This post was originally written for Dr. Smith’s blog Good Question. At a reader’s suggestion, it’s being republished here because it also relates to the concerns of this blog.
Q. I like that you translate the opening of the account as saying “sky” and “land,” since most people assume what’s being mentioned there is the creation of the universe.
Several people I’ve read have been fairly critical of the “Framework View” of this account, mainly because they don’t see the parallelism between the days. I would tend to agree that it does seem like day 2 is the better parallel for day 4 than day 1 (since, if I’m not mistaken, the Hebrews thought that the sun, moon, and stars were in the dome). It also seems like day 3 describes the space created for the sea creatures in day 5, not day 6. Finally, in day 3, there isn’t just a domain created for something to fill but there is also the simultaneous creation of plants to fill the land.
How would you interpret these observations?
My layout of the opening creation account in Genesis does follow what is customarily known as the “Framework View.” Here’s how I’d answer the criticisms of that view which you cite.
First, I see Day 4 as the clear counterpart to Day 1 because Day 4 provides the rulers for the realms created on Day 1. And the language is clearly reminiscent: On Day 1 God separates the light from the darkness, and on Day 4 God creates lights to “separate the day from the night,” to “separate the light from the darkness.” On Day 1 God calls the light “Day” and the darkness “Night,” and on Day 4 God creates two great lights to rule the day and the night. (As I explain in my Genesis study guide, that’s how this account operates. Each realm of creation has its sub-regents, under God’s authority. Humans are created at the end as God’s vice-regents, responsible for all of creation under God.)
Day 2 is the clear counterpart to Day 5 because on Day 2 God makes the dome to separate the waters below the dome from the waters above the dome, i.e. to carve out a demarcated space within the chaotic pre-existing waters. (See this post on the Hebrew view of these waters, which seem to us like eternally existing matter.) Then on Day 5 God populates this carved-out realm, the sea, along with the realm created by the dome itself, the sky.
Day 3 is not about the creation of the seas, it’s about the creation of the land—this is the clear purpose of God’s creative fiat: “Let what is dry appear.” But it is by contrast with the new thing, the land, that the sea is definitively differentiated and named—just as the already-existing darkness gets a name, “Night,” by contrast with “Day.” Sometimes to know what a thing is, you need to know what it is not!
Finally, the green plants are created in the second creative act of Day 3 (“The land brought forth greenery, plants that bore seeds according to their kind, and trees whose seed was in their fruit according to their kind”), and they are mentioned again, in parallel language, in the second creative act of Day 6: “ I have given to you humans as your food every seed-bearing plant that is upon the face of the whole land, and every tree whose fruit makes it a seed-bearing tree.” So we need to understand these plants, even though they are living things (in our view), not as part of the population of the land, but rather as part of that realm itself, making it habitable for people and animals, who are its population proper.
Thanks very much for your questions, and I hope these clarifications are helpful!
Paradigms on Pilgrimage 