2 Peter and the Days of Genesis

As we read through the two letters of Peter, readers may encounter a famous line, ” one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” (2 Pe 3:8). So… let’s talk about that line and the days of Genesis.

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In the traditional arguments around the meaning of the “days” of Genesis and the age of the earth, it is key that we recognize one assumption: Concordism. This is the idea that science and scripture MUST agree, because they’re saying the same thing. There’s a lot of complex history to this, but in practice it often follows an unconscious train of thought: scripture is true, and truth means facts, and facts mean history and science. So if scripture isn’t scientifically accurate, it can’t be inspired. (This is an assumption shared between extremes, both young-earth advocates like Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis/ Ark Encounter/Creation Museum, and hard atheist/evolutionary biology professor Richard Dawkins.)

Hard concordism is a connecting driveshaft between scripture and science, and can be turned from either direction: scriptural interpretation can drive the science, or science can drive scriptural interpretation. If science is controlling and says the earth is really old, then Genesis must somehow be saying that the earth is really old; we have to rewrite our understanding of Genesis to make it match.  On the other hand, if scripture is controlling and scripture says the earth is young, then mainstream scientific conclusions about a very old earth must be wrong, because “we know scripture is true.” We have to reject scientific conclusions, because we already know what true science should say.

There’s actually an entire set of assumptions here, but perhaps that’s for another post. Let me simply summarize by saying that many historians and Bible scholars today reject concordism, as do I.

It may surely be said that the Genesis accounts of creation are not in conflict with scientific and historical knowledge. Yet this is not because they can be shown to be in conformity with this knowledge, but precisely because they have little to do with it.
— Conrad Hyers, “Dinosaur Religion” link

Historically, even before the “Scientific Revolution” and geological discoveries and such, Christians did not agree on the age of the earth or the timeframe of creation. Some said it was actually instantaneous, but put in a literary seven-day structure in order to be understandable to humans.

In the last two hundred years, there have been four primary interpretations.

First, “a day is a 24 hours, and therefore the earth is young.” This interpretation makes strong concordist assumptions, that the genre of Genesis is scientific/historical information, and told purely from God’s omniscient perspective. Ken Ham says Genesis is God’s eyewitness account. This has, suffice to say, some problems beyond concordist assumptions.

Second, a day is a thousand years. This makes the same concordist assumptions about the nature of scripture. However, this has added problems; it makes further assumptions about genre and the nature of interpretation, and takes passages out of context. It’s true that 2Pe 3:8 says “one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” (KJV)
But can you 1) legitimately retroject this back into Genesis and 2) does it mean what people claim? I would give a strong “no” to both.

What’s the context of Peter’s statement? No longer polytheistic pagans, the new Christians Peter addresses had

stopped worshiping the various gods of their empire, city, trade guild, or family, and instead worshiped only “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1Pe 1:3). This change in behavior meant that they were now viewed as unpatriotic (worship of the genius of the emperor was equivalent to flag worship in modern America), disloyal to their city (since they would not take part in civic ceremonies involving worship), unprofessional in their trade (since guild meetings usually took place in pagan temples), and haters of their families (family gatherings and ceremonies also took place in temples, and household worship was thought to hold the family together). After all, no one was asking these Christians to believe in the gods (many of their neighbors did not really believe in them), but only to offer token worship as a sign of their familial or civic allegiance. People who were so obstinate as to refuse this simple duty surely had to be “haters of humankind,” as many in the Roman Empire considered them.

Second, they now followed a morality different from that of their fellow citizens. Previously they had enjoyed drunken parties and loose sexual morals, but now they demonstrated self-control in their drinking, eating, and sexual habits. This different behavior cut them off from their former friends, who thought that they had become weird (1Pe 4:4).

The result of these changes in their lives was social ostracism: insults, abuse, rejection, shame, and likely economic persecution with the resulting loss of property. There is no evidence in this letter of official persecution, such as imprisonment or execution, but rejection, abuse, punishment by family leaders (owners of slaves; husbands of women) and perhaps occasional mob violence had certainly taken their toll. (Official persecution would come in the time of Pliny.) Their fellow citizens thought that these believers in Jesus no longer belonged in their city or family and were communicating that message loud and clear.

—Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary: Hebrews to Revelation 4:122–123.

In modern translation and with more textual context,  2Pe 3:8 reads

But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day. The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.

Peter is NOT making a scientific claim about the precision or equivalence of God’s clock, nor providing a technical definition of “day” that Genesis might be using without saying so. Rather, Peter’s letters address Christians under great stress, and he’s trying to help them realize that God’s promises  don’t operate “on their calendar,” so to speak, and they need to understand that in order to not lose faith.

Moreover, Peter’s statement is not a direct revelation from God; it’s not obvious in English, but he’s citing Psa 90:4, which is poetry. A good translation of the Hebrew there is,

For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, or like a watch in the night. You sweep them away; they are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning

That too is not a claim about the technical scientific equivalencies of God’s time; it’s a poetic expression of the idea that the eternal God has a different perspective than we do.

The third interpretation of “day” is called the “day-age view.” This is extremely popular among LDS and says “a day just means an indefinite length of time.” This allows Genesis to accommodate however many billions of years science might say about the age of the earth. However it still makes highly concordist assumptions, and it’s just plain wrong.

It’s true that “day” in some places in Hebrew means “an unspecified of time,” but this meaning can’t be imported into Genesis 1, because it’s an idiom that simply doesn’t fit there and is ruled out by context.
IOW, if my wife and I are going somewhere, and she says “we need to go now!” And I reply “one minute!” but I come down five minutes later… can I then take that usage of minute to argue to my students that my 60-minute college course is REALLY 60×5 minutes long? No, because my usage of “one minute” or “one second” is an idiom meaning “wait please,” whereas the other, through its contextual usage and genre, is a precise time measurement.

The fourth interpretation is the newest, but also (imo) the most accurate and contextual. The rediscovery of the ancient Near Eastern contexts of scripture in the last 150 years has strongly called concordist assumptions into question. Just as creation accounts from Israel’s neighbors are NOT in the genre of “scientific/historical narrative,” neither are Israel’s three creation accounts. They have other purposes and other genres.

The days of Genesis ARE intended as 24-days, just not historical/scientific days. Drop the anachronistic concordist assumption that Genesis MUST match up with science, and suddenly, one finds oneself with a lot of clarity and many science/religion problems disappear.

The reason to describe creation in a seven-day pattern has little to do with a context-free omniscient documentary of natural history, and tons to do with what Genesis is describing; the creation of God’s cosmic temple, and the divine functionality therein. In good ancient Near Eastern priestly pattern, all temples are constructed and dedicated in some function of seven; seven days, seven years, etc. That extends to Gods cosmic temple. It was a requirement of the form/genre, just as a business letter has requirements of the form/genre. (For more on this, see here.)

Moreover, the ”creation” that is happening is likely not even physical/construction. Contrary to our modern materialist assumptions, for Israelites, “create” didn’t have to do with material construction; existence was not defined in physical terms. To exist meant to have  a name and a function within a system. The Bible describes the desert as uncreated because it doesn’t DO anything. That‘s the creation portrayed as taking place over seven days, not scientific/materialist creation that science can recover.

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