A Fifth day:
20 And God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.”
21 So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.
22 And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.”
23 And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.
On day two, the writer described our wonderful hydrologic cycle. With a fifth day, he paints a picture of a dramatic explosion of life that fills the water in the sea and atmosphere. He deliberately chose what parts of creation to highlight. He did not say that these were the first animals. The writer highlights the filling of the skies with flying creatures. The general term he used would include any animal that flies. The earliest fossils that might be classified as true birds appeared 160 mya in the rock record (Switek 2013). Pterosaurs appeared by about 230 mya.
The English Standard Version (ESV) quoted above says that “God created the great sea creatures”. Other versions translate this as “sea monsters”. What is a biblical sea monster? Wenham (1987) notes that the same word can be translated “snake” or “crocodile” or another “powerful animal”. Last year, an early crocodile fossil was identified that was dated as having lived 180 mya. (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190912094709.htm ). While we cannot be clear what creature Moses had in mind, he did choose to be more specific here. Why? The Jewish scholar, Umberto Cassuto helps here:
“Throughout the whole section only the general categories of plants and animals are mentioned, but not the separate species, save the sea monsters. This exception has not been made, we may be sure, without a specific motive. Here, too, it would seem, the Torah intended to sound a protest, as it were, against concepts that were current among the Gentiles, and to a certain extent even among the Israelites, but which were not in accord with its own spirit. In Egypt, in Mesopotamia, in the land of Canaan and in the countries of the East generally, all sorts of legends used to be recounted about the battles of the great gods against the sea dragon and similar monsters.” Cassuto, 1944
As Wenham notes, “They are not rivals that have to be defeated, but just one of his many creatures”. Moses chose to highlight these creatures precisely because he wanted Israel to worship the Creator, not the creation.
Given that Genesis 1 is in an exalted or elevated prose, the choice to use “bara” the more specific word for creating here certainly was not an accident. The Expositor’s Bible Commentary notes: “Each new step in the account is marked by the use of bara: the universe (v.1), the living creatures (v 21), and man (v.26).” Obviously, the writer considered these creatures to be qualitatively special. Hugh Ross interprets this to be because they are conscious on a different level than those before and as such able to relate to man differently. (Ross, 1998)
As with the plants, we are not told what processes may have been involved in creating them. God simply gave the order, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly”. I see no problem with the processes of creation including natural selection and mutation. The Bible makes no claim for or against secondary agents. That question is primarily a scientific one.
Conclusion 6: Flying animals, including birds and animals that would qualify as the “sea monster” indeed arose after the land plants at least 475 mya reported for day 3 and after the sun and moon were visible by ~400 mya.
A Sixth day:
24 And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds—livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.” And it was so.
25 And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.
26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
29 And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food.
30 And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so.
31 And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
The climax of creation as told by Moses comes with the creation (bara) of man on day 6. The account shows man’s relationship to creation and this gives great value to every human life. Day 6 begins with “Let the earth bring forth living creatures”. Again, the account is not interested in any secondary processes that may have been used. It is not providing a scientific description of how they were created. The primary cause is clear. The secondary causes proposed so far by science would be useless without the primary creative agent, God.
The text continues to use largely general terms for the animal life created, making it difficult to be specific in dating this creative period. It is likely that they are mammals which first appeared in the Triassic period, >200 mya. The examples given- “livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth” suggest that these are creatures that are useful to man. A case can be made for ancestors of the modern cattle, sheep and goats arising anywhere between 2 to 55 mya. Genesis presents an extravagant explosion of diverse life using general terms, but those terms allow them to be lined up easily with scientific data.
Mankind is presented as the special creation of God. He is created in the “image of God”. These humans were spiritual beings designed for special relationships with God. They were not the first Hominids or necessarily even the first to be physiologically Homo sapiens. Dating this means looking for evidence of the spiritual dimension. In my book, “A Texas-Sized Challenge to Young Earth Creation and Flood Geology”, I discussed options for dating this Adam relating to several interpretive options. One option is that the account is figurative and if so, then it is irrelevant to look for a specific date. I looked at three other options, that vary based on when Adam and Eve lived and when Noah’s flood occurred. For this discussion, I will refer you to the book and consider a bit more in the final discussion. For the moment, I just will say that the range of when spiritual man appeared would be from 200,000 years ago to 6,000 years ago. Artifacts do suggest that men with a spiritual dimension were around between 40-80,000 years ago.
It is also worth noting that if Genesis 2:4-25 are correlative with a portion of day 6, as discussed in a previous post, then the events of day 6 do not describe a 24-hour day. Linking the more detailed account from Genesis 2 with day 6 is a very natural interpretation, especially as verse 4 introduces the account this way: “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens.” Genesis 2:4 (ESV) I plan to investigate this issue further in later posts.
Conclusion 7:
God created life that man would need, both food and also companionship. The creatures named in day 6, including spiritual mankind, can be interpreted to have appeared between 55 mya and 40,000 years ago. Mankind as spiritual beings were created in a special form and are noted to have been created in the image of God. As image bearers, they have special abilities and responsibilities.
A Seventh day:
1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.
2 And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done.
3 So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.
The seventh day is different from all of the others in many ways. It was not a day of creation. A day of rest… why? When I was in first grade, around lunch time, the teacher would have the class lay their heads down on their desks to rest. I now understand that the teacher probably needed the rest much more than the kids. I didn’t want to stop and rest. I have changed my mind and learned to like naps… I get tired. Is this what Genesis 2:1-3 is telling us about God? Was He tired? Was He worn out from the billions of years of creation? Did he just take the day off and not do anything?
The God of the Torah had many attributes, but getting tired was not one of them (Isaiah 40:28). This seems to be a typical case of God accommodating man by using human qualities to describe his spiritual realities in ways that we can relate to. In other places (Colossians 1:17, 1 Corinthians 8:6, Acts 17:28, Nehemiah 9:6) the Bible describes an important part of God’s activity is sustaining creation. Without God sustaining the universe it would not continue to exist. If God continued to sustain the universe, what does it mean that God rested? Verse 1 tells that “the heavens and the earth were finished”. Over six creative periods, God prepared the earth. The earth went from a dark and foreboding to light to a planet with a robust planet full of life. It was even complete with observers who could appreciate beauty and relate to the creator. God could now change the way He related to His creation. He also could accommodate man’s need for rest and a time for worship by revealing this point in creation in a way that man could understand. It would be the model for man’s activity.
Conclusion 8:
God blessed his creation as good and gave us an example of setting aside a period for rest and acknowledging him.
Discussion
Over this post and the previous post, I have compared the creation events of Genesis to the record of nature as understood by science today. I have not claimed that the Bible is a scientific account but that it records creation in a series of verbal pictures. Christians from the scientific community have related the days of Genesis 1 to long periods of creation for at least the last 150 years. Hugh Ross and the Reasons to Believe (RTB) organization are leading advocates of this scenario today. I largely agree with their positions and certainly recommend them as a resource. Hebrew scholars agree that “yom”, the word translated as day can literally mean an indefinite period of time, suggesting that such an interpretation should be seriously considered.
It seems that both the young earth creationists (YEC) and the theistic evolution (TE) advocates insist the text is speaking of 24-hour days. Of course, they interpret the timespan very differently. I am using other posts to show some of the ways that the “science” presented by the YEC is invalid. The record of nature is clear that the earth is much older than any YEC interpretation allows. The TE advocates insist that the Genesis accounts are to be interpreted figuratively. You might ask, if I became convinced that these accounts as figurative stories, would that destroy my faith? Hardly. I know many Christians who do believe this. The Christian faith is centered on the person of Jesus as God. That question does not rely on how we interpret Genesis.
How about these questions? 1) how did the human author intend the account to be interpreted? and 2) how does God want us to take it? The writer used great care in what has been termed an elevated prose, but it is not Hebrew poetry. The author deliberately wrote to show the children of Israel that nature is created and not to be worshipped. Some authors have questioned whether or not the writer really cared about the real historical order or the physical origin of the earth but rather was interested in showing that God had ownership. I recognize that the author did want to contrast to the polytheism around them but I believe that he was also answering questions that every child asks, “Where did I come from and how did it all start?”
The ease with which the events of creation can be related to our scientific understanding is not an accident. God could have given a detailed account or provided more concrete evidence but for most of history this would have been useless. What He did give answered the questions in a fashion that has resonated with mankind for thousands of years. Now as we do have more detailed information about the history from a scientific fashion, the record provides an outline that fits. The Christian God gives evidence but never enough to not require faith to trust this evidence. This creation account fits this “modus operandi” perfectly. No other early creation story can be considered literally in any way comparable.
We continue to have many arguments about evolution vs creation. I noted earlier that Genesis 1 does not tell us either way. In my opinion, the idea that our forms of life originated by unguided accidents as proposed by naturalism requires faith far beyond the evidence. The evidence points to a mind behind creation. The degree to which natural selection and mutation were the tools used by the creator is an exciting topic to study, but not that theologically significant. Genesis 1 does clearly claim that mankind is created as a special creature designed for relationship with God, in His image. Here we have a question with both scientific and theological importance. Here again, I believe there are options in both areas that are available to reconcile perceived differences. In future posts, I want to explore what the Bible teaches about the origin of man. It seems there are multiple ways to interpret Genesis in terms of possible other humans before Adam and Eve and also how to interpret the scientific data regarding early man.
If creation in Genesis is consistent with creation in nature, then that is powerful evidence that the same God is ultimately responsible for both the Bible and nature. The implications of that for each of us are huge. The creator is personal and personally directed the creation of man. The creator of the cosmos knows us and cares about us.
References:
Cassuto, U. 1944. A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, Part One. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, The Hebrew University.
Gæbelein, F. 1990. Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 2. Grand Rapids: Regency Reference Library.
Ross, Hugh, 1994. Creation and Time. Colorado Springs: Navpress
___________, 1998. The Genesis Question. Colorado Springs: Navpress
Switek, B. 2013. “New Candidate for World’s First Bird.” Retrieved April 05, 2015, from National Geographic: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/05/130530-earliest-bird-feathered- dinosaur-jurassic-science-archaeopteryx-aurornis/
Vestal, Daniel, 1989. The Doctrine of Creation. Nashville: Convention Press.
Wenham, G. 1987. Word Biblical Commentary, Vol. 1; Genesis 1–15. Waco: Word Books.
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