Thursday, April 17, 2008

Getting Past the 'Yom' Debate

This week I wrote down two questions that I have been thinking through related to inerrancy and Genesis.


1. Did the Biblical authors have special insight into how events happened and/or the workings of the laws of nature?


or


2. Did the Biblical authors use common description of events in order to serve their own purpose(s)?

To affirm question 1, a person would argue that God spoke plainly to the writer or gave that writer some sort of mystical insight in some other way.

To affirm question 2, a person would argue that the author of the text used a common cultural story of the creation of the world in order to tell who created the world.

I will say that I am much more persuaded by view 2 than by view 1, despite what many people will see as problems within the view. View 2 cuts through all of the infamous yom debates (did it mean a literal 24 hour period or a much longer span of time) because it isn’t worried about reconciling scientific understanding of the world with scripture. In taking view 2, it could be argued that the author isn’t wrong about the length of time it took to bring about complex life in the world, because the author isn’t arguing for that, but simply adopting that understanding in order to affirm the Hebrews' God.

Now, I do realize that people will have problems with this view and I expect my own view to be much more refined and nuanced with greater understanding in the future (I’m psyched about finally getting John Sailhamer’s Genesis Unbound to help me with some of my continuing questions). But it does help me gain understanding into the text. I can say that the reason the author seems to be describing normal 24 hour days with evenings and mornings is because that is what the author is describing. If the author intended for yom to mean thousands or millions of years, then he does not do a great job at conveying that through the way that he writes. But the cool thing is that it doesn’t really matter. When faced with cultural explanations with how the world was created, the author’s rebuttal seems to be, “Yeah, well our God did it.” I have a slight feeling that if the author was confronted with modern understandings of the creation of the world he would say, “Yeah, well our God did it.” And that seems to be the greater point of the passage.

I’m not totally satisfied with this view and I hold it extremely loosely. I know that it will bring up questions of what inerrancy means, and those are questions I'm still working through.

Also, to see both sides of the argument dealing with yom, read this post by Justin Taylor and the ensuing comments.

To get a description of what Sailhamer lays out in Genesis Unbound, read this review.

1 comment:

Justmatt said...

Hey Chet this is my buddy Jim's Blog - I think you'd like it - you are both "deep" : )
http://moralscienceclub.blogspot.com/