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Question: Were the 6 days ordinary days, because 'experts' state the Hebrew word for day (yom), used in Chapter 1, can mean many things?

Answer: Dr Allen Hall (Linguist) and John Mackay (Director, Creation Research) answer this query.

People who claim the Hebrew word yom (day) in Genesis Chapter 1 can have many meanings, usually hope there is one thing in cannot mean - 24 hours!
The famous six day war (Israel vs Egypt) which began on 'yom kippur', the day of atonement, can help us here. 'Yom Kippur' was a specific 24 hour period of rest in which Egypt thought it would catch the Jews at a disadvantage when they attacked Israel. The Jewish nation celebrates the day of atonement, 'yom kippur', each year because of the instruction in Leviticus 16:29-31 to set aside the tenth day of the seventh month of the Jewish calendar (October). The name of this celebration shows that the word 'yom' (meaning day) is qualified adjectivally by the word 'kippur' (meaning covering or atonement).
In Hebrew or English or any language, the more you qualify a word, the more precise your knowledge of its intended meaning becomes. When we use the word 'sportsday' in English, we don't necessarily mean 24 hours, even though we never mean more than 24 hours. If we say 'during the day' then we usually mean at most 12 hours. If, however, we say Wednesday 26 August, we mean a very specific 24 hours.
So how qualified is the Hebrew word 'yom' in Genesis Chapter 1? In verses 1-5, we read 'yom' is first defined when the 'light is called day (yom) and dark is called night' (layil) followed by 'the evening and morning of the first day' (yom). Both dark and light are then lumped together and given the name of only the light part, or day (yom). The word 'yom' is then further qualified by the use of numeric terms, eg., one, second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth, which means there are six of them. They are the same, and they are consecutive. They are also not vague since you cannot have six undefined things one after the other, which would only be one vague undefined event. This is why Exodus 20:9-11 recounts God giving Moses the creation based law that man will work for 6 yoms (days) and rest for one yom. The reason given is 'because that's what God did'. In this case the meaning of the days man will work or rest is beyond doubt, yom = 24 hours, and 7 yoms make one week of 7 twenty-four hour days.
Those who think the 6 days of Creation could not have been earth days because 'to the Lord a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years is like a day' (2 Peter 3:8), need to remember that the Creator Lord doesn't have days. Peter is making a statement about how the Lord is outside of time. God is no older today that he was yesterday. The only place days exist is on the earth where the Lord made them. The creation account in Genesis refers to six of these earth days.
It is also helpful to ask how long the creator would need to make the universe. The New Testament is emphatic that God the Father brought all things into existence through God the Son, i.e., Christ is the Creator (John 1:3; Col1:16-17; Heb 1:1-2). His creative ability showed when He spoke and water (H₂0) turned into wine (C₂H₅OH plus many other molecules) (John 2:1-11). The result of His word was the instantaneous creation of carbon(C). Anyone who can change water into wine by words alone doesn't need as long as six 24 hours to actually make the universe. The only reason we are told He took 6 days was to give man a model week to govern our time, since He is not governed by time!
Those who claim that 'insisting on 6 literal days' prevents sincere 'seeking' scientists putting their faith in God, miss the mark badly. Such scientists do understand that Genesis 1 says the world was made in six days. The problem is that they prefer to put their faith in academic colleagues and then accept the 'scientific' 6 billion year view of the past (which does contradict an unspoken decision to trust their associates, who weren't there in the beginning, and to not place their faith in the Creator Christ, who was there in the beginning.

Question: If Genesis Chapter 5 is the written account of Adam's line, why is there no mention of Cain or Abel (Adam's children from chapter 4)?

Answer: Most people are aware that in the Hebrew Psalms, the same thought is repeated using slightly different words in following lines. These two line 'repeats' are known as Hebrew parallelisms. A similar parallel structure can also occur in the way Hebrew authors wrote history - not in alternate lines, but in alternate segments (or chapters). Genesis 4 and 5 is one example.
Genesis chapter 4 gives the account of Adam and Eve bearing Cain and Abel - obviously a part of the first family. Genesis 5 then restarts Adam's family tree but gives no mention of Cain or Abel. Since the editor of Genesis (Moses) left both chapters 4 & 5 in the book, and his obvious purpose is not to contradict himself, what reason did he have to organise the text like this?
The Genesis 5 chronology of Adam's descendants (minus Cain and Abel) is repeated several times in Scripture (see Luke 3:23-38, and 1 Chronicles 1).
The purpose of these much longer chronologies is to show Adam as the ancestor of Jesus Christ, via all linking relatives. Since Abel was killed with no known offspring (Chapter 4), he could not have been an ancestor of Christ. Cain and his descendants likewise played no part in Christ's family tree, and were all eliminated by the time of Noah's Flood. The Chapter 5 chronology mentions only those people through whom Christ was descended, therefore it has no need to mention Cain or Abel from Chapter 4.

Question: Who was Cain afraid of when the Lord banished him?

Answer: Cain and Abel were recorded as offering sacrifices (Genesis 4). This meant they had a knowledge of man's obligation to God concerning payment for sin. Their most likely source of information about sin would have been their father Adam, who had learned from his Creator in Eden (Gen. 3) that the price of sin was death. All those sinned against by Abel's murder had a technical right to extract this price from Cain. So at the very least, Cain, was afraid of his mother and father (Abel's immediate creators). At the most he was frightened that his wider family of brothers and sisters (who had been born, or were yet to be born) would seek to kill him. Sadly, Cain does not seem to have been afraid of the Lord.

Question: Who was Cain's wife?

Answer: Genesis 3:20 gives us Adam's faith statement that he named his wife Eve because she would "become" the mother of all living. Whoever Cain married in Chapter 4, therefore had to be a direct descendant of Eve. At the closest Cain's wife was his sister. At the most distant she was a niece once removed.

Question: Leviticus 11:21-23 The Bible says we are able to eat insects that have four legs but since insects have six legs how can this be accurate?

Answer: Two vital points:

ONE: The Bible description is actually a reference to how these creatures walked and not their total number of legs. The rule is you can eat the flying ones that walked on fours even if they hopped with their other two legs. See Encyclopaedia Britannica under I, page 402 Vol 12, 1962 for pictures of locusts, grasshoppers and praying mantis's all standing on four legs and may flies.

TWO: Never forget the first rule of reading any literature - always assume the original author did not set out to contradict himself nor to make a fool of himself and so any misunderstanding is likely to be first at your end.

Furthermore, if you see in what appears to be a contradiction, you won't be the first, and if nobody has changed the text in 3,000 - 4,000 years, it's most likely because the contradiction is at your end, not in the author's. And lastly, even if you continue to believe there is a contradiction, the only other conclusion available to you is that Christians and Jews must have the utmost integrity since they have never altered the text to try and fudge it to please people such as yourself.

Question: How can Genesis 10 mention different languages, when chapter 11 says they all spoke the same language?

Answer: Genesis 10 & 11 are an example of parallel chapters in Hebrew historic thought. The general technique used in such parallels is for the first chapter of the parallel pair to state something in general terms, from which the second chapter expands some detail at length. Genesis Chapters 1 & 2, 4 & 5, plus 6 & 7 also contain parallels.

The clue about "different languages vs the same language"� is in Genesis 10:4, which says that "from these the maritime people spread out into their territories each with its own language". The editor of Genesis, Moses, is merely pointing out that the people mentioned in verse 4 were the ancestors of those who later became the "maritime people", who lived near and on the sea. Chapter 11 then shows in more detail how the world's people had been spread out, starting from Noah's family whose descendants had first established themselves in the land of Shinar. They had then been in one place (or land) speaking one language up to the rebellion at the Tower of Babel. After Babel they had ended with different languages, then moved away to different places. Some of them became "maritime peoples" who were no longer land based. Since Genesis 11 does not say no one had, or would ever become maritime people, there is no contradiction with Chapter 10. Even though in the west we would normally write our history in linear chronological form, so that events in Chapter 10 should occur before events in Chapter 11 - the Hebrews didn't. Is our way any better than theirs? It is arrogance to make such a claim.
The Genesis 10:4 comment about the origin of the maritime peoples is an inserted editorial comment by the person (Moses) whom the Lord inspired to edit the records from Adam's time onwards into one document, whose purpose was to point all men to Christ alone for their salvation from the sin of the first man, Adam.

Question: I have noticed that when referring to creation, the term "Special Creation" is often used. I assume that the use of the word "Special" is for a specific reason.

Answer: The term Special Creation seems to have arisen to distinguish the more vague views on Creation, e.g. Intelligent Design, from the description of purposeful creation by the personal Creator God, as described in Genesis. This term is normally applied to the belief that the world was specially created in six days, with the living things specially created in separate kinds. The word “special” and “species” are related, and so its origin is connected to the creation of separate kinds, although the modern use of the term “species” refers to subgroups within the basic kinds.
The term Special Creation is a helpful concept to distinguish a literal belief in Genesis from a belief in a deistic creator who may have used evolution over millions of years.