Jeff your posts all read either like propaganda (I’ve learned so much that confirms what I already believe, more and more support is added all the time, etc.), or an exercise in giving yourself excuses not to engage anyone (there’s too much to unpack, there are no undecided people here (e.g. everyone is closed-minded, except you ofc).
Why waste your time indeed.
I think part of the confusion in this thread is that not everyone here is arguing for either young‑earth creationism or gap theory. Some of us hold a simpler, text‑anchored view.
For example, I take Genesis 1:1 as the moment God created everything , the heavens, the earth, and all the raw material of the universe. Genesis 1:2 isn’t a ruined world; it’s simply describing the condition of the earth after that initial creation.
The way I picture it is like this: God plants a garden and lets it run on its own for a long time. Left alone, it becomes dark, wild, and unstructured, not “ruined,” just untended. That’s the state Genesis 1:2 is describing.
Then God steps in and takes six literal 24‑hour days to form, fill, and assign roles, essentially preparing the garden for human life.
This also explains the polemic element in Day 4. The text doesn’t say God created the sun and moon on Day 4; it says He gave them their functions, to rule the day and night, to mark seasons, days, and years. In the ancient Near East, the sun and moon were worshiped as gods. Genesis flips that: they’re not deities; they’re timekeepers. They serve God.
That fits the pattern we see earlier:
The point isn’t cosmology, it’s theology. God is the one who orders, assigns, and rules.
So yes, the six days are literal 24‑hour days, but they’re days of preparation, not the timeframe of the universe’s origin. The text never says Genesis 1:1 happened within those six days, which means natural history fits between v.1 and v.3 without contradicting the Hebrew.
So there were plants, or at least seeds, before day 3?
But the main question here is whether these days correspond to anything real or observable. Or whether they were intended by the writer(s) to communicate anything about the world or history in addition to about God.
Day 3 doesn’t require seeds or plants to exist beforehand, and the text doesn’t say they did. It simply says the land brought forth vegetation, and that vegetation is described as seed‑bearing. That’s a functional description within the narrative.
I still affirm six literal 24‑hour days, not as the timeframe of the universe’s origin, but as six real days of God’s work in forming, assigning, and preparing what He had already created “in the beginning” (Gen 1:1). The text itself distinguishes between the initial act of creation and the subsequent days of God’s ordering activity.
And those six days weren’t given to Israel as a scientific chronology. They were given as a worldview corrective. Israel had just come out of a culture that worshiped the sun, moon, stars, and a whole cast of rival deities. Genesis 1:3–31 (and Exod. 20:11’s appeal to it) reads like Moses is deliberately dismantling that worldview. Each day functions as a theological strike against pagan cosmology: the lights aren’t gods, the sea isn’t a monster, humanity isn’t an afterthought.
So the days are literal, six actual days of God’s work, and they are literary, arranged to teach Israel who truly rules the cosmos. Their purpose is pedagogical and polemical: to reshape Israel’s imagination, to replace the mental world of Egypt with a radically different one grounded in the sovereignty of the Creator.
In that sense, the days correspond to something real (God’s real acts in real time), but their narrative function is to communicate meaning, identity, and theology, not to map the physics of cosmic origins.
Thank you so much for the comments. I have learnt more about the Hebrew language though I have not any expertise to possibly argue on that basis which understanding is right or not. I do see in this long thread that it is argued by others that Gen 1 v1&2 can be argued as introduction (which is my perspective), and to my mind 2v1 is closing the sequence of wayyiqtol events (thank you for educating me), which is why I would favour that perspective.
Perhaps what I would ask you, if all the days are 24 hours and God has already made the Sun, Earth & Moon in our solar system (as you say God does in v1), then what exactly did God do on day 4 that it needed to be called out? You say God “commissioned” them. What exactly do you mean? Are you saying the “lights” were there but “hidden” and God did a reveal act (somehow)? Isn’t the point of day 4 that lights for day and night “began” AND they were good for timing seasons, days and years? What do you see happening that is so significant on day 4 that it is listed in this sequence? If it was just a reveal act, it seems more of a marketing trick than something I am lost in wonder at. In my (work) experience commissioning would mean that everything has been designed, made, tested and is good to go, and now I’ve signed off the paperwork for quality control. I don’t think day 4 was a tick box exercise … (not to devalue commissioning work).
My main point being that because the text specifically calls out the fact that these lights on day 4 are good for timing means that before this “event” their timing was different, or, that there was no way of timing things before. Otherwise, why mention it? Hence days 1 to 3 cannot be assumed to have the same timing as day 4 and onwards.
I’m not sure what you understand about the Big Bang theory, but before that “singularity” event it’s impossible to describe as it’s before space and time existed. Personally I think as a human it is almost impossible to think outside of the concept of time. I think we are limited creatures in that sense. But God who is before / outside of time, can exist there. Hence before this, there was nothing, which is even less that what we might think of in space. So to say the earth was without form and empty, seems fairly accurate. It did not exist. There was nothing, not even space, because nothing had expanded and nothing had formed. Dark and deep are reasonable descriptions of nothing. I am (liberally) interpreting “the face of the waters” as being danger because the Big Bang explosion is about to happen under God’s control.
The Big Bang theory initially has an enormous explosion of energy (light) expanding rapidly but then cooling and becoming dark. Hence in the beginning there was light and then there was a period of dark. Only after another 8 billion years (so the theory goes) does our solar system begin to form, based around the Sun, with our planets forming in orbits. Hence the Sun, Earth and Moon come later. By “day 4” their orbits have stabalised.
Let me try to clarify what I mean by “commissioning” the lights on Day 4 and why I don’t see Day 4 as the creation of the sun, moon, and stars.
I see Genesis 1:1–2 as the absolute creation of the cosmos. My starting point is that the heavens and the earth in Gen 1:1 is a merism for the totality of the cosmos, sun, moon, stars, earth, everything. That’s standard Hebrew usage. So in my reading, the heavenly bodies already exist before the six workdays begin.
Day 1: God asserts sovereignty over the light–dark cycle. When we get to Day 1 (Gen 1:3), I read it through the lens of Job 38, where God asks Job who commands the morning. The Israelites had just come out of a culture that worshiped the sun. Moses is making a theological point. The sun is not a god. Your God controls the light–dark cycle. Day 1 is not about creating photons; it’s about God taking authority over the daily rhythm that pagan cultures attributed to solar deities.
Day 4: Not creating the lights, but appointing their functions. So what is Day 4 doing? The Hebrew verb asah (“make”) is flexible, it can mean fashion, prepare, appoint, assign, or commission. It does not have to mean “bring into existence.” In many contexts it clearly means assigning a role. That’s how I read Day 4. God is formally appointing the sun and moon to their covenantal functions, signs, seasons, days, years. This is exactly the kind of thing Moses would need to say to a people who had been taught that the sun and moon were gods who determined fate, seasons, and agricultural cycles. Moses is saying – No. God, not the sun, determines times and seasons. God, not the moon, governs the calendar. These are not deities. They are tools.
It’s the same way I might “make you a district manager” I’m not creating you; I’m assigning you a role.
Why mention timing on Day 4? You asked why timing is emphasized on Day 4 if the lights already existed. Because the Israelites needed to hear that God is the one who gives the sun and moon their calendrical authority. In the ancient Near East, the sun and moon were worshiped precisely because they governed agricultural seasons, festivals, and omens. So Day 4 is a theological polemic these lights serve God’s purposes. They do not rule you.
Does this imply Days 1–3 had different “timing”? I don’t think so. The text doesn’t say the lights began timing on Day 4; it says God appointed them for that purpose. The function is being declared, not initiated. Before Day 4, the light–dark cycle already exists (Day 1). The text explicitly says there was “evening and morning” before Day 4. So the rhythm is already in place. Day 4 is not a “reveal trick” or a “tick‑box commissioning.” It’s a theological declaration to a people steeped in solar and lunar idolatry.
So what is the significance of Day 4? For me, the significance is this; Day 4 dethrones the sun and moon as deities and installs them as servants. Not creators of time, but instruments of God’s ordered world.
That’s why it belongs in the sequence.
I think you’ve raised some genuinely helpful points, especially about how hard it is for humans to think outside of time. Where we differ is simply in how we see the structure of Genesis 1. For me, Genesis 1:1 is the entire origin event, the creation of space‑time, matter, energy, galaxies, the solar system, Earth’s geologic history, dinosaurs, the whole geologic column. Everything the sciences describe fits naturally inside that single verse. And just to be clear, I’m not referring to the Gap Theory, no ruin‑and‑restoration, no Satanic fall between verses. I simply see Gen 1:1 as the total creation of the cosmos.
By the time we reach Genesis 1:2, the universe already exists and the earth already exists, but the earth is still unformed, unproductive, and not yet ordered for mankind. That’s why I don’t read Days 1–6 as describing the physical formation of the cosmos. I see them as God structuring, organizing, and assigning functions within a world He has already created.
This is also why I don’t think Day 4 implies that Days 1–3 had different “timing.” The text already has “evening and morning” before Day 4, and the Hebrew emphasizes purpose, not the beginning of existence. Your point about the Big Bang having early light, then darkness, then later star formation is scientifically accurate, but I don’t think Genesis is trying to describe that sequence. Genesis is giving a theological ordering, not a cosmological timeline.
So yes, dinosaurs, the Big Bang, cosmic evolution, the geologic column, all of that fits naturally into Genesis 1:1. And Genesis 1:2–31 describes God preparing the earth as a functional, ordered, sacred space for humanity.
Thank you. But the answer to my question is still not clear. When did those 6 days happen, and what real, observable events happened then? What’s the difference between the sun on day 3 and the sun on day 5? What observable difference would assignment of function make?
If the purpose is to establish that none of the things mentioned are gods, there doesn’t have to be any reality to the events.
As I understand it, that’s not accurate. The Big Bang isn’t the very start of things.
More importantly you seem to be missing my point. What you’re doing is trying to force-fit Genesis 1 to your understanding of the science and it really doesn’t work. The account is based on an Ancient Near East worldview, not anything like the modern views. Just because you can get things to sort-of fit doesn’t mean much because it is only a sort-of fit. It much better fits an Ancient Near Eastern view.
How does land bring forth vegetation if there are no seeds (or spores, saplings etc) present beforehand, and none are created?
John, the question of when the six days occurred is not as straightforward as it might seem, because the text itself draws a very sharp line between Genesis 1:1 and the six days that follow. The opening verse stands alone as a complete act: the creation of “the heavens and the earth,” the totality of the universe. Whatever age the world may be, that entire creation is already in place before the six days begin.
When we reach Genesis 1:2, the scene shifts. The earth exists, but it is not yet the ordered, fruitful land that will become the home of humanity. The six days describe God’s work of preparing that land , shaping it, assigning its boundaries, and bringing it into a state suitable for human life. The text does not tell us how much time lies between the initial creation and this week of ordering. It could be long; it could be short. The narrative simply doesn’t say.
As for the events of the six days themselves, the emphasis is not on the material origin of things but on their purpose within God’s plan. Light and darkness already exist; what God does on Day 1 is call the light into its proper rhythm, much like the pattern we see in Job 38 where God summons the dawn and it responds. The sun is already part of the “heavens” created in verse 1. What happens on Day 4 is not its creation but its appointment, its commissioning to govern the times and seasons. The difference between the sun before Day 4 and the sun after Day 4 is not a difference of existence but of role. The text is concerned with meaning, not mechanics.
In that sense, the “observable” change is not astrophysical. It is covenantal. The world is being ordered, named, and given its functions. The six days mark the inauguration of the land as the place where human history will unfold. They are real acts of God, but they are not described in terms of physical processes. They are described in terms of God’s purposes for the land and for humanity.
So if one asks when these days occurred, the answer is simply: after the creation of the universe, at the time when God prepared the land for human life. The text does not anchor that week to a specific date in cosmic history. It presents it as the beginning of human history, not the beginning of the cosmos.
Thanks for the clarifications. I realise I was misunderstanding your position.
Continuing my thoughts on timing, if I understand you correctly, whilst you’re saying that the Sun, Earth, Moon have been created in 1v1, you’re saying that on day 2 & 3 God was actually (re)forming them, (asah), creating the atmosphere, the seas and the dry lands, including mountains and what we would call plate tectonics. If so, it’s hard to know how much tinkering God could do without upsetting the rotational timing of earth that defines the “24 hour period”. I think there would have to be quite a lot of “tinkering restrictions” to ensure that timing of day 2 & 3 were the same as day 4.
I understand the theological point you are making about people needing to realise that the Sun and the Moon are not gods etc, but taking your explanation, haven’t day 1 and day 4 become almost the same thing, achieving the same purpose? Worship God not the Sun or Light? Until this last century, no-one understood a distinction between light and the sun. I agree that day 1 & 4 have been a mystery for many, including Augustine, but if it’s purely for a theological reason, I don’t see why two days were needed.
Furthermore when I think you say that dinosaurs existed before the end of Gen 1v1, they would have needed an atmosphere, vegetation, water etc already there to support them. So are you saying that was also present in 1v1? Which makes it hard to understand what God is forming on day 2 & day 3?
So I’m struggling to see how your interpretation really works out.
BTW I do agree with the earlier distinction you made about 1v26 when God says let us make (asah) man in our image which is deliberately different to 1v27 when God creates (bara) man in his image. Bara is used when creating life or something fundamentally new. In 1v26 the context shows that God is choosing to make mankind in his image, so its more about the form that the life will take rather than the life itself. It is I think one of the most amazing verses, as God seems to be getting excited about the choice of making man in “our image”. So amazing! So having chosen how He’s going to form man, he then actually creates (bara) man in 1v27.
Well yes, I believe there are many theories about what happened before the Big Bang, but confess I am not familiar with them at the moment or how they tie in with the Multiverse etc. I don’t know if there is much consensus on those.
Actually, no I am not trying to force fit the Big Bang theory to Genesis 1. As far as I know, Day 3 does not fit well as most scientists believe that vegetation came after water based life (in Day 5). So I acknowledge that there is a misfit there.
For myself, when I came across tools like stepbible.org that enables you to see the Hebrew and cross reference text so quickly and easily, I was surprised by the things I noticed. It made me wonder why translators sometimes make the choices they do, and I’m sure there’s many thoughts. However, it also made me wonder how many translators are scientists as opposed to linguists, and so perhaps most do not even think of some legitimate translations because they themselves are not scientists. Of course, you can say that the original author was not a scientist either, but perhaps if God did inspire them, the text could reveal more. From courses and books I’ve read, I have come across some of the Hebrew / Greek styles of writing, which led me to my preferred interpretation of Gen 1v1&2 as an opening statement (the conjunctive joins them), and Gen 2v1 as the closing statement, with the highly patterned (poetic) style of the “Yoms” in between. Even though I’m not a Hebrew scholar and probably pronounce the Romanised words poorly, the language seems to have poetic nature, bara, zara, qara etc. When I looked at this, I was then surprised by how well Genesis does actually fit the Big Bang theory. The beginning description of formlessness and void and darkness I think would have been a shocking statement to ANE worldview, given their limited travel and perceptions of permanence. Light before the creation of the Sun, the formation of earth with an atmosphere (it’s iron magnetic core protecting the atmosphere from the sun), the specific detailing of the sun and moon to determine days and season, the creation (bara) of life first in the water. For something written 3,400 years ago it is actually an amazing fit to our current scientific understanding. But sure, it’s not a perfect fit. Do you have a better fit?
I would say it’s because context is important - and ideally the historical context - and ideally an understanding of the idioms as well as literal meanings. Translation is not just about picking out possible meanings for individual words.
Sp, the words translated as “without form and empty” usually refer to a barren wasteland - which is a good fit for the lifeless Primordial Ocean - which is also the deep and the waters. I hope you can see that this fits rather better than your own speculative ideas.
It’s a disjunction rather than a conjunction and I put verse 2 as describing the initial state before creation. And to nitpick the closing is `Genesis 2:1-3
No, it’s what they already believed.
It’s not as good as you are saying. Daylight without the sun? There’s no mention of “forming the Earth with an atmosphere” - did you mean creating a solid sky and forcing large amounts of water above it? And above where the sun would later be placed? Life first in the water I’ll give you but it includes later forms of sea life - and birds created at the same time.
So really I would say that the point of it is not as a description of what literally happened.
Me personally, I think there were seeds (of some sort) but the larger point is that we’re talking about God here, not a naturalistic process. Genesis 1 doesn’t require seeds, spores, or any prior biological material to be present before vegetation appears. The text simply says that God commanded the land to “bring forth” vegetation, and the vegetation appears fully formed and seed‑bearing. That description focuses on the result, not the mechanism.
If no seeds or biological precursors existed beforehand, then the only way the land could “bring forth” vegetation is through God’s direct creative act. The land functions as the medium or stage of appearance, not the biological cause. This is the same pattern we see when God commands the waters to “bring forth” living creatures, no one imagines proto‑fish evolving in a single day. The language expresses divine authority, not natural processes.
The vegetation is described as seed‑bearing, but that doesn’t imply seeds existed before the plants. It simply means the plants were created mature, already equipped for reproduction going forward. The text is concerned with function, plants that reproduce “according to their kinds," not with explaining the biological origin of the first seeds.
So if someone insists on a naturalistic mechanism, the sentence becomes impossible: land cannot produce vegetation without seeds, spores, or prior life. But Genesis isn’t describing natural causation. It’s describing God speaking order into existence. The land “bringing forth” vegetation is a literary way of saying that God created fully formed plants, using the land as the symbolic source.
In that sense, your instinct about seeds is understandable, but it’s a modern scientific reflex. The ancient reader wouldn’t imagine seeds lying around waiting for Day 3. They would simply understand that God commanded, the land obeyed, and vegetation appeared, mature, functional, and ready to reproduce.
I think some of the difficulties you’re seeing come from assumptions I’m not actually making, so let me clarify my position more carefully. First, I hold that Genesis 1:1 is the actual creation event of the entire cosmos, not a heading. The Hebrew grammar supports this, since berē’šît bārā’ is a complete verbal clause. When God “created the heavens and the earth,” that includes the sun, moon, stars, the earth as a physical body, and all the raw materials for everything that follows. This fits well with passages like Job 38:4–7, where the angels rejoice as God lays the foundations of the earth, and Isaiah 45:18, which says God created the earth and formed it to be inhabited. So Genesis 1:1 contains everything, and what follows is God preparing that already‑created world for human habitation.
This is why I see Genesis 1:3 not as the creation of photons but as God calling the first day into being. Job 38 actually supports this pattern: God speaks of commanding the dawn after the earth already exists. Day 1 is therefore functional, the inauguration of the day/night cycle on earth. Day 4, then, is not a second creation of the sun. The Hebrew asah often means to appoint or assign a role, and Genesis 1:14–18 explicitly states the purpose of the luminaries: to govern day and night, to mark seasons, days, and years, and to give light on the earth. So Day 1 and Day 4 are not redundant. Day 1 establishes time; Day 4 installs the functionaries who regulate that time. This fits the broader biblical pattern where God first establishes a function and then appoints the agents who carry it out.
Regarding Days 2 and 3, I’m not suggesting God was reshaping the earth’s mass or altering its rotation. The text doesn’t require plate tectonics or violent crustal upheaval during those days. Instead, it describes God organizing the world’s surface, establishing the atmosphere, gathering the waters, revealing dry land, and preparing the earth to support life. None of this demands changes to the earth’s rotational timing. It’s simply God ordering the environment for human habitation, consistent with Isaiah 45:18’s statement that God formed the earth to be lived in.
On the question of dinosaurs or pre‑human life, I’m not placing them before Genesis 1:1. Quite the opposite: if they existed, they would be included within the “heavens and earth” created in verse 1. Scripture is not obligated to reveal every detail of Earth’s deep history, especially if that history had no bearing on Israel’s covenant identity or salvation. Genesis is giving us the theological and functional ordering of the world for humanity, not a comprehensive natural history.
This means Days 2 and 3 are not about creating matter but about assigning structure and habitability. God separates waters, establishes the sky, organizes the hydrological cycle, and prepares land for vegetation. These are functional preparations, not material origins. Genesis 1 is not a second creation event; it is God preparing the world He already made to be a home for humans.
And yes, I completely agree with your point about Genesis 1:26–27. The distinction between asah and bara is deliberate. In verse 26, God chooses the form and role humanity will take, “let us make man in our image.” In verse 27, God actually creates humanity as a fundamentally new kind of life. This fits the broader pattern of Genesis 1, where God alternates between assigning functions and creating new realities.
Pretty obviously the Hebrew grammar does not support your claim, again. Indeed, if it includes everything it must include things made during the six days.