THE FIRST CHAPTER OF GENESIS. 



133 



yoiiiy here translated " day " — that is for Oriental scholars. 

 But the question appeals to me as an astronomer from a 

 different point of view, one that has received little or no con- 

 sideration. An astronomical day, or rather let us put it, " a 

 day of man," involves four things : — (1) an earth that has obtained 

 definite form ; that (2) has begun to turn on its axis ; (3) a sun 

 that shines ; and (4) a man upon the earth to see. In order that 

 " evening " and " morning " may indicate definite points of 

 time, a fifth condition is necessary : — a selected locality upon 

 the turning earth, from which the sun mav be seen to set and 

 to rise. 



The chapter before us gives us no hint that, at the moment 

 when the word of command of the first day was spoken, the 

 earth had received any definite form. There is no hint of its 

 rotation, nor of any choice of a special locality. It was not 

 until the fourth day that the sun was set in the firmament to 

 give light upon the earth ; nor until the sixth day that there 

 was a man to perceive the succession of evenings and mornings. 

 Surely then the seven days of Creation are not seven days of 

 man, but seven days of God. But this must give them a 

 stronger, not a weaker, claim to be rightly called days. If God 

 regards them as days, then days they were in the fullest sense ; 

 no matter how difficult, nay perhaps impossible, it may be 

 for us to define them in our vernacular. Yet, since man was 

 made in the image of God, it may well be that the days of man 

 are faint types or images of the days of God ; the six days of 

 man's labour, of God's six days of creative work ; the seventh 

 day of man's rest, of the day which God blessed and 

 sanctified. 



YII. — ''THE EVENING AND THE MORNING." 



But if it is impossible for us to define the days of God in the 

 terms of our human experience of time, is it impossible that 

 God should translate them for us ? We find that the record of 

 each day's w^ork is concluded by the same formula — " and there 

 was evening, and there was morning." This expression is both 

 unusual and striking, particularly in the case of the first day 

 " And there was evening and there was morning, day one." 



The suggestion to my own mind is that each " day " was 

 bounded by its evening and by its morning. The natural objec- 

 tion to this view is, that the interval between evening and morning 

 is not " day " but " night ; " but the objection itself recalls the 

 interpretation (/) given above, of the seven days of Creation as 



