Anyone up on their Hebrew? Rook?

violator
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Anyone up on their Hebrew? Rook?

I was talking about the age of the universe with a theist friend of mine and he acknowledges the scientific evidence of the Big Bang and accepts the age of the universe to be around 13.7 billion years. We got onto the subjest of how he reconciles this with the Bible indicates that the Earth was created in a few days, whereas science indicates that this is off by billions and billions of years. I was asking him how he can honestly believe that a book with such an ENORMOUS error is literally 100% true. He danced around the question for a long time and I'm sure we've all had similar converstions before. A few days later he informs me that in the original Hebrew, the word "day" can be used differently to mean a long peiod of time. I asked him why the Bible, then doesn't use this instead of the English word "day"? He accused me of not reading the footnotes enough and, admittedly, I couldn't recall looking at footnotes for Genesis 1. So I found an online bible that gives access different versions of the Bible and looked at 18 different versions of Genesis 1. The ONLY version that mentions the meaning of the word "day" in the footnotes is the Contemperary English Version. The footnote in this version says:

Genesis 1:5 the first day: A day was measured from evening to evening.

So now I was quite skeptical of his claim of the Hebrew "day" meaning something else that was a longer period of time. So I found an English -> Hebrew dictionary online and tried matching up the words to a copy of the Bible in Hebrew. And that's where I ran into trouble. I'm trying to read the lines backwards because Hebrew reads right to left, and I'm trying to match up characters and in short, I'm in over my head with this issue. So has anyone (or CAN anyone) read the Bible in its original Hebrew? Do you know if the Hebrew word "day" can mean a longer period of time? As close as I was able to determine, "day" can actually mean "a period of time" or "historical period", but only in the sense that we'd say in English "in the day of Caesar" or "in the days when dinosaurs romed the Earth". Any help you could give me would be appriciated!

'The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.'
- Richard Dawkins


davidildo
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A day is a day. From

A day is a day. From sunrise to sunset, or sunset to sunset. It means literaly, "to be hot". A new Hebrew dictionary is pretty useless, you need a biblical dictionary. There are too many words that have been invented recently to be able to use modern Hebrew.

The word "Yom", can also be used in a figurative sense that could mean a period of time, or refering to a period of time, as well as used in the plural, "days".  Hense Yom Kippur is "Days of Atonement", rather than a "Day" of atonement.

 So basically, a "Yom" can mean all sorts of things.

  


aiia
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dassercha
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violator wrote: I was

violator wrote:

I was talking about the age of the universe with a theist friend of mine and he acknowledges the scientific evidence of the Big Bang and accepts the age of the universe to be around 13.7 billion years. We got onto the subjest of how he reconciles this with the Bible indicates that the Earth was created in a few days, whereas science indicates that this is off by billions and billions of years. I was asking him how he can honestly believe that a book with such an ENORMOUS error is literally 100% true. He danced around the question for a long time and I'm sure we've all had similar converstions before. A few days later he informs me that in the original Hebrew, the word "day" can be used differently to mean a long peiod of time. I asked him why the Bible, then doesn't use this instead of the English word "day"? He accused me of not reading the footnotes enough and, admittedly, I couldn't recall looking at footnotes for Genesis 1. So I found an online bible that gives access different versions of the Bible and looked at 18 different versions of Genesis 1. The ONLY version that mentions the meaning of the word "day" in the footnotes is the Contemperary English Version. The footnote in this version says:

Genesis 1:5 the first day: A day was measured from evening to evening.

So now I was quite skeptical of his claim of the Hebrew "day" meaning something else that was a longer period of time. So I found an English -> Hebrew dictionary online and tried matching up the words to a copy of the Bible in Hebrew. And that's where I ran into trouble. I'm trying to read the lines backwards because Hebrew reads right to left, and I'm trying to match up characters and in short, I'm in over my head with this issue. So has anyone (or CAN anyone) read the Bible in its original Hebrew? Do you know if the Hebrew word "day" can mean a longer period of time? As close as I was able to determine, "day" can actually mean "a period of time" or "historical period", but only in the sense that we'd say in English "in the day of Caesar" or "in the days when dinosaurs romed the Earth". Any help you could give me would be appriciated!

But see, here's the problem. After 7 days God rested, thus giving the commandment for his creatures to ALSO rest on the 7th day (the creation of the sabbath). So does this new "Scientific Xian Paradigm" suggest we are now to rest every few millenia instead of days?

Right, I didn't think so. Tongue out 

 

EDUCATION! EDUCATION! EDUCATION!


davidildo
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AiiA wrote: Blue Letter

 The word that is used in Genesis is H3117.