EVENINGS / MORNINGS

      In Genesis chapter 1 we have the expression six times "And there was evening, and there was morning". The expression does not appear in relation to the seventh day, perhaps because it was intended that there should be no end to seventh day rest. However, God's rest was soon broken in upon by sin, as we see in chapter 3.

      However, the question this article is to consider is why Scripture uses the expression in the first sentence above. Why not refer to morning and evening, rather than evening and morning ? One fairly obvious reason is that a reference to morning and evening could well be taken to mean that the passage was speaking of the daylight hours rather than the full twenty-four hours that we call one day. The danger of getting the two mixed up is quite real inasmuch as in verse 5 God called the light Day and the darkness he called Night. By putting the evening before the morning we are put on warning that it is not just the daylight hours that are being spoken of.

      The only other time that evenings are put before mornings is in Daniel 8 where we have the expression in verse 14 "Until two thousand and three hundred evenings [and] mornings" and again in verse 26 "The vision of the evening and the morning which hath been told is true". These references are usually taken to speak of a number of twenty-four hour days. However, they do not appear to throw any additional light on the expressions in Genesis 1.

      Another explanation of the Genesis expressions is that they are based on the Jewish practice of beginning the day at six o'clock in the evening and ending it at six o'clock the following evening. This explanation implies that the Jewish practice came first and savours of the sceptic's view that Genesis 1 is an account invented to fit in with Jewish thinking. In any case this explanation is very weak because the words used are not from evening to evening to accord with Jewish practice as one would expect if that were the explanation. Furthermore, throughout the Old Testament we get the morning put first as is normal practice today, that is, apart from the exceptions in Daniel 8 quoted above. Regarding the injunction in Exodus 12 verse 6 as to the killing of the Passover lamb: "The assembly of Israel shall kill it between the two evenings"; the actual meaning of the expression "two evenings" is obscure, but is no doubt the basis of the Jewish practice of beginning the day in the evening. However, even in the New Testament the usual way to speak of a day is to start with the morning - see for instance Acts 28:23; Matthew 28:1; Mark 16:2; Luke 24:1; John 20:1 (The favoured interpretation of the last four quotes is that the early morning is what is spoken of).

      However, there is another explanation of the expressions in Genesis 1, and this is that for every morning in one part of the earth there is an evening somewhere else. Those who hold that Genesis was written by a primitive people who knew nothing of the turning of the earth on its axis will not find this explanation acceptable. However, it makes sense, and shows that, while Scripture does not go into a lengthy explanation of how days pass as the result of the earth turning on its axis which would probably not have been understood by its readers and would in fact have made the Bible a scientific textbook which it was never intended to be, it does give us such scientific information as we need to know. The Bible was written for teaching, for conviction, for correction, for instruction in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16); it is not a detailed account of the origin and workings of material things, though we do get them spoken of in summary form (six days work in Genesis 1 is compressed into a few minutes reading). At the same time it sometimes puts things in such a way that they are not readily understandable until science has thrown light on them. For instance, the earth is on one occasion spoken of as something hanging in space (Job 26:7). This corresponds to the earth as spoken of in Genesis 1 verse 2. On another occasion it is spoken of as something founded upon the seas (Psalm 24:2). This corresponds to the earth as spoken of in Genesis 1 verse 9. The latter verse simply refers to the part of the earth that shows above the waters. Whether all our forbears understood this is doubtful, but it does show that when we don't understand a passage we should beware of forcing its meaning to fit in with the information of which we are aware, rather than admit that we don't understand it and wait till further facts come to our knowledge which throw light on it.

4 January 1999