Understanding the creation days...

• The record of the seven days of creation in Genesis 1 poses many challenges to the reader and interpreter of Scripture.

• We must first ask: what is the genre of this material and what is its primary intent? Since God revealed his Word through specific human authors to people in real historical and cultural settings using human words and literary conventions, the type of literature and what it was designed to communicate to the original audience matters.

1. Are these words straightforward reporting, written as though a journalist were watching and recording God's acts over seven 24-hour days?
2. Does Genesis 1 teach creation in a way that correlates with modern science, with the "days" representing long ages of time that allow for evolutionary development?
3. Is this narrative a strictly chronological account of things that took place (whatever the time factors involved), or are these historical events presented within a literary framework that is intended to portray God and his work in a certain light?
   
4. Is Genesis 1 myth, an a-historical artistic representation of cosmology, like the mythological accounts of the Ancient Near Eastern nations around them?
5. Is this text poetry, designed originally for use in worship liturgies?
   
6. Is the Genesis account primarily a polemic narrative, designed to present theological truths—setting forth a picture of God the Creator using the language and perspectives of the Ancient Near Eastern world in order to counter the myths of Israel's polytheistic neighbors?

• To start with, it is clear that Genesis 1 is not poetry. Nor does it contain the fantastic elements that characterize Ancient Near Eastern myths such as tales of the gods and warfare with great creatures representing the forces of chaos. It is prose, a simple and elegant narrative description of things that actually took place. However, it is also apparent that Genesis 1 is a highly structured narrative. The story of the days of creation has been written with great literary skill.

1. There is a clear parallelism between the first three days and days four through six. On Days 1-3, God separates light from darkness, waters above from waters below, and land where edible plants begin grow to from the waters of the seas, forming the environment where his creatures will live. On Days 4-6, God fills this environment by setting lights in the sky, forming air and sea creatures, and then creating land animals and human beings. (1/4) Light/lights, (2/5) Sky and sea/birds and fish, (3/6) Land and plants/animals and humans. Perfect parallelism, even down to the fact that day three and day six contain multiple acts of creation while the other days have only one. On the first three days God forms, the latter three he fills his creation. Only Day 7 stands apart from this parallel scheme.
   
2. Each creation day follows a specific, highly ordered pattern. (1) Each begins with the divine word, "And God said..." (2) Each day contains a statement affirming God's work, "And it was so..." (3) Each day (except day 2) portrays God evaluating his work: "And God saw that it was good..." (4) Each day ends with a summation: "And there was evening and morning, a ___ day."
3. The narrative is also structured using the number seven in various ways. The following are pointed out by Cassuto in his commentary:
   
1. Genesis 1.1 has seven words.
2. Genesis 1.2 has fourteen words (7x2).
   
3. The seven-day week is described in seven highly patterned paragraphs.
4. Each of the three main nouns in verse 1 are repeated a number of times that is a multiple of seven—God (35), heavens (21), land (21).
5. Seven times God utters the creative word, "Let there be..." or a similar command.
6. "Light" and "day" are found seven times in the first paragraph.
7. There are seven references to "light" in the fourth paragraph.
8. "Water" is mentioned seven times in paragraphs two and three.
9. The "living creatures" are mentioned seven times in paragraphs five and six.
10. The seventh paragraph about the Sabbath (the seventh day) has 35 words, and also contains three sentences of seven words each. In the very middle of the verse is the phrase, "the seventh day."

• It is obvious, is it not, that we are dealing with a text that has been carefully written and arranged. Such structuring must be taken into account when interpreting Genesis 1. This is no journalistic prose!

• So what kind of literature is Genesis 1, and how should we approach it in order to grasp its teachings? For my own conclusion I will quote C. John Collins here from his book, Genesis 1-4: A Linguistic, Literary, and Theological Commentary:

All of this leads us to conclude that the genre of this pericope is what we might call exalted prose narrative. This name for the genre will serve us in several ways. First, it acknowledges that we are dealing with prose narrative, and thus its purposes will be related to other uses of prose narrative—which will include the making of truth claims about the world in which we live. Second, by calling it exalted, we are recognizing that when we come to examine the author's truth claims, we must not impose a 'literalistic' hermeneutic on the text. Further, to call it exalted points us away from ordinary narration and leads us to suppose that its proper function extends well beyond its information to the attitudes that it fosters....

...We may conclude from this high level of patterning that the order of events and even lengths of time are not part of the author's focus; this is at the basis of what is often called the literary framework scheme of interpretation. In this understanding, the six workdays are a literary device to display the creation week as a careful and artful effort.

• In addition to this general statement about literary type, the reader will also note that the author describes God's creative acts in ways that would have stood contrary to the mythological assertions of their polytheistic neighbors. Though it is subtle, there is a great deal of polemic against false gods and other worldviews here.

• Also, though the text is not poetry, its symmetry makes it poetic and therefore useful in instructional and liturgical settings. As Bruggemann says in his Genesis commentary, Genesis 1 is not an abstract musing on origins, but rather a theological and pastoral document addressed to real people in actual historical settings with genuine faith questions and concerns. This text was designed to form the faith of God's people and equip them to worship the true and living God.