Competing Readings of Genesis

It is of course admitted that, taking this account by itself, it would be most natural to understand the word in its ordinary sense; but if that sense brings the Mosaic account into conflict with facts, and another sense avoids such conflict, then it is obligatory on us to adopt that other.  --Charles Hodge, 1871¹

But confessedly, it would not have been as readily deduced from the Genesis text had it not been for the evidences advanced by secular science.  --J. Barton Payne, 1962, on the non-consecutive-days reading²

Summary

Christians who accept the Bible read Genesis 1 in at least nine different ways.  This article lines the readings up against the same Hebrew text and asks each one the same questions.  What must the text say for the reading to work?  What does the reading explain?  What can it not explain?  And was it proposed before or after the geology it reconciles?  The sibling article The Genre and Grammar of Genesis 1 owns the word counts for yom and the grammar of Genesis 1:1;  this article uses its results and does not repeat them.  Gerald Schroeder's Six Days is the physics child of this article.

1. The readings divide into three families.  Readings that keep the days as ordinary days and keep the sequence (calendar-day;  Lennox's non-consecutive days;  Sailhamer's promised-land week);  readings that stretch or loosen the days (day-age;  analogical days;  the gap theory, which stretches verse 1 instead);  and readings that deny the chapter is about physical origins in sequence at all (framework;  Walton's cosmic temple;  evolutionary creation).  Each family pays a different price.

2. Every old-earth reading was proposed after the geology it reconciles, and its own authors say so.  Thomas Chalmers reached the gap theory in 1804 because "the writings of Moses do not fix the antiquity of the globe," and published it in an 1814 review of Cuvier that opens "Should the phenomena compel us to assign a greater antiquity to the globe."^{3 4}  Edward Hitchcock in 1852 called the young-earth reading "the most natural" and then wrote "I now make my appeal to geology."⁵  Hugh Miller switched from the gap theory to day-age in 1857 because the Tertiary fossils he had just studied would not fit a gap.⁶  Charles Hodge in 1871 said the ordinary sense was "most natural" but that the "facts" made another sense "obligatory."¹  J. Barton Payne in 1962 said the non-consecutive-days reading "would not have been as readily deduced from the Genesis text had it not been for the evidences advanced by secular science."²  Hugh Ross says his day-age reading answered "the enigma of the fossil record."⁷  Ronald Numbers, the historian of creationism, found that by the late nineteenth century "even the most conservative Christian apologists readily conceded that the Bible allowed for an ancient earth."⁸

3. The day-age reading fails the textual tests it needs most.  Each numbered day closes with "evening and morning";  Ross answers that the phrase means "beginning and ending components" of any period, an interpretation no lexicon supports.⁷  Exodus 20:11 grounds the human week in the creation week;  Ross answers that "the emphasis in Exodus 20 is on the pattern of one out of seven, not the literal duration of the days."⁷  Its concordism also fails on its own terms.  Ross concedes that land plants "show up late in the fossil record--after the fossils of animal life, a day five creation event," and answers by reading day three's "vegetation" as something other than the fruit trees the verse names.⁹  Meredith Kline, an old-earth Reformed scholar, wrote that his exegesis "also refutes the harmonistic day-age view";  John Walton, an old-earth evangelical, wrote that day-age "has never been convincing."^{10 11}

4. The gap theory fails on grammar and lost its geology in 1857.  Weston Fields's 1976 study concludes that Genesis 1:2a is a circumstantial clause describing the earth "as it was created originally, not how it became at a time subsequent to creation," and that hayetah (הָיְתָה) is "a copula, and that the translation 'was' is the correct one."^{12 12}  Custance's pluperfect "had become" would put the ruin before the creation of verse 1.¹²  Payne, an old-earth Presbyterian, listed the same three exegetical failures in 1962.²  Hugh Miller abandoned the gap theory when the Pleistocene fossils showed no "great chaotic gap" between the geologic ages and the present.⁶  The Scofield note that spread the theory rests on Jeremiah 4:23 and Isaiah 45:18, verses about Judah and about God's purpose, not about a pre-Adamic ruin.¹³

5. The framework reading is the strongest old-earth reading on genre and the weakest on the text's own time-markers.  It rests on the parallel between days 1-3 and days 4-6, first noticed by Herder, and on Kline's argument from Genesis 2:5 that ordinary providence ran during the creation week.^{14 15}  It must read seven numbered days, six "evening and morning" refrains, and Exodus 20:11 as "an earthly metaphor for the heavenly archetype."¹⁰  Its own advocates state the payoff:  Kline, that "the scientist is left free of biblical constraints in hypothesizing about cosmic origins";  Davis Young, that it "eliminates sequence and thus removes all possibility of conflict with the sequence of events proposed by geology."^{10 16}  The parallelism is real but imperfect, as Blocher's own footnote against E. J. Young shows.¹⁴

6. Analogical days keep the sequence and drop the clock.  C. John Collins holds that the days "are God's workdays, their length is neither specified nor important," a view he traces to Shedd and Bavinck.¹⁷  He admits his "sympathies are with the harmonizers."¹⁷  Because he keeps the sequence, the reading inherits every order-of-events problem of day-age;  because he drops the clock, it cannot say what "evening and morning" marks.

7. Walton's cosmic-temple reading concedes the young-earth reading of the word "day" and removes the chapter from the debate.  Walton writes that the days "are seven twenty-four-hour days.  This has always been the best reading of the Hebrew text," and that Genesis 1 "is not an account of material origins."^{11 11}  Noel Weeks, a Sydney Assyriologist, shows from Enuma Elish that gods rest in temples "but not in their own temple," and from the Marduk and Enki texts that the ancients could conceive existence without function.^{18 18}  Vern Poythress shows the "vehicle-cargo" approach wants Genesis 1 to be about theology only and about erroneous cosmology at the same time.¹⁹

8. Sailhamer's reading is a gap theory with the gap moved into "the beginning."  He holds that reshit (רֵאשִׁית) "could refer to billions of years" and that eretz (אֶרֶץ) in Genesis 1 means the promised land.^{20 20}  Andrew Kulikovsky's review shows his two proof texts for a durative "beginning," Genesis 10:10 and Jeremiah 28:1, do not carry the sense.²¹  The sun, moon and stars made on day 4 and the "seas" of day 3 are not features of Canaan.

9. Lennox's non-consecutive literal days are Payne's fourth view of 1962, which Payne traced to John Urquhart in 1904 and then conceded came from science.^{2 22}  Lennox himself expects the objection that "no reader in ancient times would ever have thought of it."²²

10. Evolutionary creation explains everything by claiming nothing.  Denis Lamoureux holds that "the science in the Bible is an ancient science" and that "Adam never existed, and therefore suffering and death did not enter the world in divine judgment for his transgression."^{23 23}  No order-of-events problem can touch a reading that makes no claim about order.  The cost is paid in Romans 5, not in Genesis 1, and is audited in Adam, the Fall, and Death.

11. The calendar-day reading passes the most textual tests and has four weak spots that must be stated plainly.  Light on day 1 before the sun on day 4;  Genesis 2:5-6, where Kline's argument is real and Futato's reply is the best answer;  the seventh day with no "evening and morning";  and the "very good" of Genesis 1:31 over a world the reading must make free of carnivory, a cost audited in Death Before the Fall.  Its defenders' answers exist and are given below;  none is as clean as the objection.

12. The comparison table at the end scores nine readings on seven tests.  The calendar-day reading passes six and half-passes one.  No other reading passes more than four.

Verdict:  The text of Genesis 1, read on its own terms, describes six ordinary consecutive days and means to.  Every reading that finds long ages, a gap, or no chronology at all in the chapter was built to meet geology, and each pays for the fit by failing a test the plain reading passes.  That verdict is about what the author meant.  Whether he was right is a question for the rock and the isotope, and this article does not pretend to settle it;  see Dating the Earth.

The nine readings and what each needs the text to say

A reading of Genesis 1 is a set of claims about four things:  what "day" (yom, יוֹם) means, whether the days follow one another, how verse 1 relates to the six days, and whether the chapter reports a physical sequence at all.  The table gives the nine readings audited here, the person who first stated each in something like its present form, and the year.

Three families emerge.  The first keeps ordinary days and keeps the sequence (calendar-day, Lennox, Sailhamer).  The second stretches a unit of time:  the day (day-age, analogical days) or verse 1 (gap).  The third denies that the chapter asserts a physical sequence at all (framework, cosmic temple, evolutionary creation).  The three families fail in three different places, and the audit below is organised around that.

Seven tests the text sets

Each reading is scored against seven tests.  Four are textual.  Three are external, and the reading has to meet them only if it claims to describe physical history.

1. "Evening and morning." Six of the seven days close with "and there was evening and there was morning, day N" (Gen 1:5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 31). The sibling article reports the counts and discusses the disputed cases; the combination of yom with a number and with "evening" and "morning" is the ordinary-day idiom of the Hebrew Bible.²⁴
2. Numbered consecutive days. The days are counted "one, second, third" through "sixth" and "seventh" (Gen 1:5-2:3). A reading that separates or reorders them must say why the numbers are there.
3. Exodus 20:11 and 31:17. "For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day." The verse uses the creation week as the pattern for the human week. A reading must say what the analogy is an analogy to.
4. Genesis 1:1-2. Whether verse 1 is a first act, a summary heading, or a separate earlier creation, and whether verse 2 says the earth "was" or "became" formless. The grammar belongs to the sibling article; the consequence for each reading is scored here.
5. The order of events. Genesis has plants on day 3, the sun on day 4, sea creatures and birds on day 5, land animals on day 6. The fossil order has marine animals before land plants, land animals before birds, and the sun before the earth. Any reading that claims the chapter reports physical sequence must meet this.
6. Death before the Fall. Genesis 1:29-31 gives plants for food and calls the finished world "very good." Romans 5:12 ties death to Adam. Any reading that puts the fossil record before Adam puts predation and disease in the "very good" world. The theology is audited in Death Before the Fall; the score here is only whether the reading has the problem.
7. Provenance. Was the reading proposed before or after the geology it reconciles? This test does not decide truth. A reading born of geology can still be right. It does decide whether the reading can be called the natural sense of the text, because its own authors will usually have said which sense was natural.

Every old-earth reading came after the geology, and its authors said so

This is the finding that organises the rest.  It is not an accusation.  It is what the authors wrote.

Chalmers, 1804 and 1814.  William Hanna's memoir prints Thomas Chalmers's St Andrews chemistry lecture of 1804:  "The writings of Moses do not fix the antiquity of the globe.  If they fix anything at all, it is only the antiquity of the species."³  Hanna calls Chalmers "the first clergyman in this country who, yielding to the evidence in favour of a much higher antiquity being assigned to the earth than had previously been conceived, suggested the manner in which such a scientific faith could be harmonized with the Mosaic narrative."³  The 1814 review of Cuvier, reprinted in Chalmers's Works, begins the gap theory with a conditional:  "Should the phenomena compel us to assign a greater antiquity to the globe than to that work of days detailed in the book of Genesis, there is still one way of saving the credit of the literal history.  The first creation of the earth and the heavens may have formed no part of that work."⁴  The same review concedes the point it is answering:  "We conclude with adverting to the unanimity of geologists in one point,--the far superior antiquity of this globe to the commonly received date of it, as taken from the writings of Moses.  What shall we make of this?"⁴

Hitchcock, 1852.  Edward Hitchcock, president of Amherst College and a geologist, argued for the gap:  "I am willing to admit, at least for the sake of argument, that the common interpretation, which makes matter only six thousand years old, is the most natural.  But I contend that no violence is done to the language by admitting the other interpretation."⁵  Five pages later:  "Let it be recollected that I do not maintain that this is the most natural interpretation, but only that the passage will fairly admit it by the strict rules of exegesis.  The question still remains to be considered, whether there is sufficient reason to adopt it as the true interpretation.  To show that there is, I now make my appeal to geology."⁵

Miller, 1857.  Hugh Miller, the Scottish stonemason-geologist, told his readers why he had moved from the gap theory to day-age:  "I certainly did once believe with Chalmers and with Buckland that the six days were simply natural days of twenty-four hours each,--that they had compressed the entire work of the existing creation,--and that the latest of the geologic ages was separated by a great chaotic gap from our own."  His fieldwork in the Pleistocene beds changed that:  "the conclusion at which I have been compelled to arrive is, that for many long ages ere man was ushered into being, not a few of his humbler contemporaries of the fields and woods enjoyed life in their present haunts."⁶  The gap theory needed a break between the fossil ages and the present.  Miller found none, so he stretched the days instead.

Hodge, 1871.  Charles Hodge of Princeton laid out both options in his Systematic Theology:  "Admitting the facts to be as geologists would have us to believe, two methods of reconciling the Mosaic account with those facts have been adopted.  First, some understand the first verse to refer to the original creation of the matter of the universe in the indefinite past ...  Second, the word day as used throughout the chapter is understood of geological periods of indefinite duration."¹  Then the epigraph:  the ordinary sense is "most natural," but if it conflicts with "facts," another sense is "obligatory on us."¹  Hodge then printed James Dana's eight-stage geological sequence beside the Genesis days and reported that "the order of events in the Scripture cosmogony corresponds essentially with that which has been given."¹

Payne, 1962.  J. Barton Payne, a conservative Presbyterian Old Testament scholar, surveyed four evangelical readings in his Theology of the Older Testament.  Of the fourth, the non-consecutive literal days later revived by Lennox, he wrote the epigraph:  "confessedly, it would not have been as readily deduced from the Genesis text had it not been for the evidences advanced by secular science."²  He also wrote, of the days generally, that "To define these days other than normal twenty-four hour days does, however, seem to wrest Scripture, with its description of the 'evening and morning' (Gen. 1:5;  and cf. Ex. 20:11)."²

Ross, 1994.  Hugh Ross describes the night he first read Genesis as a teenage astronomer.  "My third clue was the lack of an evening and a morning for the seventh day.  The only reason I could imagine for the author's breach of parallelism, his failure to mention the evening and morning of the seventh day, was that the day might not yet be over.  When I saw that the seventh day was a day of rest for God, I recognized a possible answer to the enigma of the fossil record."⁷  The fossil record came first;  the reading was the answer to it.

The historians agree.  Ronald Numbers, a historian of science at Wisconsin and no friend of creationism, opens The Creationists with the finding:  "By the late nineteenth century even the most conservative Christian apologists readily conceded that the Bible allowed for an ancient earth and pre-Edenic life.  With few exceptions, they accommodated the findings of historical geology either by interpreting the days of Genesis 1 to represent vast ages in the history of the earth (the so-called day-age theory) or by separating a creation 'in the beginning' from a much later Edenic creation in six literal days (the gap theory)."⁸  His survey of post-Darwinian creationists "failed to turn up a single scientist or cleric who rejected the antiquity of the earth."⁸  Jeremy Sexton's 2018 study of the genealogies makes the parallel point for Genesis 5 and 11:  "Interpreters did not challenge the chronological intent of the Genesis genealogies until the ascendancy of Darwinism in the 1860s."²⁵

None of this makes the old-earth readings false.  It does settle test 7 for all of them, and it explains why their authors so often concede test 1 or test 2 in the same breath.

The day-age reading fails the tests it needs most

The day-age reading is the oldest of the stretch-the-day readings and the one most often met in apologetics.  Its modern form is Hugh Ross's Creation and Time (1994) and Navigating Genesis (2014).  Its nineteenth-century form is Hugh Miller's Testimony of the Rocks (1857), James Dana's geology, and Hodge's endorsement.

What it needs the text to say

Ross gives his textual case as a numbered list.  Yom has three literal meanings, one of them "a long but finite period of time";  Psalm 90:4 shows that "God's days are not our days";  the syntax "and was evening and was morning day X" is "a departure from simple and ordinary expression" that "creates an ambiguity";  and the seventh day has no evening and morning, so it "has (or had) not yet ended," which by "the parallelism of the Genesis creation account" suggests "the first six days may also have been long time periods."^{7 7}

Test 1: evening and morning

The refrain is the reading's largest problem, and Ross's answer is the weakest part of his book.  "In other words, evening and morning refer to the beginning and ending components of 'day,' however it is used.  For example, 'in my grandfather's day' refers to my grandfather's lifetime.  So the morning and evening of his day would be his youth and old age."⁷  No Hebrew lexicon gives erev (עֶרֶב) or boqer (בֹּקֶר) that sense, and the phrase "in my grandfather's day" is English, not Hebrew.  Ross concedes the syntactic point "does not constitute a proof."⁷  Payne, who wanted to keep the door to long ages open, still wrote that reading the days "other than normal twenty-four hour days does, however, seem to wrest Scripture, with its description of the 'evening and morning'."²  Bruce Waltke, a framework advocate who holds no brief for the calendar-day reading, rejected day-age on the refrain:  "the pattern in the text of morning-evening seems inconsistent with the epoch theory."²⁶

Test 3: Exodus 20:11

Ross's answer:  "Sometimes the Sabbath is a full year (cf. Leviticus 25:4) ...  Since God is not subject to biological cycles, His rest period is completely flexible.  Clearly, the emphasis in Exodus 20 is on the pattern of one out of seven, not the literal duration of the days of creation."⁷  He also quotes Gleason Archer:  "By no means does this demonstrate that 24-hour intervals were involved in the first six 'days,' any more than the eight-day celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles proves that the wilderness wanderings under Moses occupied only eight days."⁷  The Tabernacles analogy fails on its own terms:  Leviticus 23:42-43 says the feast recalls that Israel lived in booths, not that the wandering lasted eight days, while Exodus 20:11 says the human week copies the divine one because "in six days the LORD made."  Simeon Turpin's review of Lennox makes the grammatical point that "Exodus 20:8-11 uses an adverbial accusative of time ('in six days') which indicates the duration of God's creative activity."²⁷

Test 5: the order of events, on Ross's own terms

Day-age is the only old-earth reading that stakes itself on concordance with the fossil order.  It therefore has to meet the order, and it does not.

Plants before the sun.  Day 3 has "vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit" (Gen 1:11).  Day 4 has the sun.  Ross reads day 4 as the sun appearing through a clearing atmosphere rather than being made:  "It's not that God made (or created) them on the fourth day; He simply made them visible and distinguishable on that day."⁷  Kline, an old-earth critic, treats day 4 as "an independent argument against the solar-day and day-age" readings, because the effects attributed to the luminaries on day 4 "are the same effects that are already attributed to the creative" work of day 1, and he rejects the appearing-only reading on the ground that verse 16 says the lights were made.¹⁰

Land plants after marine animals.  Ross concedes the fossil order:  "Evidence for land plants, especially for advanced ones such as fruit trees, shows up late in the fossil record--after the fossils of animal life, a day five creation event."⁹  His answer is to read deshe (דֶּשֶׁא) in verse 11 as green plant life in general and to move the fruit trees off day 3.  The verse names the fruit trees.  The earliest land-plant spores are Middle Ordovician, about 470 million years old on the standard scale;  the earliest vertebrates are Early Cambrian, about 518 million;  the earliest unequivocal flowering plants are Early Cretaceous, about 130 million.^{28 29 30}  On the standard scale, day 5's fish precede day 3's plants by about 50 million years, and day 3's fruit trees follow day 5's fish by nearly 400 million.

Birds before land animals, and sea mammals on day 5.  Genesis has "every winged bird" on day 5 and "livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth" on day 6.  The standard scale has tetrapods on land about 365 million years ago and the first bird, Archaeopteryx, at about 150 million;  see Archaeopteryx and Bird Origins.  Ross meets this by reading day 6's animals as "three specialized kinds of land mammals, the kinds most crucial to humanity's needs" and leaving the rest unstated:  "When other land mammals arrive on the scene the text does not say.  Scientific research will need to fill in that information."⁹  He also places dinosaurs on day 5 and "the first sea mammals" on day 5, before the land mammals of day 6, though whales descend from land mammals on the standard account and appear about 50 million years ago.^{9 9}  Once "winged bird" can be a dinosaur and "beasts of the earth" can be three domesticated kinds, the match is no longer a test.

Test 6: death before the Fall

Day-age puts the whole fossil record inside the six days.  Ross accepts the consequence:  "Multiple extinction events have occurred, implying that they remain because God repeatedly replaced extinct species with new ones."⁹  He also reports, accurately, what the other side holds:  "Creation science teaches that all animals ate only plants until Adam and Eve rebelled against God's authority."⁹  Both sides agree on where the disagreement lies.

The old-earth critics of day-age

The reading's sharpest critics are not young-earth.  Kline's 1996 article opens by saying its exegesis "also refutes the harmonistic day-age view."¹⁰  Walton writes that the day-age reading "has never been convincing," because "the examples generally used of yom referring to an extended period of time are examples in which the word is being used idiomatically: 'in that day.'"¹¹  Waltke rejects it on the refrain.²⁶  Payne kept it at arm's length.²

The young-earth reply that misfires

Ross reports Henry Morris calling progressive creationism "a compromise with the enemy" and the day-age reading "the worst of all options."⁷  Morris's charge is theological, not textual, and this article does not use it.  The textual case against day-age is made by its own allies above.

The gap theory fails on grammar and lost its geology in 1857

What it needs the text to say

Fields summarises the claims of the classic gap theory in a paragraph:  in "the far distant dateless past" God created a perfect earth;  Satan fell;  judgment brought "Lucifer's flood," indicated by the waters of 1:2;  the fossils date from that ruin;  and the proofs are that hayetah in 1:2 "should be translated 'became' or 'had become,' not 'was,'" that tohu wabohu (תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ) means "a sinful, therefore, not an original state," and that Isaiah 45:18 "states that God did not make the earth 'tohu.'"¹²  The Scofield Reference Bible spread this reading to millions.  Its note on Genesis 1:2 reads:  "Jer. iv. 23-26, Isa. xxiv. 1 and xlv. 18, clearly indicate that the earth had undergone a cataclysmic change as the result of a divine judgment.  The face of the earth bears everywhere the marks of such a catastrophe.  There are not wanting intimations which connect it with a previous testing and fall of angels.  See Ezk. xxviii. 12-15 and Isa. xiv. 9-14, which certainly go beyond the kings of Tyre and Babylon."¹³  The 1917 edition repeats it word for word, with the verse numbers in arabic figures.¹³

A small audit point:  John Whitcomb's foreword to Fields's book says the note appeared in "the Scofield Reference Bible (first edition, 1917)."¹²  The first edition was 1909 and carried the note.

Test 4: "was" or "became"

Fields's 1976 study, written at Grace Theological Seminary under Whitcomb, is the standard young-earth critique and the one the gap theory's defenders have to answer.  Its grammatical conclusion:  "Genesis 1:2a consists of a noun clause which is circumstantial (subordinate and explanatory) to the main verb of 1:1.  This means that 1:2 is a description of the earth as it was created originally, not how it became at a time subsequent to creation."¹²  On the verb:  "we conclude with all the grammarians cited above that in Genesis 1:2 it is a copula, and that the translation 'was' is the correct one."¹²

Custance had staked his 1970 book on the pluperfect.  His translation reads "But the earth had become a ruin and a desolation," and his second chapter defends "the use of a disjunctive (but for and), the use of the pluperfect in the place of the simple perfect, and the use of became in place of the simple was."³¹  Fields's reply is that a pluperfect in a clause circumstantial to verse 1 would have to describe something before verse 1:  "According to the pluperfect translation, the narrative would read this way:  'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  Now the earth had become (prior to its creation) unformed and unfilled.  Then God said, Let there be light.'"¹²  His test case is Jonah 3:3, where the same construction, "Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city," describes a state that already existed, not a becoming.¹²  Fields also reports that Custance kept only twenty-four of the forty-five Brown-Driver-Briggs examples of hayah meaning "to be," and that the lexicon lists Genesis 1:2 among them.¹²

Payne, who was not a young-earth creationist, reached the same three conclusions in 1962:  the verb "is in an unstressed position, which makes the translation 'became' unlikely";  the nouns "indicate simply the absence of a detailed creation up to this point.  Their meaning is not 'desolation'";  and "The condition of creation as described in Genesis 1:31 was still 'very good.'  The fall of Satan, therefore, whenever it may in fact have occurred, could not yet have taken place."²

Isaiah 45:18

The verse says God "did not create it empty (tohu), he formed it to be inhabited."  Fields reports that Custance himself "has admitted, and we think rightly so, that the force of the argument from this passage is compelling only to one who has already accepted the tenets of the theory," and that the New Scofield Reference Bible of 1967 moved its gap note from Genesis 1:2 to Isaiah 45:18.¹²  Isaiah's tohu is contrasted with "to be inhabited";  it states God's purpose, not a prior ruin.  Jeremiah 4:23, the other proof text, describes Judah under Babylonian judgment in the language of Genesis 1:2 reversed.

Tests 5, 6 and 7

The gap theory does not claim concordance, so test 5 does not bite.  Test 6 bites hard:  the whole fossil record of predation is pre-Adamic, and Pember was explicit that the pre-Adamic world was one of sin, "sin, too, which would seem to have been patiently borne with through long ages."³²  Test 7 is settled by Chalmers and Hitchcock above, and by Pember's own preface, which sells the theory as the reading that "absolutely disables the attacks of Geology upon the Book of Genesis" by leaving "an interval of undefined magnitude between creation and the Post-tertiary period."³²

The theory's geology died before its exegesis.  Miller abandoned it in 1857 because the Pleistocene record showed no chaos between the fossil ages and the present.⁶  Numbers records that George McCready Price's flood geology "wiped out the scientific rationale for the traditional day-age and gap interpretations," and that Price's Religion and Science Association put itself on record in 1935 as "condemning and repudiating" both "the Day-Age theory, which is false scientifically and cannot be made to harmonize with the record of Genesis I; and (b) The Pre-Adamic Ruin Theory, which makes nonsense of the scientific facts and is utterly fantastic theologically."^{8 8}  Modern geology has no "Lucifer's flood" and modern young-earth geology has no room for one.  The gap theory now has no science on either side.

The framework reading is strongest on genre and weakest on the text's own clocks

Where it came from

The framework reading is a twentieth-century Reformed product.  Blocher, its best expositor in English, traces the idea back to Augustine's instantaneous creation and forward through Gersonides and Lagrange, then says:  "The pioneer, around 1930, was probably A. Noordtzij of the University of Utrecht, and since World War II the main" advocates have been Reformed theologians.¹⁴  Davis Young, a Calvin College geologist who holds an old earth, describes it as "the 'framework theory' of Genesis 1 advocated by such men as A. Noordtzij, Nicholas Ridderbos, and Meredith Kline."¹⁶  Noordtzij's 1924 book has not been read for this article;  it is cited here through Blocher, Young and Kline.  Kline's 1958 article names Ridderbos's 1957 book and Bernard Ramm's 1954 Christian View of Science and Scripture as the two works that "evoked animated reactions among evangelicals."¹⁵

What it needs the text to say

Blocher states the reading in one paragraph:  "The literary interpretation takes the form of the week attributed to the work of creation to be an artistic arrangement, a modest example of anthropomorphism that is not to be taken literally.  The author's intention is not to supply us with a chronology of origins.  It is possible that the logical order he has chosen coincides broadly with the actual sequence of the facts of cosmogony;  but that does not interest him."¹⁴  Waltke states the payoff:  "The presentation of creation through 'days' reveals God's sovereign ordering of creation and God's care to accommodate himself to humanity in finite and understandable terms."²⁶

The reading has two supports.  The first is the parallel between the two triads of days, which Blocher credits to Herder:  "Day 1 corresponds to Day 4, Day 2 to Day 5, Day 3 to Day 6.  Corresponding to the light (1) are the luminaries (4);  to the creation of the expanse of the sky and the separation of the waters (2) correspond the birds and the fish (5);  and to the appearance of the dry land and of vegetation (3) correspond the land animals including mankind together with the gift of food (6)."¹⁴  From this Blocher draws the conclusion that matters:  "The reader who is in sympathy with that meditation no longer stumbles at the 'problem' of the fourth day with its 'delayed' creation of the stars ...  Chronology has no place here."¹⁴

The second support is Kline's argument from Genesis 2:5.  The verse says no shrub or plant of the field had yet grown "for the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground."  Kline's point in 1958 was that this gives a natural reason for the absence of plants, which "necessarily presuppose radically different providential operations for the creation period" than a week of miracles would allow;  it "validates the not so traditional interpretation which regards the chronological framework of Genesis 1 as a figurative representation of the time span of creation."¹⁵  He restated it in 1996:  "Gen. 2:5, however, takes it for granted that providential operations were not of a supernatural kind, but that God ordered the sequence of creation acts so that the continuance and development of the earth and its creatures could proceed by natural means.  This unargued assumption of Gen. 2:5 contradicts the reconstructions of the creation days proposed by the more traditional views."¹⁰

Kline is candid that this is the load-bearing member:  "Purely exegetical considerations, therefore, compel the conclusion that the divine author has employed the imagery of an ordinary week to provide a figurative chronological framework for the account of his creative acts ...  The question is actually closed in favor of the non-chronological interpretation by the exegetical evidence of Gen. 2:5."¹⁵  Futato's 1998 article adds the argument that Genesis 2:5-7 is itself topical and shows that it did rain at creation, so that "Gen 1:3-31 is a coherent account of creation that has been arranged topically to focus the reader's attention on vegetation and humanity."³³

Test 1 and test 2: the refrain and the numbers

Here the framework pays.  Kline concedes that the evenings and mornings are figurative along with the days:  "once the figurative nature of the chronological pattern is appreciated the literalness of the sequence is no more sacrosanct than the literalness of the duration of the days in this figurative week."¹⁵  Blocher's reading "recognizes ordinary days but takes them in the context of one large figurative whole."¹⁴  The reading therefore agrees with the calendar-day reading on what the words mean and disagrees only on whether the author meant them.  That is the same position James Barr took from the other side of the fence, and the sibling article treats it at length.

The parallel between the triads is real and imperfect.  Blocher's own footnote records E. J. Young's objection that "the fish (5) swim in the seas (3), and that the birds are related to the earth (v.22)," and answers that "the birds are also linked with the expanse of the sky (v.20)."¹⁴  The waters that the fish fill were made on day 1, not day 2 (Gen 1:2);  the sea creatures of day 5 fill the seas of day 3;  the sun of day 4 rules a day and night that already existed on day 1.  A pattern that needs three adjustments to hold is a pattern the author may have noticed, not one he built the chapter on.  Joseph Pipa's critique quotes Wayne Grudem's further point that the second triad does not simply fill the first:  the luminaries of day 4 "are placed not in any space created on Day 1 but in the 'firmament'... that was created on the second day," a word "not mentioned at all on Day 1 but five times on day 2 (Gen.1:6-8) and three times on Day 4 (Gen.1:14-19)."³⁴

Test 3: Exodus 20:11

Kline meets the Sabbath argument head on:  "The gratuitous insistence of literalists that the terms of the Sabbath ordinance in Exod. 20:11 demand that the creation week be one of literal solar days is contradicted by the metaphorical character of the whole series of creational replications to which the original Sabbath ordinance (Gen. 2:3) belongs ...  the sabbatical week of the ordinance is a likeness of its original, not exactly the same;  it is an earthly metaphor for the heavenly archetype."¹⁰  This is consistent, and it is the reading's weakest point.  Exodus 20:11 says "in six days the LORD made" and uses the same "six days" for the human work week in the verse before.  A metaphor whose vehicle and tenor are both "six days" has no figurative distance to work with.

Test 4: Genesis 2:5 read the other way

The calendar-day reply to Kline is that Genesis 2:5 is about the land where the garden would be, on day 6, not about the whole earth on day 3.  Collins, who is not a calendar-day advocate, reads it that way:  "it best suits the grammar of 2:5-7 if we read these verses as describing the conditions in the 'land' when God formed the first man, on the sixth day of Genesis 1."¹⁷  Futato's own conclusion that "it rained at the time of creation according to Gen 2:5-7" removes the "no rain until the Flood" reading that some young-earth writers used, but it does not touch the day-6 reading.³³  The plant terms in 2:5, siah (שִׂיחַ) and eseb (עֵשֶׂב) "of the field," are not the terms of 1:11-12, and 3:18 uses them for the cultivated and thorny growth of the cursed ground.  On that reading 2:5 describes a landscape awaiting a farmer, and Kline's argument from ordinary providence has no purchase on the six days.  This is the best young-earth answer available;  it is an answer, not a proof, and Kline's argument remains the strongest single textual objection to the calendar-day reading.

Tests 5 to 7

The framework escapes test 5 by design.  Kline's abstract says so:  "as far as the time frame is concerned, with respect to both the duration and sequence of events, the scientist is left free of biblical constraints in hypothesizing about cosmic origins."¹⁰  Young says the same:  the reading "eliminates sequence and thus removes all possibility of conflict with the sequence of events proposed by geology."¹⁶  Test 6 bites, because the reading places the whole fossil record before Adam and says nothing about it.  Test 7 is settled by the dates:  the reading arrived between 1924 and 1958, a century after the geology, and Blocher warns his readers of exactly that temptation:  "So great is the advantage, and for some the relief, that it could constitute a temptation.  We must not espouse the theory on the grounds of its convenience but only if the text leads us in that direction."¹⁴

Analogical days keep the sequence and drop the clock

C. John Collins, professor of Old Testament at Covenant Seminary, sets out the analogical-days view in Genesis 1-4 (2006):  the days "are God's workdays, their length is neither specified nor important, and not everything in the account needs to be taken as historically sequential.  This position found advocates in the American Presbyterian William Shedd and the Dutch Reformed Herman Bavinck."¹⁷  He adds that Shedd accepted the geology of his day while Bavinck was skeptical, and that "I will not deceive you by making myself out to be neutral:  my sympathies are with the harmonizers."¹⁷

The argument is that the refrain presents "God as a workman going through his workweek, taking his daily rest (the night between the evening and the morning) and enjoying his Sabbath 'rest.'  To speak this way is to speak analogically about God's activity."¹⁷  Because Exodus 31:17 says God "was refreshed" on the seventh day, and "God does not get tired as we do," the language must be analogical, "and the import is that human work and rest are analogies of God's work and rest."¹⁷

This is the most careful of the stretch-the-day readings and the one least driven by concordism.  It passes test 3 better than day-age, because it does not need Exodus 20:11 to say anything about duration.  It fails test 1 for the same reason day-age does:  if the days are God's workdays of unstated length, "evening and morning" mark nothing.  Collins keeps the sequence of the days, and so inherits test 5 in full;  he also holds that "the fourth day does not describe the creation of the heavenly lights," which is Ross's move.¹⁷  And because his days are as long as God pleases, he inherits test 6.  Collins's pedigree claim is fair:  Bavinck did hold that the days were God's days.  What Bavinck did not hold was that this made room for geology;  Collins records that he "was skeptical" of it.¹⁷

Walton's cosmic temple concedes the days and withdraws the chapter

John Walton, professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College, published The Lost World of Genesis One in 2009.  Its thesis is that ancient cosmology "is function oriented," so that "to create something" in Genesis 1 means to assign it a function in an ordered system, not to bring its material into existence.¹¹  On this reading Genesis 1 "is not an account of material origins," though Walton adds at once:  "I firmly believe that God is fully responsible for material origins, and that, in fact, material origins do involve at some point creation out of nothing.  But that theological question is not the one Genesis 1 addresses."¹¹  The seven days are the inauguration of the cosmos as God's temple, in which he takes up residence on day 7.

What it concedes

Walton concedes the whole lexical case of the calendar-day reading.  "These are seven twenty-four-hour days.  This has always been the best reading of the Hebrew text.  Those who have tried to alleviate the tension for the age of the earth commonly suggested that the days should be understood as long eras (the day-age view).  This has never been convincing."¹¹  Of young-earth creationists:  "I would contend that while their reading of the word 'day' (yom) as a twenty-four-hour day is accurate, they have been too narrow in their reading of words such as 'create' (bara') and 'made' ('asa)."¹¹  Day 3, on which "God doesn't make anything," "is only a problem if this is an account of material origins."¹¹

The reading therefore passes tests 1 and 2 by agreeing with the calendar-day reading, and escapes tests 5 and 6 by withdrawing the chapter from physical history.  Whether it passes test 3 depends on whether "in six days the LORD made" can mean "in six days the LORD assigned functions."  Exodus 20:11 uses asah (עָשָׂה), the verb Walton reads functionally;  Exodus 31:17 adds that God "was refreshed."  A temple inauguration liturgy is a possible reading of a week in which God "made" things;  it is not the obvious one, and Walton's own book concedes that no one read it that way before the ancient Near Eastern texts were recovered.

The critics

The most damaging critic is Noel Weeks, an Assyriologist at the University of Sydney, in the Westminster Theological Journal for 2016.  Weeks takes Walton's method first:  Walton "sees the biblical text as a product of, and hence explicable in terms of, a mentality that the biblical authors shared with their contemporaries, irrespective of religious differences."¹⁸  On the claim that "the ANE was not concerned with the nature of material objects in themselves but only with their function," Weeks answers that "Walton is putting a proposition to the evidence that the evidence is poorly equipped to answer," and gives two counter-examples:  the test of Marduk, "where he had to show the ability to destroy a constellation and then recreate it, both by simply speaking.  Surely the point here is the existence of the constellation rather than its function";  and the contest of Ninmah and Enki, "where the test is whether one can create a human so deformed or restricted that the other cannot assign a role to that specimen of humanity.  Surely here there is a conceptual distinction between existence and function."¹⁸  On the temple, Weeks reads Enuma Elish itself:  Ea rests in a temple built on the defeated Apsu, and the gods rest in Marduk's temple Esagil.  "Thus, gods rest in temples but not in their own temple.  The presupposition seems to be that the gods normally dwelt in heaven or the apsû.  If so, Walton's thesis has met a significant obstacle."¹⁸

Vern Poythress, also in the Westminster Theological Journal, names the approach the "vehicle-cargo approach," in which "the cosmological trappings are only the vehicle, while the 'cargo' that the vehicle carries consists in the theological content of the passage," and lists Walton's Lost World pp. 55-57 among its examples.¹⁹  His objection is that the approach "can be tempted to want to have it both ways.  At one time it may tell us that Gen 1 is only about theology, and not about events ...  At another time the vehicle-cargo approach may tell us that Gen 1 includes and does not correct a false cosmology of ancient times."¹⁹

Creation Ministries International's review, by Gavin Cox, makes the pastoral objection and quotes the passage in Walton's question-and-answer section where the cost is paid:  fossil hominins "could be part of the pre-functional cosmos--part of the long stage of development that I would include in the material phase," and "The anthropological specimens would not be viewed as humans in the image of God.  They would not be assessed morally (any more than an animal would), and they were subject to death as any animal was."³⁵  That is test 6, answered by placing all death before the story starts.

The score

Walton's reading is the only old-earth reading that agrees with the calendar-day reading about the words.  It differs about what the words are for.  It was proposed in 2009, and its author is clear that it is new;  Cox observes that "no one in the last 2000 years of church history has thought of it."³⁵  The reading withdraws Genesis 1 from every physical question at once, which is why it explains nothing the fossil record asks and is contradicted by nothing it says.

Sailhamer's promised-land week is a gap theory with the gap moved

John Sailhamer, an evangelical Old Testament scholar, published Genesis Unbound in 1996.  He calls his view "historical creationism."  It has two moves.  First, "the beginning" (bereshit, בְּרֵאשִׁית) is a period, not a point:  "there is no way to limit the duration of the word 'beginning' (Hebrew, reshit).  It could refer to billions of years, to a few thousand years, or to a period as" short as the text allows;  "God created the universe during an indeterminate time period, perhaps long before the 'promised land' was made habitable and human beings were created."^{20 20}  He tells his children that the dinosaurs "were created, lived, and became extinct during 'the beginning.'"²⁰  Second, eretz in Genesis 1 "more precisely means 'land'," and "The work of God during the six days of creation, therefore, is an account of His preparing 'the promised land' as a place for man and woman to dwell."²⁰  The six days are ordinary days;  Sailhamer's own diagram labels the beginning "(BILLIONS OF YEARS)" and the week "(24 HOUR) DAYS."²⁰

The reading passes tests 1 and 2 outright and passes test 3 as well as the calendar-day reading does, since its days are days.  It fails test 4 twice.  Kulikovsky's review for the Journal of Creation puts the first failure:  "Sailhamer essentially holds to a kind of modified gap theory.  He argues that 'beginning' (Hebrew reshit) can refer to an indefinite and possibly long period of time.  He cites Genesis 10:10 and Jeremiah 28:1 for support.  However, the instance in Genesis 10:10 carries no temporal reference at all and thus provides no support at all for Sailhamer's claim."²¹  The second failure is that verse 2 describes "the deep" and "the waters," verse 10 gathers the seas, and verses 14-18 make the sun, moon and stars and set them in the expanse.  None of these is a feature of Canaan.  Sailhamer's answer is that the sun and moon were made "in the beginning" and that day 4 only assigns them a purpose, which is the day-age move and fails for the same reason:  the text says God "made" them and "set" them.¹⁰

Sailhamer is honest about the reading's motive.  "Such an understanding of Genesis 1 fits well with most contemporary scientific views of the age of the universe," and "Given what appears to be true about the age of the earth, it is likely that millions or billions of years transpired during this time of 'the beginning.'"^{20 20}  He also claims a pedigree:  "in the days before the discoveries of the 'New World' and beyond, the limited geographical horizons of the readers of the Bible fit well into the geographical focus of the biblical authors.  Consequently, my view is often found in earlier works."²⁰  He does not name them, and no pre-modern commentator known to this article reads the eretz of Genesis 1:1-2 as Canaan.  Test 6 bites in full;  the fossil record is inside "the beginning."

Lennox's non-consecutive days are Payne's fourth view, and Payne said where it came from

John Lennox, an Oxford mathematician, published Seven Days That Divide the World in 2011.  After surveying the calendar-day, day-age and framework views he offers "another possibility:  that the writer did not intend us to think of the first six days as days of a single earth week, but rather as a sequence of six creation days;  that is, days of normal length (with evenings and mornings as the text says) in which God acted to create something new, but days that might well have been separated by long periods of time."²²  He anticipates the reader:  "'But isn't this rather far-fetched?  Surely it goes against the natural, plain, straightforward reading of the text?  In any case, isn't it clear that no reader in ancient times would ever have thought of it?'  I understand this objection very well, as it has also occurred to me."²²

The view is not new.  Payne described it in 1962 as the fourth of four evangelical options:  "Over fifty years ago John Urquhart stressed that, except in the case of the sixth day, the Hebrew noun for 'day' has the indefinite form, 'a second day,' 'a third day,' etc., not the definite form ...  It has therefore, been concluded that the days are not to be taken consecutively but that they may be understood as separated by long ages.  Each day would then indicate a normal, twenty-four hour period."  Then the epigraph:  "But confessedly, it would not have been as readily deduced from the Genesis text had it not been for the evidences advanced by secular science."²  Urquhart's The Bible:  Its Structure and Purpose is dated about 1904 in Payne's note.

The reading passes tests 1, 2 and 4.  It fails test 3, because a week of "six days" separated by ages is not a week, and Exodus 20:11's "in six days" is an accusative of duration.²⁷  It keeps the sequence and so inherits test 5 in full:  fruit trees on a day 3 that precedes by ages the fish of day 5.  It inherits test 6.  And Payne settled test 7 fifty years before Lennox wrote.  Lita Sanders's review for the Journal of Creation concludes that the book "is ultimately unsatisfying precisely because creation is divisive, and any convincing argument for a position will come down on one side or the other.  Lennox does not fall under any of the established categories, and his book is not long or in-depth enough to even mount a sufficient argument for key portions of it."³⁶

Evolutionary creation explains everything by claiming nothing

BioLogos describes its position:  "Evolutionary Creation (EC) is a Christian position on origins.  It takes the Bible seriously as the inspired and authoritative word of God, and it takes science seriously as a way of understanding the world God has made.  EC includes two basic ideas.  First, that God created all things, including human beings in his own image.  Second, that evolution is the best scientific explanation we currently have for the diversity and similarities of all life on Earth."  On Genesis:  "Some ECs believe Adam and Eve were a historical couple.  Others see the story as a symbolic retelling of Israel's story, or as a symbolic story about humanity as a whole."³⁷

Denis Lamoureux, who teaches science and religion at St Joseph's College in the University of Alberta and holds doctorates in both theology and biology, gives the position its fullest statement in Evolutionary Creation (2008).  "The science in the Bible is an ancient science.  It is the science-of-the-day a few thousand years ago in the ancient Near East.  Therefore, any attempt to align science with biblical statements about the origin of the world is doomed."²³  The Holy Spirit "descended to their level of understanding and employed their scientific and historical categories," so that "the ancient science and ancient history in Gen 1-11 are incidental vessels that deliver eternal spiritual truths."²³  On Adam:  "The historicity of Adam is built on an ancient conception of origins.  The traditional belief in an actual causal connection between his sin and the origin of physical death is false."²³  And:  "Adam never existed, and therefore suffering and death did not enter the world in divine judgment for his transgression."²³

Denis Alexander, a Cambridge immunologist, holds a more conservative version in Creation or Evolution (2008):  Genesis 1 "is describing creative events that occurred before anyone was around to describe them, so it cannot be history in any normal use of that term," and the days are figurative, a reading he supports from Philo, Origen and Augustine.^{38 38}  The church-history claim is audited in Age of Earth in Church History.

Evolutionary creation is the limiting case of the third family.  Where the framework reading says the chapter's order is not chronological, this reading says nothing in the chapter is a claim about nature at all.  It therefore passes no textual test and fails none;  the tests do not apply.  Its cost falls on Romans 5:12-21, 1 Corinthians 15:21-22 and 45-49, and Luke 3:38, and it is Lamoureux who states the cost most plainly.  The audit of that cost is in Adam, the Fall, and Death.  On test 7 the position is candid:  Lamoureux's whole book is an argument that concordism must be given up because science has shown it fails.

The calendar-day reading passes the most tests and has four weak spots

The calendar-day reading holds that Genesis 1 describes six ordinary consecutive days, that verse 1 is either the first act of the week or its heading, and that the chapter is a report of what happened in the order it happened.  It is the reading every witness above calls natural:  Chalmers, Hitchcock, Hodge, Payne, Walton and Blocher all say so in the passages quoted, and the sibling article adds James Barr, Hugh Williamson and others who hold no brief for it.  The lexical and grammatical case is made there.  This section states the reading's weak spots, because a reader who finds them only on a critic's site will not believe anything else here.

Weak spot 1: light on day 1, the sun on day 4

The chapter has "Let there be light" and the first evening and morning on day 1, and the sun, moon and stars made and set in the expanse on day 4.  A day is defined by the sun.  Blocher puts the objection sharply:  the calendar-day reader "has no need to construct the problematic theory of days like solar days but without the sun, of which the text gives not the slightest hint."¹⁴

The young-earth answer is old.  Jonathan Sarfati's Refuting Compromise (2004) argues that "God can create light without a secondary source, and the Bible tells us clearly that God created light, as well as the earth, on the first day," that Revelation 21:23 describes a city lit without sun or moon, and that Genesis "even defines a day and a night in terms of light or its absence."  He quotes Calvin on Genesis 1:3, "the Lord, by the very order of the creation, bears witness that he holds in his hand the light, which he is able to impart to us without the sun and the moon," and on 1:14, "God had before created the light, but he now institutes a new order in nature, that the sun should be the dispenser of diurnal light."³⁹  The answer is coherent.  It is also an answer nobody would give unless the text forced it, and the text does force it:  the day-1 light has an evening and a morning, so something was providing a directional light on a rotating earth.  What the reading cannot do is say what.  Sarfati's further point is fair:  the same order, earth before sun, "fatally undermines progressive creationists' attempts to harmonize the Bible with billions of years."³⁹  The day-4 problem is a problem for every reading that keeps the sequence.

Weak spot 2: Genesis 2:5-7

Kline's argument is set out above and is the strongest textual objection the reading faces.  The best answer, Collins's and Futato's day-6 reading of the "land" and the field plants, is also set out above.  Its weakness is that it makes 2:5 a statement about the future site of the garden, which the verse does not say.  A fair reader will call this spot contested rather than closed.

Weak spot 3: the seventh day has no evening and morning

Ross's third clue was that day 7 lacks the refrain and is therefore still running.⁷  Collins argues the same from John 5:17 and Hebrews 4:3-11:  "the Father is 'working' on his Sabbath, which only makes sense if we suppose that his creation Sabbath continues."¹⁷  Sarfati's reply is that the claim "is without any exegetical foundation whatsoever," because Genesis 2:2-3 says God rested "on the seventh day," not that the seventh day continues, and Hebrews 4 speaks of a rest that believers enter, not of a day that has not ended.³⁹  The refrain's absence is real, and the reading has to explain it as a literary closure:  day 7 is not a working day, so its work-frame is not stated.  That is a reasonable explanation and not the only one.

Weak spot 4: "very good" and the diet of Genesis 1:29-30

Genesis 1:29-30 gives seed-bearing plants to man and "every green plant" to every beast and bird "for food," and 1:31 calls the finished world "very good."  The calendar-day reading takes this to mean no carnivory before the Fall, and therefore must put every fossil predator, tumour and venom after Adam and mostly in the Flood year.  Payne, a conservative, denied the premise:  "Genesis 1:30, for example, does not restrict animals to a vegetarian diet, though this is often claimed."²  Ross records the young-earth position accurately and rejects it.⁹  This is the largest physical commitment the reading makes, and the sibling article Death Before the Fall audits what it costs.  It is stated here because a reading that passes six textual tests and then has to absorb the whole fossil record of predation into 1,656 years has paid for its textual cleanliness somewhere else.

What the reading does not establish

The reading establishes what the author meant.  It does not establish that he was right.  The sibling article quotes Barr's 1987 lecture to that effect, and this site's position is that the physical case for a young earth must be made from the rocks, not from the grammar;  see Dating the Earth and Fossil Order and the Flood.  A skeptic who grants every finding in this article has granted only that Genesis 1 says what young-earth creationists say it says.

The comparison table

Scores:  P passes the test;  F fails it;  ½ passes with a cost its own advocates concede;  n/a the reading makes no claim the test can touch, which is scored as a pass on tests 5 and 6 only when the reading also gives up any claim to describe physical history.  Test 7 is scored P for a reading proposed before the geology it reconciles and F for one proposed after.

Two cautions.  The table scores textual fit and provenance;  it does not score truth, and it is not a vote.  And the calendar-day reading's 6½ is bought with the largest physical commitment of any reading, which the table does not show.

Common objections

Objection 1: "The plain reading is a modern fundamentalist invention; the church always read the days figuratively."

Alexander makes this from Philo, Origen and Augustine.³⁸  The sibling article Age of Earth in Church History tests it father by father.  The short answer is in this article's own witnesses.  Philo and Augustine held instantaneous creation, which is shorter than six days, not longer;  and Blocher, who wants Augustine on his side, concedes that Augustine's days are "not physical but ideal."¹⁴  Numbers, no creationist, reports that young-earth belief was the ordinary position that "these people rarely expressed ...  in books and journals" because nobody was contesting it.⁸

Objection 2: "Provenance is a genetic fallacy. A reading born of geology can still be the right reading."

Agreed, and the article says so.  Test 7 is not a truth test.  It is an answer to a specific claim, that day-age or framework or the gap is what the text naturally says.  The people who built those readings said it was not, and the article quotes them.  A reading can be true and unnatural;  it cannot be both unnatural and the plain sense.

Objection 3: "Genesis 1 is exalted prose, not a scientific report. Demanding that it match the fossil order is a category error."

That is the framework and evolutionary-creation position, and it is scored as such.  The order-of-events test is applied only to readings that claim concordance:  day-age, analogical days, Sailhamer, Lennox.  Ross's whole case is that the order matches.  It is fair to hold him to it.

Objection 4: "The calendar-day reading also comes from outside the text: it is the reading of people who already believed in a young earth."

The witnesses for the calendar-day reading in this article are Hodge, Hitchcock, Payne, Walton and Blocher, who did not believe in a young earth, and Barr and Williamson in the sibling article, who do not believe the text is true.  The calendar-day reading is the one reading whose hostile witnesses outnumber its friendly ones.

Objection 5: "Kline's argument from Genesis 2:5 has never been answered."

It has been answered by Collins and by Futato's own conclusion that 2:5-7 concerns "the land" and that it rained at creation;  the answer is stated above and marked contested.  Kline's stronger claim, that 2:5 "closes" the question of sequence, is not accepted by Collins, Waltke or Futato, all of whom are non-literalists.

Objection 6: "Walton's reading is not old-earth at all; it is neutral. Why is it scored as if it were?"

Because its author scores it that way.  Walton's answer on fossil hominins places them in "the long stage of development that I would include in the material phase," before the seven days.³⁵  A reading that is neutral about time but locates the whole hominin record before day 1 has taken a side on test 6.

Objection 7: "The scoring is rigged: the calendar-day reading gets a ½ on the test where it is weakest and every rival gets an F."

The ½ on test 5 is for day 4 and Genesis 2:5, both stated at length above as unresolved.  The rivals get F on test 5 for a different reason:  each claims concordance and then, by its own author's admission, moves a named item (fruit trees, birds, land animals) to make the match.  A reader who thinks day 4 deserves an F for the calendar-day reading should give the same F to Collins, Sailhamer and Lennox, which does not change the ranking.

Sources