In the schoolyard of numerals, sometimes it’s important to not be first!

This post won’t go into the many details demonstrating that the Genesis account of creation speaks of days as we understand days; that there are no “outs” in the original Hebrew allowing someone to consider that the days presented in Genesis 1:1 – 2:3 are some form of long ages supporting a five billion-year-old Earth. Such meaning isn’t there, and that’s unequivocal. Also unequivocal is the fact that no gap of eons occurs between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2.

Both the day-age theory and the gap theory attempted to provide from Scripture the prop of deep time required for naturalistic explanations of origins. Those theories, day-age and gap, were the desperate cries of 18th-century church leaders who, themselves bamboozled into accepting deep time, had to find ways to provide relevancy to the book of Genesis in a world swept up in the fervor of “enlightenment.” Enlightenment, indeed! Lyell’s fairy tale of the geologic column is still accepted today. Mount St. Helens, anyone? But, I digress…

Anyhow, if going through the basic Hebrew found in the initial portion of Genesis (verses 1:1 – 2:3, and the only part of the book that does not occur in the literary style of the Hebrew Toledot) would be helpful, I’ll do that in a future post. Such a foundation isn’t necessary for today’s topic, which involves a look at how numerals are used in describing the days in the Genesis account of creation, and why such a look gives us fascinating insight to God’s revelation of His work during the first week in the life of the universe.

Let’s have a look at Genesis 1:1-5:

1In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

3And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day. 

(All Scriptures NIV except as noted otherwise)

What I want to focus on is found in the second half of verse five: And there was evening, and there was morning-the first day.

The NIV got the translation wrong. That’s not what it says in the Hebrew. Don’t worry, NIV: You’re not alone. A quick check of some of the more popular English versions shows that the NLT, ESV, KJV, and NKJ all use an ordinal at that point in the text. And, why not? The numeral form used for Days 2 – 7 are all ordinals in the Hebrew. Maybe Day 1 should have been an ordinal. Well, there have been positions taken by scholars that, perhaps, this was just an oversight at some point during copying. Or, others argue, it’s not unheard of to interchange ordinals and cardinals, especially in the first instance of something.

Let’s step back for just a second. Could there be something else in play?

Let’s take for a minute the position of many scholars that the original versions, the Old Testament Hebrew and the New Testament Greek, were penned in styles meant to convey the most understandable text to those original readers; that we, thousands of years and many cultures later, would do well to take into account all of the contextual facets we can bring to bear in our study of Scripture. If that’s true, and I hold that it is, then why use a cardinal numeral for Day 1 and ordinal numerals for Days 2-7?

Maybe God wants to tell us something!

The Bible is, after all, God providing us with a written and objective record of what He wants us to know about Him and His work. What, then, would we gather from this translation of verse five:

And there was evening and there was morning, one day.  (NAS)

What does it matter whether we use “one” or “first” at this point? Glad you asked!

Remember that at this point in time (and, mind you, time was at that moment brand-spanking new), nearly everything was occurring for the first time. This was the first day ever! There hadn’t been a day before. Well, then, what’s a day? When you have the full cycle of evening to morning, that’s what a day is. It’s one day.

Another English version sets the tone of the complete thought in a way that’s maybe a little easier to see:

There was an evening, and there was a morning: one day.  (CSB)

In Genesis 1:5 you have not just the passage of time for the first day ever, but you have the defining measure of what constitutes a day. Thereafter, the days occur as the ordinals, since God Himself has already defined for the reader what a “day” is. Now that a day has been defined, each of the remaining days in the creation week can use the ordinals as their descriptors: Second day, third day, forth day, and so on.

This understanding in keeping with the original Hebrew of this portion of Genesis, which occurs in the literary form of a time-sequenced historical narrative, and it’s also in keeping with the idea of finding the most-understandable rendering of the text. We don’t have to suppose any errors in copying. We don’t have to try and imagine any linguistic or stylistic variants that could possibly be in play (but which imagined variants must be argued from silence). Rather, we can just let the text speak for itself:

And there was evening and there was morning, one day.  (NAS)

Folks, I find these little details in the Bible to be utterly fascinating, not to mention enlightening. The old saying is that “The devil’s in the details.” Nonsense! God is in the details! Just ask your own DNA molecules!

DNA molecules? That’s a topic for another day soon. In the meantime, I hope you’ll agree with me that, truly, God is in the details of our unfathomably large universe, and in the smallest of things. I think God wants us to recognize what He’s established for us to recognize: That when the cycle of morning follows evening, we mark that passage of time appropriately. That day? That first day? That was one day, folks. It was Day One in the existence of all things.

Now, go make a pen & ink change in your Bible at Genesis 1:5 if your translation put an ordinal in there!

            I, the Lord, speak the truth;

            I declare what is right."