Yom: Examining Creation's Timeframe with Linguistics

יוֹם

I’ve often encountered Christians that believe the world was created in 7 24-hour days, because “that’s what the Bible says” in Genesis 1 and they won’t believe otherwise.

There are a ton of arguments against this “fact,” but I think the most compelling one is the linguistic ambiguity for the word “day” (yom) used in the creation account. First, let’s take a look at an English translation for one of the days of creation:

"God called the light Day (yom), and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day (yom)."
ESV Genesis 1:5

The Ancient Hebrew word used here “yom” יוֹם, can mean the following things based on its entry on Wikipedia:

• Point of time (a specific day)

• time period of a whole or half a day:

• Period of light (as contrasted with the period of darkness),

• Sunrise to sunset

• Sunset to next sunset

• General term for time ( as in 'days of our lives')

• A year "lived a lot of days"

• Time period of unspecified length. "days and days"

Now, if you were brought up in the education system, you probably know that Wikipedia isn’t a valid academic source 😛. However, it does seem to indicate that something interesting is going on here as the word can mean drastically different time extents based on the context. One way to learn a bit more is to compare other usages of the word yom in Genesis (the word is used throughout the Hebrew Bible — I thought it’d be best to focus just on Genesis as we can assume it was edited as one writing piece).

Note that yamim is the plural of yom for the following examples, as there aren’t actually a lot of usages of the singular form beyond the creation account.

“In the course of time (yamim) Cain brought to the LORD an offering of the fruit of the ground”
ESV Genesis 4:3

This is the loosest translation of yom I could find in Genesis. The way the ESV has rendered it looks pretty similar to the English phrase “In these days…” which is also very non-specific when it comes to extent.

“Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in years (yamim). The way of women had ceased to be with Sarah”

ESV Genesis 18:11

Years?! What?! I guess you could say “advanced in days.”

And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day (yom) from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days (yamim) and years

 ESV Genesis 1:14

Similar to Genesis 1:5 where the word is used both to describe daytime as well as specific time extents. This is most likely a literal day, as the words used for “seasons” and “years” are more specific as well.

These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day (yom) that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.

 ESV Genesis 2:4

This one is a bit trickier for me. The verse is right before the creation of humanity in Genesis 2 (which happens during the events of Genesis 1). In MSG and NLT, the word “day” doesn’t even show up, nor does any extent of time. As this prefaces the writer(s) zooming into humanity’s creation, it could be referring to the specific day that happens on, but my pretty uneducated guess is that it’s an extent of time that refers to the whole creation timeline, kind of serving as a capstone of the creation account.

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Ultimately, the word is ambiguous. Readers often come into Genesis with their preconceived notions of what it should say and how the world was created and then attempt to make an interpretation of this thousands-of-years-old text. Instead of fully pushing this argument into a dichotomy, I want to make the following point: it’s ok to not know what’s going on in the creation account for sure. It’s also really hard to get into the writers’ headspace and really think: what were they trying to say through Genesis 1? What did they care about? Maybe nailing down that days were slightly less than 24 hours or the commonality of carbon throughout the universe weren’t exactly top thoughts?

I think it’s short-sighted to make strong claims about what precisely the Hebrew Bible says without even attempting to investigate the original language, so go for it! I used a free tool called Logos to look up the Hebrew inline & compare different translations. Don’t blindly believe what you hear: check it! Also this post isn’t intended to completely discredit the creation of the world in 7 literal days. In a worldview where God exists and is omnipotent, anything can be accomplished, even if it’s manufacturing evidence that the world was created over a much longer span of time. But yes, your call on what side of the argument you’re on. Cheers!