religious and/or sociopolitical claim / position / philosophy.  Dan's videos often come across as "shooting fish in a barrel," but I think such public and direct claims are "fair game" for critique, and Dan generally has the training and competency to do it.  To his credit, Dan includes requests in his posts that his viewers not "harass" or spam content creators Dan is critiquing. 

While I generally give his asserted pronouncements on scriptural/linguistic issues a decent benefit of the doubt based on his CV, I keep that presumption firmly contingent and rebuttable.  Just today Dan posted this video in which he addresses a few points (interestingly, he is critiquing a "devotional" critique (by an apparently Christian young man) of a skeptic's critique of purported scientific "errors" in the Bible.  

1. Genesis 1 usage of "day" as a literal 24-hour day

The skeptic disputes the notion of a 6-day creative period. 

The Christian fellow then argues that ancient Hebrew word for "day," yom, is often used non-literally (as in not a literal 24-hour day).  The fellow then claims that he is "not reading into the text."

Dan then responds: "You're absolutely, indisputably reading into the text, and the text unilaterally indicates yom is to be understood as a literal 24-hour period.  To being, there is nowhere in the text where a metaphorical day is indicated.  The only thing that points in the direction of metaphor is the need for the text to point in the direction of metaphor.  The first occurrence of the word day in verse 5 is talking about the separation of the light and the dark, where the light is called day, {and} the darkness is called night.  Then it says there was evening and there was morning.  Day one.  So we have a clear transition from light to dark, and then dark to light, where we're moving between day and night and back to day.  And we're going to see in verses 14-16, when the sun and the moon are finally created, that they are there to mark that transition.  The days, the seasons, the years.  Those are being used literally as well.  We finally have the use of day with numerical adjectives attached to them, whether you translate it ordinally or cardinally.  Everywhere that occurs in the Hebrew Bible, that is a reference to a literal 24-hour period, and not to the more figurative use of day in reference to some kind of passage of time.  And Genesis 2:4B ['These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens'} is no help because that is an entirely different and entirely separate creation account, where all of creation happens in one day.  Genesis 1:1 through Genesis 2:4A is the later priestly account that is updating it and revising it, and is also using it as an opportunity to introduce the Sabbath.  So there is clearly continuity between the seventh day of creation and the seventh day of the week.  Again, there is absolutely nothing in the text that points in the direction of a metaphorical reading of yom.  There is only one thing that indicates we should read this metaphorically, and that is just the need to read it metaphorically in order to make it align with contemporary science."

A few thoughts:

A. Dan states that the Christian fellow is "absolutely, indisputably reading into the text."  I think Dan is doing the same thing.  There is always an interpretive component to reading a text.  By way of example, consider Luke 2:1, which states: "And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Cæsar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed."  The Greek word for "world" used here, oikoumenē, has the following usages in the Bible:

Here, the context would seemingly call for definition 1(B).  Caesar, the political leader of the Roman empire, sent out a "decree" to all those subject to his power, that is, " the Roman empire, all the subjects of the empire."  This usage, then, seems pretty clear.  But that usage still requires interpretation and extrapolation by the reader.

Consider other uses of oikoumenē:

• Matthew 24:14 - "And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come."
• Acts 11:28 - "And there stood up one of them named Agabus, and signified by the Spirit that there should be great dearth throughout all the world: which came to pass in the days of Claudius Caesar."
• Acts 19:27 - "So that not only this our craft is in danger to be set at nought; but also that the temple of the great goddess Diana should be despised, and her magnificence should be destroyed, whom all Asia and the world worshippeth."
• Acts 24:5 - "For we have found this man a pestilent fellow, and a mover of sedition among all the Jews throughout the world, and a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes."

The literal v. figurative interpretation of these can, I think, vary a bit.

B. Dan states that "there is nowhere in the text where a metaphorical day is indicated."  I disagree with that in a few ways.  Genesis, as an ancient text, was written in a time where cosmology was more finite, flawed and rustic.  The Bible is not a scientific text, so descriptions of events were, I think, intended to both convey information but also do so in a lyrical/poetic way, to add elements of beauty and grandeur.

Moreover, the text of Genesis 1:16 states that on Day 4 "God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night."  If Dan's insistence of hyperliteralism holds, then Genesis posits that God did not create that luminous spheroid of plasma held together by self-gravity we call "the sun" until Day 4.  Since a day is "the time period of a full rotation of the Earth with respect to the Sun," it seems difficult to insist on Day 1 being a literal 24-hour period. 

Moreover, verses 3-5 reference the "light," which God created and "divided ... from the darkness" during Day 1.  So is this a reference to the sun?  If yes, how do we reconcile that with the sun being created in Day 4?  If no, then Dan's hyperliteral interpretation of the text does not seem to hold.

FWIW, the Church's Old Testament manual does a pretty good job of laying out the various ways we can interpret Genesis 1:

Church manuals are, of course, not definitive - or even necessarily authoritative.  But the third theory above ("that the word day refers to a period of an undetermined length of time, thus suggesting an era") seems to work well.

C. Per Strong's Lexicon, yom appears 2,287 times in the Old Testament, and is translated in various ways:

This all seems rather basic and obvious, and I suspect Dan does not really insist on strictly literal interpretation of Genesis 1's use of "day" as being a literal 24-hour day. 

D. I did find this bit of Dan's commentary interesting: "We finally have the use of day {yom} with numerical adjectives attached to them, whether you translate it ordinally or cardinally.  Everywhere that occurs in the Hebrew Bible, that is a reference to a literal 24-hour period, and not to the more figurative use of day in reference to some kind of passage of time." 

2. The Flood was "Global"

The Christian guy makes a few claims regarding the Flood, one of which is that "many scholars argue that the flood stories don't actually {describe a} global {flood}, but {rather a} local {flood."

Dan responds: "Many scholars argue that is probably the traditional root of the flood story in the Bible, but the Bible describes it explicitly and repeatedly as global."

Is Dan correct on this point (that "the Bible describes it {the Flood} explicitly and repeatedly as global"

Thanks,

-Smac

 

 

Strictly speaking, I agree that text is one thing ("day" reads "day") and using the text to convey a metaphor is another. Unless we know the intent or customs of the author, we read into the text whatever literal or figurative meaning our own intent or customs allow. We can still learn "something" from a literal interpretation of Genesis according to our experience and mental states in relation to it. Reading an old covenant can draw us closer to God and the restored covenant since we are His children and possess, fundamentally, the light of Christ, whatever we believe the facts to be.

[Okrahomer]

It would be very interesting to see how Dan would respond.  Have you posed your questions directly to him yet?

[Calm]

54 minutes ago, smac97 said:

If no, then Dan's hyperliteral interpretation of the text does not seem to hold.

That would depend on how ancients viewed Light, if the sun and moon were the source of Light or if Light was something else separate from the sun in the sense that the sun possessed much of it, but not all (as if Light was money and it was first scattered around and then collected when the Sun and Moon were created).

Wiki has a bit of what I am referring to…

Quote

The light is described as being created here before the sun, moon, and stars, which appear on the fourth day (Genesis 1:14–19).[10] In some Jewish interpretations, the light created here is a primordial light, different in nature from (and brighter than) that associated with the sun.[11]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_1:3#:~:text=The light is described as,that associated with the sun.

Edited June 7, 2023 by Calm

[Calm]

Found this, have no idea on the credibility, but it sounds intelligent.   

Added just to clarify why I think this a useful article:  Friedman is a highly respected biblical scholar, so the article is using very credible sources for its claims.  I don’t have access to the material referenced here to ensure the quotes are being used properly and this page is the only use of the quotes online in English so I can’t check them that way, but from what is posted, it all seems to support Dan’s position quite strongly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Elliott_Friedman

https://www.thetorah.com/article/if-the-sun-is-created-on-day-4-what-is-the-light-on-day-1

Quote

Historical-Critical Approach: Separating between Daylight and Sunlight

The key to any critical explanation of the text is that the author of Gen 1 is trying to explain the world as he sees it. It is often difficult for modern readers, familiar with contemporary scientific notions, to put these aside and enter the mind of an ancient cosmologist, but once we do the answer is, quite literally, as clear as the blue sky.^[8]

The Bright Blue Sky: The Tyndall effect

Why is the sky blue during the daytime? The scientific answer is that molecules of air in the atmosphere scatter blue light from the sun. At night, when the earth is facing away from the sun, there is no light to scatter and the sky is black. The scattering of light by the atmosphere is called the Tyndall effect, named after the scientist John Tyndall who first suggested this mechanism in 1859.

But the ancient cosmologist was living in a different world than Tyndall. In his conception, the earth is the center of the universe, and the sun, moon and stars travel above it, in the firmament. When this ancient cosmologist asked himself why the day-time sky is blue, his answer was because there is light in the heavenly water above the firmament. As he would have seen from earth, water is blue and thus when the light enters the water, the sky looks blue. When the light leaves the water and darkness creeps in, it is black.

The light and darkness in this conception should be pictured as diffuse physical substances that permeate the waters of the heavens. The sun, in this conception, is a totally separate light. Richard Elliott Friedman, in his gloss on v. 15, describes this view in the following manner:

Note that daylight is not understood here to derive from the sun. The text understands the light that surrounds us in the daytime to be an independent creation of God, which has already taken place on the first day. The sun, moon, and stars are understood here to be light sources—like a lamp or torch, only stronger. Their purpose is also to be markers of time: days, years, appointed occasions.^[9]

Moshe Weinfeld (1925-2009), in his commentary on Genesis (1:3), offers the same overall reading:

האור בלתי תלוי במאורות שנבראו ביום רביעי, בהתאם להשקפה הרווחת בימים ההם, כי האור כחשך יש להם קיום עצמאי במקומות נסתרים המקצים להם (איוב לח, יט-כ).

The light is not dependent on the lights created on the fourth day, in accordance with the viewpoint popular during that period that light and darkness are independent entities that exist in hidden places [of the heavens] dedicated to them (Job 39:19-20).^[10]

The text to which Weinfeld calls the readers’ attention is God’s speech to Job:

^{איוב לח:יב} הְמִיָּמֶיךָ צִוִּיתָ בֹּקֶר (ידעתה שחר) [יִדַּעְתָּ הַשַּׁחַר] מְקֹמוֹ... ^לח:יח הִתְבֹּנַנְתָּ עַד רַחֲבֵי אָרֶץ הַגֵּד אִם יָדַעְתָּ כֻלָּהּ. ^לח:יט אֵי זֶה הַדֶּרֶךְ יִשְׁכָּן אוֹר וְחֹשֶׁךְ אֵי זֶה מְקֹמוֹ. ^לח:כ כִּי תִקָּחֶנּוּ אֶל גְּבוּלוֹ וְכִי תָבִין נְתִיבוֹת בֵּיתוֹ.

^{Job 38:12} Have you ever commanded the day to break, assigned the dawn its place…^38:18 Have you surveyed the expanses of the earth? If you know of these -- tell Me. ^38:19 Which path leads to where light dwells, and where is the place of darkness, ^38:20 That you may take it to its domain and know the way to its home?

God here asks Job whether he knows where light and darkness are stored, implying that these two substances are discrete entities in and of themselves. When one is spread out in the heavens, the other is sitting in its appointed spot awaiting its turn.

A Sumerian Creation Story with Glowing Heavens

The view of light and darkness as physical entities that cause day and night can be found in at least one ANE text as well. In a fragmentary Sumerian tablet (NBC 11108) from Nippur during the Ur III period (21^st cent. B.C.E.), we find the following:

When Anu, the lord, made heaven shine, made earth dark… Heaven and earth he held together as one… Day did not shine; in night, heaven stretched forth. Earth, bringing forth plant life did not glow on its own…^[11]

The text describes the Sumerian high god Anu’s creation of the world. When Anu separates heaven and earth, the heavens shine but the earth does not. In other words, when the heavens and earth were combined in the primordial mush, there was perpetual night. By separating the heavens from the earth, Anu also separates light from darkness.Wayne Horowitz notes the parallel with Genesis:

In NBC 11108:8, as in Genesis, where day exists before the creation of the sun, moon, and stars, the heavens are conceived to have had their own glow, irrespective of the presence of luminaries.^[12]

The Function of the Sun, Moon, and Stars According to Genesis 1

If day and night are controlled by the entry and exit of the primordial light and darkness into the watery heavens, what is the sun for? The Torah lists three functions.

1. Light

The text equates the function of the sun with that of the moon and stars. These latter do provide some light during the night but they certainly do not light up the sky. The same is true of the sun, in the Torah’s conception. The sun adds light (and warmth) to the already independently existing daylight, but even without the sun, the sky would be blue and the daytime light.

2. Ruling the Day and Night

We think of stars and planets as inanimate objects, but the ancients thought of them as sentient beings—they move in consistent patterns so how could they not be?—and generally worshiped them as gods. By describing the sun, moon, and stars as created objects, the Torah denies their divinity, but this does not mean that the author of Genesis one did not share the idea that they were alive and powerful beings, perhaps part of God's heavenly court. Thus, the Torah seems to mean what it says when it writes that the sun and moon were created to dominate or rule (מ.ש.ל) the day and the night.

3. Divide between Light and Darkness

Finally, the celestial lights divide between day and night in a symbolic way. Their existence does not help divide between light and dark in a physical way; both are lights. Rather, the Torah intends to say that the bigger luminary, the sun, symbolizes the daytime, over which it rules, and the moon symbolizes the night, over which it rules.

The ending agrees with Dan.

Quote

Friedman makes the point well at the end of his above referenced gloss:

People have questioned whether the first three days are twenty-four hour days since the sun is not created until the fourth day. But light, day, and night are not understood here to depend on the existence of the sun, so there is no reason to think that the word “day” means anything different on the first two days (sic)^[14] than what it means everywhere else in the Torah. People’s reason for raising this is often to reconcile the biblical creation story with current evidence of the earth’s age. But it is better to recognize that the biblical story does not match the evidence than to stretch the story’s plain meaning in order to make it fit better with our current state of knowledge.

In short, reading the biblical text as an allegory or a mystery is merely an attempt to foist modern notions of the heavens upon an ancient text working with an entirely different worldview, and doing so obscures the creativity and message of the biblical author.

 

Edited June 7, 2023 by Calm

[Benjamin McGuire]

1 hour ago, smac97 said:

This all seems rather basic and obvious, and I suspect Dan does not really insist on strictly literal interpretation of Genesis 1's use of "day" as being a literal 24-hour day. 

I think that your approach is misunderstanding some fundamental ideas. I have been engaging in another thread for quite a while now the distinction between literal and figurative (probably not very well, and certainly without a lot of success). I am going to try and frame a couple of distinctions here.

1: The distinction between literal and figurative can be problematic because we deal with texts both in pieces and in the whole. What I mean by that is this - a metaphor is a good example of figurative language. So we take a well known metaphor: Life is a highway. And we know that this is a metaphor because life isn't a highway. But each word in that metaphor has to be read quite literally for the metaphor to work. When we say 'highway' in the metaphor, we mean exactly that - a highway. The figurative nature of the metaphor occurs because we are saying that life is a highway (which makes no sense) but meaning life is like a highway (and then we can mention all the ways in which the comparison might be apt). It makes no sense to say that we understand the term highway figuratively, because we don't. We understand the sentence figuratively because it is the sentence that has meaning apart from the individual words.

2: It may be that Dan is engaged in hyperliteralism. I'll get to that in a moment. But, the problem is that the person Dan is responding to isn't, in fact, claiming that the language should be read figuratively. Rather, they are claiming that the definition of the Hebrew is flexible. They are arguing for an alternative literal reading of the text. You don't pick up a dictionary and argue that definition 1 is literal, and definition 2 is figurative. If they are in the dictionary, then they are all literal (by definition).

1 hour ago, smac97 said:

Genesis 1 usage of "day" as a literal 24-hour day

This comment is problematic on its own, since grammatically it doesn't use the term "literal" in the sense of the literal/figurative dichotomy. It uses the second more recent definition (from Merriam-Webster): "true to fact : plain, unadorned."

This gets unpleasantly nuanced.

3: As Dan points out (at least as far as I can tell from his comments), there isn't any metaphor here for the word day. This doesn't mean that we cannot understand the creation narrative (Gen. 1:1-2:4a) as non-literal or figurative. It just means that for the metaphor to work, the term day needs to be understood literally.

This is a fundamental explanation here of the issue. We apparently have a number of participants in this forum who have no problem reading the Genesis creation account (Gen. 1:1-2:4a) as occurring over seven consecutive 24 hour periods of time. Which suggests that labeling Dan's interpretation as hyperliteralism seems more than a little misplaced.

All of the material that you (smac97) present is not about presenting a figurative reading of the text, but about various interpretational strategies that can be used protect a literal reading of the text. The Old Testament manual quote you provided says "All three theories depend on how the word day, as used in the creation account, is interpreted." Option 1: Seven 24-hour days. Option 2: the term day refers to God's time, which is a thousand years in our time. Option 3: the word day is an undefined period. None of these options is figurative. They are all literal. They just promote different definitions for the word. The Old Testament manual often spends a lot of effort to try and show that the Old Testament message is similar to modern understanding. A premise that is problematic on many levels.

There is a separate related problem. The creation stories are myths, not histories. When we read them as histories (when we demand that they fit into chronologies of the age of the earth), we have already misidentified the genre of the text. By the term myth, I do not mean that it is fiction - only that it isn't concerned with things like our modern notion of history. Reading it in such a way (as a myth) allows us both to read it quite literally (as a 24 hour day) and to recognize that it isn't trying to establish for us a time frame of creation.

1 hour ago, smac97 said:

Is Dan correct on this point (that "the Bible describes it {the Flood} explicitly and repeatedly as global")?

Yes. Especially when we recognize that the purpose (in terms of the myth) of the flood is to understand why evil persists in the world despite God's creating it and making it good. The flood represented a destruction of the old creation and the beginning of a new creation (which is a common theme in various cultural myths). If it is just a local flood, then none of the surrounding context makes any sense. It is hard to connect a local flood to "the end of all flesh" or the idea that God is going to "destroy them with the earth." And at the end, we have (with the rainbow) the promise of God not to destroy all flesh again with the flood. Which makes no sense one we recognize that there have been many localized floods in the past three thousand years - some of them with significant loss of life.

Understanding it in the mythic sense of a re-creation, after the flood, we still have wickedness - so we have to explain how that wickedness continued, and we have to explain why God doesn't try again - both of these issues we find in scripture as well.

Only if we feel the need to make the biblical text literally accurate do we start trying to find ways to redefine the language to allow for such reading to fit the history that we have come to understand. This isn't making the language figurative - it is keeping it literal but changing the definitions - and arguing that those definitions can be used to keep the text literal. The only real figurative interpretation that has been widely used among LDS members about the flood is the (nonsensical in my opinion) idea that the flood wasn't a flood so to speak, but a baptism of the earth so that the now personified earth can be redeemed from the fall itself and become celestialized. That is a figurative understanding of the flood.

Edited June 7, 2023 by Benjamin McGuire

[Analytics]

13 minutes ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

...The creation stories are myths, not histories...

Right. Dan calls his series "Data Over Dogma." His point is simply to acknowledge that the Bible says what it says. Likewise, scientific reality is what it is. The basic concept of data over dogma is to acknowledge those two things for what they are and not adulterate them with attempts at reconciliation. 

Edited June 7, 2023 by Analytics

[rodheadlee]

3 hours ago, Calm said:

That would depend on how ancients viewed Light, if the sun and moon were the source of Light or if Light was something else separate from the sun in the sense that the sun possessed much of it, but not all (as if Light was money and it was first scattered around and then collected when the Sun and Moon were created).

Wiki has a bit of what I am referring to…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_1:3#:~:text=The light is described as,that associated with the sun.

The light from the big bang?

[Calm]

20 minutes ago, rodheadlee said:

The light from the big bang?

What ancient knew of the Big Bang?

[The Nehor]

2 hours ago, rodheadlee said:

The light from the big bang?

The light from the Big Bang wouldn’t be visible to human eyes. Paradoxically it would also have blinded any human looking at because even non-visible light can burn out eyes.

[bluebell]

5 hours ago, Analytics said:

Right. Dan calls his series "Data Over Dogma." His point is simply to acknowledge that the Bible says what it says. Likewise, scientific reality is what it is. The basic concept of data over dogma is to acknowledge those two things for what they are and not adulterate them with attempts at reconciliation. 

My favorite "Follow Him" podcasts from last year went over the creation stories and how they worked with the beliefs of the people they were told to.  I LOVED finally understanding them.

[rodheadlee]

3 hours ago, Calm said:

What ancient knew of the Big Bang?

Well none did. But I was reading a description in a nonfiction book about the beginning of the universe and it reminded me of those verses in Genesis. I'm not home so I can't get the quote out of the book

Of course heavenly father would know about the Big Bang. It may not have been the Big Bang but something that happened right after.

 

Edited June 8, 2023 by rodheadlee

[rodheadlee]

1 hour ago, The Nehor said:

The light from the Big Bang wouldn’t be visible to human eyes. Paradoxically it would also have blinded any human looking at because even non-visible light can burn out eyes.

Heavenly Father would know and see. 

[The Nehor]

18 hours ago, rodheadlee said:

Heavenly Father would know and see. 

God would know but would God describe it that way? I don’t know.