Creation Sunday School Series

The Hermeneutics of Genesis 1
by Matt Powell

1. Principles of Hermeneutics
   1. Start with meaning, then go to significance
   2. Meaning is established by looking at the text, and deciding what Moses was trying to communicate to his audience, and what his audience would have heard.
   3. Meaning cannot be driven by outside concerns. That is, we cannot use our understandings of politics, economics, history, or (especially relevant in this case) science to inform our understanding of the text.
2. Considerations in regard to Gen. 1:
   1. Is it poetry?
      1. Lacks explicit figures of speech
      2. Lacks parallelisms
      3. Some structure can be discerned that might lead one to think of it as poetry (see chart on second page)
      4. Some difference from the way the rest of Genesis proceeds, possibly identifying it as having a different source than the rest of Genesis.
      5. If it is poetry, does that mean it’s not history? (See Psalm 78)
   2. The meaning of yom: my
      1. Day (24 hours)
      2. Time or period (in the day of Abraham)
      3. Period of light vs. the period of darkness
      4. A working day
      5. With cardinal numbers, (first, second, etc)- always takes the first meaning.
   3. "Evening and morning" - repeated six times. Heightens the chronological referent.
3. Considerations from other parts of the Bible:
   1. The fourth commandment, ties the human week to the week of Creation
   2. The rest of Genesis is intended explicitly to relate history, and chronological history at that. If Gen. 1 were intended to be read differently, Moses could have signaled to us much more clearly that he was relating something other than chronological time.
   3. Gen. 2:4- "In the day that the Lord God created..." Given the lack of explicit chronological referents or cardinal numbers, it is easy to see this as a general period of time, rather than a 24-hour period.