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• Gen 1:5b . . And there was evening and there was morning, a first Day.
* There are two primary kinds of Days in the first chapter of Genesis. One is
a creation day and the other is a natural day. It's very important to keep
those two kinds of days distinct and separate in our thinking because they
are as unalike in size as stones and gravel.
According to Gen 1:24-31, God created humans and all terra critters on the
sixth Day; which has to include dinosaurs because on no other Day did God
create beasts but the sixth.
However; the sciences of geology and paleontology, in combination with
radiometric dating, strongly suggest that dinosaurs preceded humans by
several million years. So then, in my estimation, the Days of creation should
be taken to represent eras rather than 24-hour events. That's not an
unreasonable estimation; for example:
"These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were
created, in the day that the Lord God made earth and heaven." (Gen 2:4)
The Hebrew word for "day" in that verse is yowm (yome) which is the very
same word for each of the six Days of God's creation labors. Since yowm in
Gen 2:4 refers to a period of time obviously much longer than a 24-hour
natural day; it justifies suggesting that each of the six Days of creation
were longer than 24 hours apiece too. In other words: yowm is ambiguous
and not all that easy to interpret sometimes.
Anyway; this "day" thing has been a stone in the shoe for just about
everybody who takes Genesis seriously. It's typically assumed that the Days
of creation consisted of twenty-four hours apiece; so Bible students end up
stumped when trying to figure out how to cope with the 4.5 billion-year age
of the earth, and factor in the various eras, e.g. Triassic, Jurassic, Mesozoic,
Cenozoic, Cretaceous, etc, plus the ice ages and the mass extinction events.
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