I appreciate the comment. I welcome the discussion.

I don’t think I suggested that “day” always means “one 24-hour period”. In fact I wrote: “Does it not seem as though the word translated “the day” takes on again a different meaning in 2: 4″. Some Hebrew words have a wide semantic range and “yom” (day) is one of them. Their meaning is very dependent on the general context and its association with other words. Walton claims that in the case of the Hebrew word “yom” there are at least 6 different possible understandings (his commentary on Genesis, p. 81) depending upon the context within which you find it. Some Hebrew words “do a lot of work”!

With respect to 24 hour days I actually indicate that Days 1 to 6 could be either 12 hour or 24 hour days, a possibility I had not thought of before writing the blog – Walton alerted me to it. Certainly a claim that “yom” in Days 1 to 6 could be understood to refer to 12 or 24 hour days (leaving Day 7 aside) says nothing about how “yom” is used elsewhere in 2: 4 or anywhere else in Genesis let alone the rest of the Hebrew text of Scripture.

Rightly or wrongly I decided to leave Genesis 2: 4 until the next series (when I get around to it). The point of the recurrent phrase “these are the generations of” or “this is the account of” is debatable and I thought I would leave reference to it until that time. It occurs at least 5 times in the first 11 chapters.

I have tried to put aside my biases and what I might like the text to mean. (I used to hold a different view – a view I think I developed because I was trying to accommodate a modern scientific view of things with what I thought was the Scriptural account – that I think is a mistaken way to proceed and prevents one from treating the text “in its own right”).

However as the blog develops you will see that I do not think one is committed to an understanding that the universe is not very old. (Until relatively recently within Christendom one would not have thought it was anything other than a few thousand years old.) I make a suggestion as to how the material might have come to have been written while maintaining that the writer/editor knew exactly what he was doing. It is we in this modern era who have the difficulty of being confident as to how he meant the material to be understood. Having said that I have no doubt as to how the basic materail was meant to be interpreted. And along with that, I don’t think the writer/editor considered that his 12 hour or 24 hour scenario framework (as I see it) was meant to receive the considerable focus that it tends to.

I am very grateful to God for having the text as part of his inspired Scripture.

Barry N.

“We might argue that the duration of the days in the Genesis account is undefined or that they represent long periods of time or that at least the first three days were of long duration … For me the meaning is reasonably plain. Days 1 to 6 and probably Day 7 as well, were six or seven ordinary days.”

http://barrynewman.wordpress.com/2010/11/23/science-and-genesis-1-1-2-3-part-xvi-2/

In his analysis of Genesis 1:1-2:3, he leaves out Genesis 2:4 (ESV, emphasis added) –

“These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the DAY that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.”

Firstly, if we are to take “day” to always mean “one 24-hour period”, then we’d have a direct contradiction between two biblical texts. The writer of Genesis would not be so stupid as to contradict himself – let alone God! So, if “day” is non-literal in Genesis 2:4, why must it be literal in Genesis 1:1-2:3?

Furthermore, considering that “These are the generations” is a heading phrase used throughout Genesis (6:9; 11:27; 25:19; 37:2), a literalist reading of “day” would force us to conclude that Creation, the Fall, Abel’s birth, Cain’s birth, Abel’s murder, Cain’s exile, and several thousand years of genealogy (we’ll have to take a non-literal interpretation of “years” here) happened in a single day. Such a suggestion is, obviously, absurd.

And I agree that James Bond shows things that are bad (some you listed) but my argument was based around graphic depictions of violence. That said I agree we need to think very carefully about how we watch things and what we watch.

Indeed when we watch movies we desire fantasy, we watch things we probably will not witness in our lives, and if we do it may be scarring. I have witnessed a few fights and indeed felt sick to the stomach.

Perhaps we should ask more questions of the films we watch. The sadistic films like saw and hostel that seem to delight in human suffering are terrible, but lets not forget even stuff like James Bond show harmful things like rage, anger, violence and an absense of respect for women. It is hard to predict these themes before seeing them, perhaps we should be forward in telling friends after the movie if something was particularly offensive, and lets not forget we can always walk out.

I am just hesitant to say don’t watch these movies in that we are called to be in the world but not of the world. A christian who holds the gospel but has no witness, will struggle to evangelize.

I’d just be hesitant to create a scale of how degrading “blood lust” is compared to “sex lust”. I think we, as a society, have objectified sex and sexuality so much that we too quickly down play the affects of sexual sin (event when it’s of a supposedly ‘standard’ or ‘mild’ nature). The life long emotional scaring that so many have to live with is clear evidence of its true impact. Also the numerous warnings against ‘sexual immorality’ in the Bible (Matthew 15:19, Mark 7:21, Acts 15:20, Acts 15:29, Acts 21:25, Romans 13:13, 1 Corinthians 5:1, 1 Corinthians 6:12, 1 Corinthians 6:13, 1 Corinthians 6:18, 1 Corinthians 10:8, Galatians 5:19, Ephesians 5:3, Colossians 3:5, 1 Thessalonians 4:3, Jude 1:7, Revelation 2:14, Revelation 2:20, Revelation 9:21) show what God thinks of it.

So I’d leave it at saying sexual perversion is real bad, and violent perversion is real bad. The degree of each badness will vary, but whether it’s baddest or slightly less than baddest is really irrelevant, we should abhor them both. Which I think is what Mark’s really getting at.

Thanks for the comment, I think you are 1000% right, “violence for entertainment” is far more degrading and it cuts a core value of Christianity. If we are all in the image of God, then how is watching human beings being destroyed entertaining?

You’ve been bold enough to say what so many seem scared to: that Christians should object to gratuitous violence as much as we do to gratuitous sexuality. Indeed, I’d say we should object to it more: (standard) pornography reduces people to beings of lust, but “violence for entertainment” reduces them further, to pieces of meat for the slicing.